Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Erika Jayne has spent years navigating the fallout from her split with Tom Girardi. Tom worked as a powerful Los Angeles attorney and built his reputation through major class action cases.
Creditors later sued Erika and Tom for allegedly misusing settlement funds owed to vulnerable clients. Their marriage collapsed as Tom’s legal empire unraveled and he was sentenced to prison time. Erika filed for divorce five years ago, which ended their two-decade relationship, but the divorce still has not been finalized.
A new lawsuit now claims someone pushed the couple to separate and suggests the timing of their split may not have been accidental.
Erika Jayne is accused of splitting from Tom Girardi to “protect” herself from “criminal prosecution”
Designer Christopher Psaila and another designer are suing Erika and her longtime friend and attorney, James Wilkes. They say Erika and Wilkes falsely accused them of charging more than $800,000 on Erika’s American Express card between 2014 and 2016. They argue the allegations were untrue and nearly sent them to prison.
According to docs obtained by Radar Online, Psaila calls Wilkes the “mastermind of a conspiracy” to protect Erika. He says Wilkes pushed Tom and Erika to strategically divorce. The filing states, “Wilkes urged TG and EJ to separate and to devise a story that would protect EJ from financial ruin or even criminal prosecution in the event that TG could not extract himself from the many lawsuits filed against TG.”
The lawsuit says Erika then filed for divorce on November 3, 2020. This happened six weeks before creditors forced Tom and his law firm into bankruptcy.
Wilkes also faces accusations that he helped Erika hide Tom’s money before Tom’s downfall. The federal complaint says he stole millions in COVID relief funds and funneled that money to Erika and her team. According to the suit, “the source of the funds that Wilkes used to pay, invest in, or loan Erika Jayne and her team… were two Covid loans… in the amounts of $2,393,079 and $2,000,000.”
The filing claims Wilkes lied about payroll numbers to secure those loans.
Psaila’s ordeal began when federal agents raided his Marco Marco fashion house in 2017. His case was dismissed in 2021, but he claims he lost “tens of millions of dollars” due to the accusations. He and a business partner later filed an $18.2 million lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution, conspiracy, and civil rights violations.
Their complaint argues, “Any investigation at all … would have uncovered that Marco Marco and Psaila had documented proof … that no fraud occurred.”
The designers now say the damage they suffered stems from an effort to protect Erika as Wilkes pushed her and Tom to split.
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TELL US – DO YOU THINK ERIKA AND TOM’S SPLIT WAS STRATEGIC?
