Robbie Robertson’s Family Feud: Inside the Late Rock God’s Inheritance Drama
On a rainy Nov. 15, 2023, a small group of music and film luminaries gathered at the Village Recorder, the famed studio housed in an old Masonic temple in West L.A. where everything from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk to Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle was recorded.
Among them were Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Lily Gladstone, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. They had come to celebrate the life of Robbie Robertson, legendary frontman of The Band, successful solo artist and prolific film score producer for whom the studio was like a second home. Robertson had died three months earlier after an excruciating battle with prostate cancer — long in remission but back with a vengeance in 2022 — that had spread to his spine and brain. He was 80.
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Scorsese emceed the memorial, in which he tearfully spoke of his brotherhood with Robertson. The director, 81, was a longtime collaborator of Robertson’s, having helmed the seminal 1978 rockumentary The Last Waltz, which captured The Band’s 1976 farewell show. Robertson went on to become Scorsese’s go-to soundtrack producer, working on such films as Casino, Gangs of New York and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Their final collaboration was the score for Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, an especially personal project for Robertson, who was born July 5, 1943, in Toronto to an Indigenous mother — Cayuga and Mohawk — who lived on the Six Nations Reserve south of the city before his birth. The score earned Robertson one of the film’s 10 Oscar nominations. There were performances at the Village Recorder memorial of the score alongside classic Band songs like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
Those in attendance would not have sensed a chill in the air. But Robertson’s three children could feel it. It hit the moment the siblings — Alexandra Robertson, 56; Delphine Robertson, 54; and Sebastian Robertson, 50 — spotted Janet Zuccarini, 58, across the room. A beautiful and driven restaurateur from Toronto, Zuccarini was their stepmother — though had not been for very long. She married Robertson on March 11, five months before his death.
The children claim they were not told of the wedding. Instead, they say, they were invited to what they believed would be a dinner celebrating the couple’s fifth anniversary of dating. When they arrived at Robbie and Janet’s house, nestled on one of the winding Crest streets above the Beverly Hills Hotel, the surprise was sprung: They had tied the knot in a home ceremony that day.
“That was probably the first major red flag,” says Alexandra in a joint Zoom interview with her siblings, all of them speaking from their respective homes around L.A. “They had never discussed marriage.” Zuccarini, who would not comment for this article, disputes this account in her countersuits, claiming the children were alerted to the nuptials.
According to Alexandra, her father “had just been told that the medical trial he was on had failed. He had stage 4 prostate cancer. He was severely depressed. And then we walk in and they announce that they’re married. I mean, the alarm bells were screaming in my head — but all we could do in that moment was raise a glass.”
Until then, everything seemed great. Zuccarini made their father extraordinarily happy, he had repeatedly told them — though he hadn’t needed to, as it was obvious by just looking at the star-crossed lovers. “What’s mine is mine; what’s hers is hers,” was Robertson’s mantra whenever the subject of the kids’ inheritance came up. The children assert that Zuccarini assured Robertson that her restaurant empire — which includes Felix Trattoria on Abbot Kinney, the hotspot that reignited chef Evan Funke’s career — was valued at more than $100 million and that she wanted nothing of his estate, which he’d always intended to leave to his kids.
But in the weeks after his death, the full scope of the couple’s legal arrangement came into focus. Zuccarini wanted, per a contract signed by Robertson in March 2023, for his estate (now controlled by his children) to continue making his half of the payments on the property they purchased together in 2021.
Robertson and Zuccarini bought the four-bedroom modernist house, designed in 1947 by Beverly Hills architect Paul Laszlo and updated by Case Study Architect Thornton M. Abelt, from Robbie’s good friend, David Geffen. (Robertson and Geffen first got to know each other at a party at Geffen’s house in the Hollywood Hills in 1973, attended by Geffen’s then-roommate, Mitchell, as well as Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.)
The price of the house was $6 million. COVID-19 had rendered Zuccarini cash-poor at the time, with profits from her restaurants temporarily down in early 2021, so Robbie agreed to front the entirety of the $1.8 million down payment with proceeds from the sale of his previous residence. Robertson figured he’d make up the difference in lower mortgage payments until he and Zuccarini both contributed an equal amount to the purchase.
After Robertson’s death, he still owed $1.2 million on his half of the mortgage. And there were monthly expenses, too — gardeners, security, insurance, property taxes, even groceries and household supplies. It all added up to about $50,000 a month. That’s a lot of money for the three kids, all of whom earn modest paychecks working in music production and administration. By their own admission, they had expected to inherit more from their father’s estate — particularly after he sold his publishing catalog for $25 million in 2022. But the final sum was somewhere in the low-seven figures.
