Pops

Gary Coleman was making $70,000 to $80,000 a week at 14. At 21, he sued his own parents for $3.8 million. His mother answered by asking a court to declare him unable to manage his own money. In the video below, from 1993, Geraldo Rivera asks him what everyone wanted to know: “So, are you a rich man today?” Stay for what he says when Geraldo brings up his parents. Diff’rent Strokes ran from 1978 to 1986, and Coleman was its undisputed star. By his own account, he was the highest-paid child actor since Shirley Temple. At his peak, he reportedly earned $100,000 an episode. He never handled the money. His adoptive parents, Willie and Sue, and a business adviser did. It went into a trust fund that was supposed to protect him. In 1989, he took them to court, claiming they had misappropriated it. The same year, his mother asked a judge for control of his fortune, estimated at $6 million, saying he couldn’t run his own affairs. The case for his parents: he had been seriously ill since childhood, and they managed everything while he worked. His father later said Gary had “put us out to pasture.” In 1993, a judge awarded him $1.28 million. A documentary later estimated he kept about a quarter of what the show paid him, after his parents, advisers, lawyers and taxes. It didn’t last. In 1999, he filed for bankruptcy and took a job as a security guard. Royalties from the show reportedly brought him about $1,000 a year. He died in 2010, at 42. Were his parents protecting a sick child’s fortune, or spending it?