Pamela Warner has gone to court claiming her late son's widow, Tenisha Warner, cut off her access to their granddaughter, MacKenzie, after Malcolm-Jamal Warner's death in July 2025. The filing, reported by TMZ, lands in the middle of an estate battle that has stretched past a year and shows no sign of settling quietly.

Pamela says she holds no grudge and isn't sure what's driving Tenisha's actions, but she's asking a judge to approve a separate settlement she's already reached with MacKenzie's court-appointed guardian, cutting Tenisha out of that particular arrangement entirely.

The backstory here is messy, and it's been unfolding in pieces for months.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner drowned off Costa Rica's Playa Cocles in July 2025, caught in a rip current while swimming with his daughter. Surfers pulled MacKenzie out safely. He wasn't as lucky, according to Hollywood Unlocked, which reported he was given CPR for 45 minutes before he was pronounced dead. Cause of death was later confirmed as asphyxia.

A year on, in what would have been an anniversary his widow called painful to mark, Tenisha sued Pamela, who serves as successor trustee of the Warner Family Trust. Tenisha's suit claims Malcolm's prenup promised her an annual $16,000 tax-free anniversary payment, Roth IRA contributions, $5,000 a month for work as his chief of staff, and a $1 million life insurance payout, none of which she says she's received since he died. She's asking the court to draw at least $1.2 million from the trust to cover it.

"For the last year, I have attempted to privately settle my beloved husband's complicated estate and honor his last wishes," Tenisha said in a statement carried by Hollywood Unlocked, adding that Malcolm had been close to updating a 1996 estate plan drafted decades before their daughter was born.

Pamela, for her part, told TMZ she offered Tenisha a one-time payout in early September, made up of a $2 million life insurance policy, a Georgia trust Malcolm had used to buy a house for his wife and daughter, and a retirement plan worth $2.4 million. Tenisha turned it down. She has since alleged, through her own filing, that Pamela sold the family's Studio City home for $1.6 million and folded the proceeds back into the trust rather than passing them to her and MacKenzie. Pamela's side maintains the estate simply couldn't keep covering the $9,000 a month it cost to hold onto that property.

Tenisha has also pushed back on the Georgia house being treated as compensation, pointing out it carries a $700,000 mortgage of its own.

None of this touches MacKenzie's separate settlement, which Pamela negotiated directly with the child's guardian and now needs a judge to sign off on. Whether that approval clears before the grandmother-widow dispute drags into a second year is the open question here, and neither side sounds close to backing down.