Per the prenup — which includes both a premarital contract and an additional document that amended their existing “tenant in common” (TIC) agreement covering each side’s financial obligations to the property — Zuccarini would be allowed to stay in the house until the end of her life. The Robertson estate, meanwhile, would be on the hook for those monthly payments as long as she lived there. Given Zuccarini’s age and superb health — she plays tennis seven days a week — Robertson’s kids did some quick math: Payments to Zuccarini over the next decades would cost them upward of $7 million. They concluded they had inherited a raw deal.
To say that arrangement did not sit well with them would be an understatement. They insist their father was far too addled on a cocktail of powerful pain-killing drugs — Oxycodone, methadone, anti-nausea medication Zofran and appetite-stimulating antipsychotic Olanzapine — to fully comprehend what he was doing when he signed the amended TIC agreement. It was their understanding that upon his death, either his estate or Zuccarini would have the option to buy the other out; failing that, both parties would jointly sell the house and split the profits, they say. There was no fourth option where she stayed there for the rest of her life and expected his children to foot half the bill.
But Zuccarini says Robertson knew exactly what he was signing and that he wanted to ensure that she could remain in their dream home for as long as she wanted, without an increase in monthly payments.
After some tense conversations, the two sides seemingly came to an impasse.
A few days before the Village Recorder memorial, Alexandra texted Zuccarini. “She had been traveling for five weeks, to Toronto and Italy, and she was finally back,” Alexandra recalls. “I said, ‘Can my siblings and I go through some of my dad’s things?’ And she essentially said, ‘No. Not until this is resolved. I’ll throw some things in a box for you.’ I was in a state of shock over how cruel and cold that was.”
The Robertson children hoped to smooth things over at the memorial. “I made a point of saying, ‘Go say hi to Janet,’ ” Alexandra continues, referencing her two teenage children. “They made sure to say hi. And she just looked right through them.”
Adds Delphine, “We tried to be cordial and welcoming. I leaned in and gave her a hug. I was about to invite her to Thanksgiving. I thought this had gotten out of hand after all we’d been through together. And something just stopped me from doing that. The following day, we received the litigation.”
The litigation she’s referring to is a claim in probate court that sought to recover outstanding payments, including for Robertson’s cremation, death certificate and invoices for flowers and catering — provided by Felix — for a home memorial. Not only do the children have no intention of paying, they shot back with a lawsuit for elder abuse and interference with their inheritance seeking to void the tenancy agreement. At this point, Zuccarini upped the stakes, filing another suit — one that claims she qualifies under the law as an omitted spouse and is entitled to a third of Robertson’s estate. This includes assets in his trust, typically untouchable in probate proceedings, such as his share of proceeds from the sale of his music catalog, the rights to his intellectual property and likeness and earnings from the work he did on Killers of the Flower Moon.
“The notion that Janet Zuccarini was anything other than a loving and devoted wife to Robbie is a fiction drawn from the children’s greed and entitlement,” her lawyers Gabrielle Vidal and David Grossman tell The Hollywood Reporter. In June, the restaurateur also sued David Jackel, executor of the estate, and Adriane Hibbert, head of Robertson’s trust, for breach of contract.
The matter of Robertson v. Zuccarini has thus snowballed from a family disagreement into an estate battle royale, with crisscrossing lawsuits and flying accusations of avarice and elder abuse. It entangles A-listers from the highest echelons of Hollywood’s music, film and food spheres.
It is all-out war.
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Zuccarini was raised in Toronto, one of three daughters of Giacomo Zuccarini, an Italian émigré and Canada’s first importer of espresso makers. Fascinated by cinema, she spent her early 20s living in Rome, working as a casting agent at Cinecittà, the legendary film studio where everything from La Dolce Vita to The Passion of the Christ was made. She also earned money tutoring Italian directors in English and doing occasional extra work in films like The Godfather Part III.
When she returned to Toronto in the mid-1990s, she invested her savings in a well-located eatery called Café Nervosa. She now owns 10 spots around Toronto, all of them operating under the umbrella of her restaurant group, Gusto 54.
Her first foray into L.A.’s ultracompetitive dining scene came with Felix Trattoria in 2017. Thanks to Felix, Funke is now a celebrity chef — a charismatic Italian-cuisine genius who neatly fills the void left by Mario Batali, sidelined that year by #MeToo accusations.
