Tenisha Warner is breaking her silence about her grief one year after the unexpected death of her husband, actor and musician Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
Tenisha, who shares a 9-year-old daughter with the late Cosby Show star, appeared on the Thursday (July 23) episode of CBS Mornings and spoke to anchor Gayle King about her husband and his July 2025 drowning.
Also this week, Tenisha filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against Malcolm-Jamal’s mother, Pamela Warner, for access to their family trust, sharing that she is “struggling” as a sole provider to her daughter with Warner.
The actor was 54 years old upon his death in Costa Rica, where he rescued his daughter from a riptide current.
Around the three-minute mark of the video below, Tenisha called her husband’s death the “worst day” of her life. “Feels unfair,” she added.
“And all I could think about was my daughter. And what I needed to do to continue to be her mother. And be her only parent,” Tenisha said.
She added that she couldn’t remember details about her immediate reaction to her husband’s death because her “body went through shock.”
Tenisha also confirmed that she doesn’t plan to relocate from their family home.
“I don’t think about moving because all our memories are here,” she said. “I can't be in my own home without feeling the loss, but I can't walk away.”
She spoke on the complications of grieving Warner’s sudden loss.
"The hardest thing about grief is that people move on. But for us, we're his wife and child, there's no moving on. There's moving with and living with,” she explained.
In her legal dispute against Pamela Warner, Tenisha alleges that she is owed under the couple's May 2022 premarital agreement. She says Malcolm-Jamal agreed to a $1 million life insurance policy naming her sole beneficiary, annual Roth IRA contributions, anniversary payments, and a monthly salary for her role as his chief of staff, none of which were fulfilled.
The suit was filed in both Georgia's DeKalb County Superior Court and a Los Angeles court.
On the first anniversary of her son's death on Tuesday (July 20), Pamela Warner posted to his legacy Instagram account, writing that "in the year since my son's death, I have discovered how cruel, evil and greedy a human can be.”
