This blog post was written by: Dave Madan, Senior Manager, Scotiatrust
The most famous sentence of Hayden Panettiere’s career was an instruction to protect a girl.
Save the cheerleader, save the world. She was the cheerleader, Claire Bennet, and what protecting her actually looked like over four seasons of Heroes was not the heroics you would expect. It was a middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses, not her biological father, who had taken her in and who spent the show standing between her and the people who wanted what she had. Claire could survive almost anything done to her body. What she could not always survive was the decisions other people made about her.
Panettiere died in August at thirty-six. She left a daughter, Kaya, who is eleven and who has lived since 2018 with her father, Wladimir Klitschko, in Ukraine, an arrangement Panettiere agreed to while she went into treatment and spoke about openly in the last year of her life.
It is a sad set of facts and an unusually clarifying one, because it pulls apart three questions that most parents hear as a single question.
When a young parent sits down to make a Will, the thing on their mind is who would raise the children. It is what they came in to talk about and often the only part they have thought through. But a Will for the parent of a minor answers three questions, and there is no reason the answers should be the same.
The first is who raises the child, and it is the question where the Will may do the least. A testamentary guardianship appointment in the common law provinces is a nomination rather than an appointment. It tells a court what the parent wanted, and a court will take that seriously, but it binds nobody, and where the other parent is alive and has custody it will usually do nothing at all. Panettiere had already answered this question in 2018, by agreement rather than by document. Nothing her Will might have said in 2026 would have changed where her daughter lives. That is worth saying out loud to clients who believe the guardianship clause is the important part of the document, because often it is the least operative thing in it.
The second question is who holds the money, and here the Will does real work. A child cannot receive an inheritance directly. Without a named trustee, the funds go to a public official who administers them under a statute, invests them cautiously, and releases money for the child on application with receipts attached. Every common law province has its own arrangement along these lines and none of them is a plan. They are a holding pattern with a filing requirement.
Naming a trustee avoids all of it, in a clause shorter than this paragraph.
And notice that the job is not the first job. Raising a child well and administering a seven-figure fund on her behalf are unrelated skills, and there is no rule that one person must do both. More delicately, the person raising the child may be a former partner. A client can want that person to have their daughter and still not want them signing cheques against her inheritance, and there is nothing shameful in saying so. The document lets you separate the roles. A great many Wills do not, because nobody thought to ask. Noah Bennet is a useful figure to keep in mind here. The man was not the girl’s father and was not raising her alone, and his entire function in the story was to stand between her and the people who had noticed what she was worth.
The third question is when it ends, and it is the one clients consider least and regret most.
Panettiere would have understood this one from the inside. She started working as a small child, in the state that had already learned the lesson the hard way. California passed the Coogan Law in 1939 after Jackie Coogan, who earned a fortune as a child star of the silent era, reached adulthood and found that his parents had spent nearly all of it. The law that bears his name puts fifteen per cent of a child performer’s gross earnings into a blocked trust that nobody can touch. It is a good law, built by people who had watched the failure happen, and it releases the money to the performer on their eighteenth birthday.
Even the protective version ends on a birthday. That is the term worth arguing about with clients, because it is the one they accept without noticing they have accepted it. The default on a Canadian intestacy is majority, eighteen in some provinces and nineteen in others, at which point the whole fund transfers outright with no conditions on it, whatever the beneficiary happens to be doing that year, and with nobody anywhere in the structure empowered to consider whether that is wise.
The alternatives are ordinary drafting. Capital staged at twenty-five and thirty with income and encroachment available in the meantime. A discretionary trust running longer where there is a reason for one. A trustee who can pay for a degree, a down payment or a treatment programme without going to court first. The 2016 changes to the taxation of testamentary trusts removed the graduated rate argument that used to sell these, so the case now rests on control and judgment alone, and it has to be made in conversation rather than shown on a tax table.
She spent six seasons on Nashville playing Juliette Barnes, a young woman who arrives at sudden money surrounded by people with opinions about it. That is closer to the actual risk than anything most clients imagine. Staging capital is not a statement of distrust in your child. It is an acknowledgement of who tends to turn up around a nineteen-year-old with a great deal of money, and of the fact that you will not be there to notice them.
Two things to check once the three questions are settled. Whether anything walks around the Will on the way out the door, because a carefully built trust governs nothing that passes by beneficiary designation, and a policy or a registered plan naming a minor with no trustee appointed lands straight back in the statutory holding pattern the Will was written to escape. And whether the trustee has the powers these particular facts require. A beneficiary abroad, in a country at war, raises questions of currency and sanctions screening and simply how funds arrive. A trustee who can accumulate, hold, and pay third parties directly can work with that. One whose only instrument is a distribution to a guardian overseas cannot.
Whether Panettiere answered any of these questions we do not know, and probably never will. Her mother told an interviewer she believes there was no Will, while allowing in the same conversation that she did not know the details, and no probate filing has been reported. That is worth remembering before drawing conclusions about anyone, including clients. Probate is public and a trust is private, so a carefully built plan and no plan at all look exactly alike from outside.
The instruction was to save the cheerleader. It was never a bad instruction. It is only that in this line of work, saving her is a document, and the document has to answer all three.