When Zuccarini enlisted him, Funke was on a downswing, having resigned in 2015 from Culver City’s Bucato after a spectacular and public flameout with its owner. (The restaurant did not survive the year.) None of that bothered Zuccarini, who recognized Funke’s talent for putting innovative spins on old-world Italian dishes.
“I like working with someone who’s very talented and has had a bit of a setback,” Zuccarini said in a 2023 Toronto Life profile. “They come back hungry.” Pitching him a glass-walled “pasta lab” where he could work his magic nightly to an audience of diners, she convinced Funke to join her at Felix. The restaurant was an instant smash, earning rave reviews and filling up its 243 seats weeks in advance.
It was at Felix that Zuccarini met Robertson in 2017, at a birthday party thrown by Roots Canada co-founder Michael Budman for his wife. Zuccarini was familiar with the legendary music figure from her native Toronto, but not what one would call a fan. (Robertson was 23 years older than her, having peaked as a heartthrob rock star well before Zuccarini had reached her teens.) Robertson was instantly smitten: Here was a beautiful, intelligent, self-made woman — and a minor star in her own right, with a magnificent restaurant empire under her belt and a recurring role as a judge on Top Chef Canada.
“I thought, ‘Oh, OK, maybe she’s just not interested in me,’ ” Robertson told Toronto Life. But she was interested. Their courtship proceeded to unfold against an elite, storybook backdrop — in Michelin-starred restaurants, on private jets and aboard Geffen’s $400 million superyacht. Felix Trattoria, meanwhile, became the happy beneficiary of her social-status glow-up. Scorsese and DiCaprio popped up as patrons, as did Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and other ultra-starry members of Robertson’s entourage.
The Robertson children were supportive of the romance. “We thought she was great,” says Alexandra. “We were thrilled that our father wanted us to get to know her, and we were very clear that we embraced her into our family fold. She seemed to fit right in. She seemed like she was a person of substance, and we felt good about her. If our father was happy, we were happy.”
Before they met, the family — Robertson’s three kids, six grandchildren and even the mother to his children, his ex-wife, Dominique Bourgeois, his best friend until his death — would gather every Sunday for lunch. Zuccarini was insistent they keep up the gatherings. “To her credit, she encouraged him to keep this tradition going,” says Alexandra. “She knew it was medicinal for him.”
***
Not long after the couple moved into Geffen’s former house in February 2021, Robertson confided to his son that he “wanted to make an honest woman” out of Zuccarini.
“One of my oldest friends is a jeweler,” says Sebastian. “And my dad said to me, ‘I want to get her a promise ring.’ ” Sebastian brokered a diamond that cost in the low six figures from famed jewelry designer Anita Ko. “In the process, I talked to Janet and my dad quite a bit. And in those talks, they both said to me, ‘We’re never getting married.’ Janet said to me, ‘I don’t want the state of California involved in my personal life,’ ” Sebastian continues.
That’s not how Zuccarini remembers it. She recalls fondly how Robertson got down on one knee at their home and presented her with an “engagement ring” a few days shy of their fourth anniversary. “After the engagement, Robbie and Janet often spoke about getting married on their fifth anniversary of dating and discussed Northern California and San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito as possible locations for the ceremony,” states Zuccarini’s complaint. “But nearly six months after their engagement, Robbie’s cancer progressed and Robbie and Janet decided to postpone wedding planning while they focused on Robbie’s treatment.”
The fairy tale had ended in July 2022, when, after two successive abdominal surgeries, doctors found Robertson’s long-dormant prostate cancer had aggressively returned. The doctors proposed a cutting-edge radiation treatment. By January 2023, Robertson’s doctors somberly told him the treatment had failed and that the only avenue left was chemotherapy. They conceded his prospects were grim.
“The cancer had metastasized to his spine and his vertebrae cracked,” recalls Alexandra. “So he then had to have two back surgeries. It was traumatizing to see how much he suffered. I cannot stress enough how sick he was. He was in chronic pain and discomfort. He was on massive amounts of pain medication, opioids, THC. He was just trying to get through the day — and it was just shocking that she thought it was a good time to get married.”
According to Robertson’s children, Zuccarini began hounding their father to get married in February of that year while he was undergoing chemo and his health was dramatically deteriorating. She also set about having another of her lawyers, Thomas Bacon of Bacon Law Group, draft a prenup and an amendment to the already existing TIC that rendered him responsible for half of the home’s expenses in perpetuity. Robertson gave the paperwork to his business manager and real estate lawyer to vet, according to Kevin Leichter, an attorney representing the estate. They told him it all looked in order. Two days before the nuptials, he signed.
