Erika Jayne has made it clear it’s expensive to be her … but at what cost? The lawyer who filed the class action lawsuit against the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star and her estranged husband, Tom Girardi, has vowed to prove her alleged involvement in his wrongdoings.
“We believe we’re going to be able to prove that Erika was incredibly involved in not just the law firm, but also, he was loaning money to her company 10s of millions of dollars to her company,” Jay Edelson said on the “Reality Life with Kate Casey” podcast on Wednesday, June 16. “And we think that money came from client funds. And we’re going to look into all of that. And that’s all going to be, you know, part of proof that we showed to a jury — that she was knee-deep in this fraud, and she can say, ‘Oh, she didn’t know anything about it.’ And I think that’s going be hard for to convince a jury of.”
Jay’s firm, Edelson PC, claimed in December 2020 that Erika, 49, and Tom, 82, “are on the verge of financial collapse and locked in a downward spiral of mounting debts and dwindling funds” and referred to their divorce as a “sham.” In the court documents obtained by Us Weekly, the pair, who split in November 2020, were accused of embezzling settlement money intended for the victims of families killed in a 2018 plane crash.
“She was basically taking client funds and using it to fund her lifestyle,” Edelson alleged to Kate Casey on Wednesday. “And if we’re successful [in our case], that means that we’re going to be able to get whatever possessions she has back in order to pay off any sort of judgment. So, there’s no exception of, you know, this is a valuable piece of artwork. I mean, it gets really nasty when you get a judgment and someone doesn’t want to pay, you literally can depose them and say we want to go through your purse, take out the possessions in your purse, you know that is no longer yours.”
Edelson added that he believes the possessions in Tom and Erika’s home will be “auctioned off” in the future. “I know that that’s happening with the stuff that’s in his office,” he said. “Because his office, which was, you know, a shrine to Tom Girardi. I don’t know who would buy that. Different things, but they’ll auction that stuff off.”
Us has reached out to a rep for Erika about Edelson’s claims. While she has stayed mostly mum on the situation, the singer claimed in promos for the current season of RHOBH that she was unaware of Tom’s financial issues. News broke on Tuesday, June 15, that Erika’s lawyer, Peter Mastan, has filed a motion to be removed from her bankruptcy case — a move that comes days after The Housewife and the Hustler detailed the allegations against the spouses.
According to the ABC News documentary, the Bravo star was subpoenaed to give a deposition about their finances in May 2020 and September 2020, but both dates were postponed. She has yet to be legally charged with anything. Sunny Hostin claimed in the doc, which started streaming on Hulu on Monday, June 14, that her defense is that many of her luxury possessions were “gifts to her” and “thus separate property” from Tom. Hostin noted, “I’m not sure as a legal proposition wins the day.”
Tom, meanwhile, claimed during a September 2020 deposition that he was broke. The former lawyer, who was stripped of his license, has been placed under conservatorship after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s earlier this year.
“I’m not a doctor, I don’t know. But what I can tell you is that it seemed very convenient,” Edelson told Casey. “When we put out the facts that we found through our investigation of the types of things he was trying to do, during the time he had Alzheimer’s, where he was really scheming, he was scheming to protect himself from the fraud. He was scheming to try to keep as many possessions as possible, he was scheming to try to sell cases that he had in the pipeline to other firms.”
