Robert Mapplethorpe inherited three quarters of Sam Wagstaff's $7 million estate over the sister's challenge, left his own parents nothing, and was tried posthumously in Cincinnati

Curator Sam Wagstaff died on 14 January 1987. His estate was worth upward of $7 million. Mapplethorpe received three quarters and Wagstaff's partner Jim Nelson the rest. Wagstaff's sister, Judith Jefferson, was left $10,000, contested the will and delayed distribution; the outcome is not stated in the sources found^†. Mapplethorpe, executor of the estate, sold the penthouse. In 1988 he founded the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. He died the next year of AIDS at 42 and left nothing to his parents. Christie's sold his personal collection in October 1989 for $2.27 million for the Foundation. His exhibition The Perfect Moment opened at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center on 7 April 1990; a grand jury indicted the center and director Dennis Barrie for pandering obscenity and using minors in nudity-oriented material. The jury saw 7 of 175 photographs. After a trial from 24 September, an eight-member jury acquitted both on 5 October 1990. In 2011 the Foundation gave most of his archive, with 120,000 negatives, to the Getty and LACMA in a deal its president valued well above $30 million.