Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Family scrap over £62m Aretha cash
ARETHA Franklin made no will – leaving her family to battle it out over her £62million estate.
Already the Queen of Soul’s four sons have filed papers listing themselves as interested parties.
Her fortune could end up being valued much higher due to the back catalogue of her work.
Before her death from pancreatic cancer at 76, on Thursday, her attorney, Don Wilson, repeatedly asked her to put together a trust.
“I was after her for a number of years to do that,” he said.
Unless contested, assets would be divided among her children. Aretha’s funeral is in two weeks in Detroit after two days of open casket viewings. A RISING TV star has told how she was sexually assaulted on a break from work in a “life-changing” night.
Michaela Coel was working overnight on a script when she went to meet a friend on a break – only to wake up hours later at her desk after the attack.
Michaela said: “I took a break and had a drink with a good friend who was nearby. I emerged into consciousness many hours later. I was lucky.
“I had a flashback. It turned out I’d been sexually assaulted by strangers. The first people I called after police, before my family, were the producers.”
Describing the attack as “lifechanging”, she said her “anxious” employers were unsure how to deal with the emergency and struggled with “normal human empathy”.
She said: “When there are police involved, and footage of people carrying