“The reason for the 2023 TIC Amendment and Premarital Agreement was simple,” states Zuccarini’s petition. “Robbie and Janet knew that they were getting married; they knew that Robbie had been battling prostate cancer for 25 years; they knew that Robbie’s children were reliant on Robbie to support their lifestyles; they knew that Janet’s cash flow took a major hit as a result of the pandemic; and they knew that Janet wanted to stay in the home that she created with Robbie for the rest of her life. So Robbie and Janet told counsel to draft up an agreement that would allow Janet to stay in the Gilcrest Property for as long as she wanted and would not increase her monthly expenses.”
Responds Alexandra, “What’s unconscionable about it is that it appears to be one way, and it’s another way. It was during a time when my father was not reading and retaining information and he did not have proper legal representation.”
Zuccarini disputes this assessment of her husband’s mental acuity. “His entire medical team, which is a who’s who of LA’s finest medical doctors, stand ready to testify that Robbie never declined cognitively,” states her omitted spouse petition, filed May 9 in L.A. Superior Court. “Not to mention that Robbie was quite literally working on his Academy Award-nominated score to Killers of the Flower Moon at the same time the Adult Children claim he was ‘unable to work, or even read’ and ‘weakened in mind and body.’ ” To underscore that fact, the lawsuit points to a lengthy and intellectually sharp interview Robertson conducted with Variety in the last week of July 2023, just days before his death.
But the Robertson children say that’s a gross distortion of the facts and point out that the score was finished in 2022, before his health and mental capacity began to dramatically deteriorate. “The last recording session was in November 2022, and he was too sick to attend,” Alexandra recalls. The Variety interview, they add, was arranged only after Robertson canceled a planned press tour.
“The two biggest interviews were New York Times and Vanity Fair, and he canceled both of them because he couldn’t keep his train of thought,” Alexandra says, adding that “he muscled his way through” his short final interview. “His publicist and the manager helped to fill in any of the gaps.”
A mention in Zuccarini’s lawsuit of Robertson attending the film’s premiere in July 2023, just weeks before his death, was in fact a private L.A. screening held in June — the film’s world premiere was in Cannes in May, the L.A. premiere was in October — that had to be rescheduled several times because of Robertson’s failing health. “I can’t understand how they would put this in a legal document when it’s all easily refutable,” Alexandra adds.
Amid Robertson’s rapid decline, Zuccarini was also in the midst of readying her most ambitious project yet — an 8,000-square-foot Italian eatery in the former Madeo space on Beverly and Robertson boulevards called Stella. Featuring food by Canadian chef Rob Gentile, it opened in March after multiple delays — the same month Stella was sued by a contractor. He claimed that he was stiffed on a $550,000 bill for five months of work he did before his contract was terminated for failing to complete the project on time or within the budget, which he denied. The lawsuit settled two months later for an undisclosed sum.
Zuccarini also undertook an “extensive remodeling and the purchase of new furniture for the new home which she had gotten him to purchase, and which he would only live in a short while,” according to the Robertsons’ lawsuit. “She presented his bookkeeper with expense after expense for 50 percent reimbursement, ultimately causing him to spend $175,957 on renovations and $338,131 on furniture and furnishing in the year before his death.”
The marriage occurred on March 11, 2023. Contrary to his children’s claims of coercion, Zuccarini says Robertson was just as enthusiastic as she was about getting married. Per her petition: “By early 2023, Robbie turned his attention back to wedding planning and started discussing a destination wedding in Japan or Italy. Recognizing that it would be difficult to plan a destination wedding and still make their desired wedding date of March 11, 2023, Janet suggested that they just make it happen on their fifth anniversary (as they had always planned) at home with Janet’s restaurant, Felix, doing the catering. Robbie loved the idea. Not long after they arrived at this decision, Robbie and Janet attended their good friend, David Geffen’s, 80th birthday party. During dinner, Robbie enthusiastically announced that he and Janet were getting married. The dinner party was attended by approximately fifteen people and was less than two weeks before their wedding.” (The lawsuit does not specify who was there or if they would be willing to testify.)
Whatever the case, the children were not present for the actual vows, nor was their mother, nor were Robertson’s six grandchildren. The only family who were in attendance for the “I dos” were Zuccarini’s sister and her brother-in-law, who filmed the ceremony. In the footage, Robbie appears too weak to stand for his vows.
The next day, Zuccarini posted a three-minute video to Instagram with the caption, “We got hitched,” and a diamond ring emoji. As a dizzying array of romantic photos and famous faces — Mitchell, David Byrne — fly by, Zuccarini says, “The private planes, David’s yacht, New York City, St. Barts, the Hamptons, Grammy parties, premieres, red carpets, more red carpets, spending quality time with legends and icons … You were worth the wait.” (She also extols their quiet times together.)
