The Unacknowledged Daughter
The six sons were not the only people excluded from Jerry Lewis’s 2012 will.
Suzan Lewis—born in the 1950s, the daughter of a woman named Lynn Dixon who had reportedly had a three-year affair with Lewis—was also not named in the will. The legal distinction between her situation and the sons’ situation is significant: the sons were named in the will and explicitly excluded. Suzan Lewis was not named at all.
Under some estate law frameworks, the absence of a child from a will, rather than an explicit exclusion, can leave room for a legal argument that the omission was unintentional. Estate attorney David H. Lenok, writing in Wealth Management shortly after the will became public, noted that the specific, named exclusion of the six sons was the kind of language that made challenge difficult, while the complete absence of Suzan Lewis from the document left the question of whether she was intentionally excluded or simply overlooked.
Suzan Lewis told Inside Edition, in reporting that CBS News Philadelphia picked up, that she believed she deserved something from her father’s estate. DNA tests had reportedly shown an 88.7 percent probability that she was Jerry Lewis’s biological daughter. That figure was reported by Inside Edition and cited in CBS coverage; the tests themselves could not be independently verified from the sources reviewed for this article.
Jerry Lewis never publicly acknowledged Suzan Lewis as his daughter. Her mother, Lynn Dixon, reportedly had a three-year affair with him that produced the pregnancy, but Lewis’s public acknowledgment of any paternal relationship never came.