Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne is in the fight of her life trying to prove she wasn’t involved in her husband Tom Girardi’s legal scandals, and one lawyer is determined to refute those claims and take her down.
Jay Edelson is the lawyer responsible for filing the class-action suit against Tom and Erika, and following the release of The Housewife and The Hustler, he’s more determined than ever to prove that Erika is not innocent in the matter.
“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.
“And we think that money came from client funds,” he continued. “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.”
“She was basically taking client funds and using it to fund her lifestyle,” he added.
This is the same lawyer who called Erika and Tom’s divorce a “sham” back in December 2020 and alleged that Erika filed for divorce to protect their assets from Tom’s impending lawsuits.
Erika’s lawyers drop her following The Housewife and The Hustler
The Housewife and The Hustler not only motivated the lawyer charging Erika but also provoked a response from the legal team that was representing her.
In fact, her legal team, Dinsmore & Shohl, dropped her case and spoke out on why just after the documentary was released.
While the legal team did not specifically mention the documentary, they spoke on how “the relationship of trust and confidence that is essential to a properly functioning attorney-client relationship has broken down” and is “irreparable.”
The statement from Erika’s team alleges that she may not have been one-hundred percent honest with them.
The goal of The Housewife and The Hustler was seemingly to answer the question, “How much did Erika know about Tom’s corruption?”
The Housewife and The Hustler seemingly showed the extent of Erika’s involvement as her company was allegedly listed as a recipient of funds, and she was listed a part of the board as a secretary on one LLC.
The accusations against Tom and Erika Girardi
Tom Girardi has been accused of wrongfully taking money from settlements of the class-action clients that he has represented over the years.
The cases against him have only increased over time reportedly sending the pair into bankruptcy.
This is why Erika was accused of using divorce to protect their funds.
Erika insisted that she didn’t know anything about Tom’s criminal actions and claimed that she filed for divorce because he had cheated on her.
While the infidelity accusations may be true, Edelson and other lawyers still stand by the fact that her divorce was related to Tom’s court cases.
Since the lawsuits were filed against Tom, Erika has moved out and spoken out about the depression she has suffered from while Tom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and put under conservatorship by his brother.
Meanwhile, this all went down while RHOBH Season 11 was filmed, and Erika has implied the blowback from her divorce will play out on-camera. Lawyers have already ensured they’ll be watching her every move.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs on Wednesdays at 8/7c on Bravo.