Erika Jayne and her ex-husband Tom Girardi will have to sell their art collection and other valuable items in a court-ordered auction, according to the Art Newspaper.
The proceeds from the sale will be used to pay off creditors as Girardi’s fortune is consumed by bankruptcy as a result of a major lawsuit.
Girardi was a lawyer at Keese & Girardi, a firm that handled high-profile class action lawsuits. He was recently barred from practising law and is now being sued for fraud.
He is accused of stealing millions of dollars from his clients, falsifying case expenses, laundering the money he stole through his firm, and threatening and bribing people who knew about the scheme to keep them quiet. A large portion of the stolen money came from the victims of the Lion Air Flight 610 plane crash.
Jayne, his ex-wife, is a suspect in the case. According to the lawsuit, Girardi used $25 million of the stolen funds to fund Jayne’s lavish lifestyle, and she accepted the money knowing full well how he obtained it. They divorced shortly after the suit was filed in November 2020. Girardi is now 83 years old and has Alzheimer’s disease.
“The law firm paid out more than $25 million in expenses that were approved and generated by one person, Erika Girardi,” a prosecutor told Us Weekly in a statement. “We hope that Ms. Girardi returns some of these expenses from her position of privilege and obscene wealth so that the former clients and creditors of this law firm can mitigate the horrific and unfair losses perpetrated by her husband and others.”
Jayne’s attorneys deny this.
Works by Miró, David Hockney, and Glenna Goodacre will be auctioned off at a court-ordered auction next month at California’s John Moran Auctioneers. A first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince, as well as a rare Steinway piano, will be available for purchase.
