Real Housewife of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne and her ex-husband Tom Girardi will have to give up their art collection and other valuable items in a court-ordered auction, the Art Newspaper reports.
The funds from the sale will be used to pay off creditors as bankruptcy consumes Girardi’s wealth following a major lawsuit.
Girardi was a lawyer whose firm, Keese & Girardi, handled high-profile class action lawsuits. He was recently disbarred and is now being sued for fraud.
He allegedly stole millions of dollars from his clients, falsified case expenses, laundered the money he stole through his firm, and threatened and bribed people who knew about the scheme to keep them quiet. Much of this stolen money was taken from the victims of the Lion Air Flight 610 plane crash.
Jayne, his ex-wife, is implicated in the case. The suit claims that Girardi used $25 million of these stolen funds to provide for Jayne’s lavish lifestyle, and that she took the money in full knowledge of how he got it. They divorced in November 2020, shortly after the suit was filed. Girardi is now 83 and has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
“The law firm paid out over $25 million in expenses which were approved and generated by one person, Erika Girardi,” said a prosecutor in a statement to Us Weekly. “We are hopeful that Ms. Girardi comes down the mountain from a place of privilege and obscene wealth and returns some of these expenses so the former clients and creditors of this law firm can mitigate the horrific and unfair losses perpetrated by her husband and others.”
Jayne’s lawyers deny this.
At a court-ordered auction at California’s John Moran Auctioneers next month, works by Miró, Hockney, and Glenna Goodacre will go up for sale. A first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince and a rare Steinway piano will also go up for sale.