It was revealed posthumously that Karen Black had a daughter with
Robert Benedetti, Diane Koehnemann Bay, who was born March 4, 1959, when Karen was a 19-year-old divorcée studying at Northwestern. Diane was adopted at birth by Don and Joan Koehnemann. On August 7, 2012, Diane got in touch with Karen through Facebook after the state of Illinois unsealed its adoption records; ironically, Karen had disclosed the secret of Diane's existence to her own family just a few months earlier. Diane's memoir "Finding Karen Black" came out August 8, 2022.