Here's Who Inherited Brittany Murphy's Money After She Died

The naughties were hard on all of us. The world had somehow survived the 20th century, but not without a bit of trauma to drive us all a bit nuts in the first decade of the 21st. Pop culture started the new millennium with a toxic mix of celebrity body shaming and gossip addiction that unfortunately was too much for some of those at the center of the maelstrom of bad vibes. Actor Brittany Murphy was one such victim.

Murphy was young and beautiful, and her career was kind of in a rut, so it was easy for all of us to chalk her death up to something like substance abuse. However, as Esquire noted in October 2021, a documentary about Brittany Murphy's death shed some new light into her untimely demise. While hers was one of a number of famous deaths that were never properly investigated, the pneumonia that killed her was most likely caused by anemia resulting from an eating disorder, which was exacerbated by her controlling husband, Simon Monjack.

Young as she was, Murphy did not die intestate. According to People, she had put together a will before she even met Monjack. The document stipulated that her mother Sharon receive her estate in the event of her death. But Sharon would find that what her daughter left her wasn't much after Brittany's marriage to Monjack.

Perhaps the most intriguing details of the 2021 Brittany Murphy documentary had to do with just how much of a weirdo Simon Monjack was. He was a serial liar, and of the worst kind, as well. There must a special ring in Hell for people who lie about having cancer, and if so, Monjack (pictured above with Sharon Murphy) is most certainly boiling in a coffin full of his own blood there right now (he mysteriously died of similar causes — notably not cancer — just six months after his wife's death). But as Rolling Stone has pointed out, that's merely the tip of Monjack's iceberg of creepiness.

After her daughter's death, Sharon Murphy had a very strange relationship with Monjack. They reportedly slept in the same bed together and were photographed holding hands and looking into each other's eyes in a way we don't normally associate with sons- and mothers-in-law. But Sharon didn't know the truth about Simon until after his mysterious death, when she tried to pawn some of the jewelry he had given to Brittany during their marriage. Jewelers found the pieces to be total fakes, worth diddly squat. Sharon discovered that Monjack had pilfered Brittany's bank accounts to the tune of $3 million in the three years of their marriage. He just mooched off of her while controlling every aspect of her life, and ultimately created the toxic conditions that led to her death.