According to the children, the day after the wedding announcement and party, Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique, called Robertson, concerned over what the marriage meant for their children’s inheritance. “And he said, ‘Nothing changes,’ ” Alexandra recalls. “We signed a prenup. What’s mine is mine, what’s hers is hers.” In terms of the house, “he said to me and both my siblings on several occasions, ‘Janet has the right to buy you out, you can buy her out, or you sell the house.’ “
But that’s not how Zuccarini remembers it. Her petition states, “Robbie sat his children down before he died to explain exactly what he and Janet agreed she would receive after his death; and in that very meeting they shed tears of gratitude because Robbie told them that Janet would not be inheriting the entirety of his estate, but rather an interest in the house they shared and purchased together. … The Adult Children now come looking for more because the millions that they are expected to share are not enough. It is the epitome of greed and entitlement.”
In Robertson’s final days, “we were in contact with Janet all the time,” Alexandra recalls. “Through the night, text messages, communication, meeting each other at the hospital, updates. ‘What can we do for you?’ I mean, really imagining she was a family member, in a way.” When Robertson finally succumbed to his illness on Aug. 9, 2023 — slightly more than a month after his 80th birthday — there was “a palpable energy shift,” Alexandra says, “which we chalked up to, people grieve in different ways.”
Zuccarini contends that if there was an energy shift, it came from the children, who four days after Robertson’s death met for lunch at the house to “go over house stuff.” After about an hour of conversation, “Sebastian told Janet that their father ‘lived large’ and that they ‘could not afford the prenup.’ Janet was blindsided,” the lawsuit contends.
“I was shocked,” she said in a court declaration.
Before the Village Recorder event, there was another memorial, held Sept. 23 at the couple’s home. According to the family’s lawsuit, Zuccarini catered that service and billed the Robertson estate for $20,000. “Zuccarini thereby personally profited from the memorial service,” the lawsuit states. She also billed the trust for his cremation. Both invoices were paid.
Says Sebastian: “After he passed, we did not have access to his shirts, to his notepads, to the things that you really want to have near you after you’ve lost someone. We had to go through a legal process to get his personal belongings.” Also among those belongings were Robertson’s ashes.
Zuccarini counters that at the September memorial, the children “commented on what an amazing partner she was to Robbie and how blessed he was to have her in the last years of his life. But everything changed after that and by late October 2023, the Adult Children were taking the position that neither they nor Robbie’s business managers knew about the 2023 TIC Amendment until a month after Robbie died.”
So what next? The discovery process could take years, as Leichter pledges to overturn every stone on his path to revealing the true circumstances of the sprawling estate battle. “There’s going to be many witnesses,” Leichter says. “The medical history is very relevant here. There’s a lot of people involved and a lot of records to go through.”
Zuccarini’s attorneys, meanwhile, scoff at the heirs’ claims. “Robertson’s children were hoping their father would provide them many more millions than he left to them, so they decided not to honor his agreement with his beloved longtime partner and widow and have improperly filed a false and salacious lawsuit in superior court,” Vidal and Grossman tell THR. “That lawsuit should have been filed in private arbitration as required by the terms of the contract they are contesting, but the children deliberately filed it in a public forum. Their decision to litigate their meritless claims in the press reeks of desperation and dishonors their father’s express wishes. Janet and Robbie agreed that she would be permitted to live in the couple’s home, without increasing her monthly costs, and that Robbie’s half of the house would go to his heirs when she died or sold her home. That’s it.”
The burden will ultimately be on Leichter to prove Robertson was cognitively incompetent when he signed the amended TIC contract — and that’s a high legal hurdle to clear. And even if he does succeed in doing so, what then of the accompanying prenup, which guarantees the remainder of Robertson’s estate to his children but could be invalidated if Zuccarini prevails in her lawsuit, possibly entitling her to one-third of his assets, her lawyers say? It’s a risky gambit and rare legal conundrum for the Robertson children: A win for them voiding the amendment to the TIC could actually result in them losing much more than they looked to gain in their initial lawsuit because it could potentially also nullify the prenup, entitling Zuccarini to a share of the estate. But that notion seems not to bother the Robertson kids, who stopped making mortgage payments on the house in July.
“There’s been some things blocking us from properly grieving,” says Sebastian, “a real block keeping us from creating a new relationship with our father.”
This story first appeared in the August 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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