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On a Thursday night in late September 2023, at close to 11:30, Mandy Teefey, the CEO of mental-health start-up Wondermind, sent a startling series of texts to a group of her employees. Teefey, then 47, had co-founded the company almost two years before with her famous daughter, the actress and pop star Selena Gomez, and a young entrepreneur named Daniella Pierson. The texts were muddled by typos, but the recipients were able to deduce that Teefey was in the L.A. office, a small suite above an art gallery at the corner of Melrose and Harper Avenues in West Hollywood, where she sometimes slept, and that she believed she’d seen an intruder on the security footage. The first sentence was especially difficult to make out: “There is someone drilling on the day, and the told me to go to sleep on a whisper through the ring. I’ve called the cops but I’m scared.” An employee replied, alarmed, “OMG???” Teefey wrote back, “I’m fucking shaking. I answered him and said I’m not going anywhere. And he said neither was he.” The employee checked the office’s Ring cam remotely and said she didn’t see anyone. Teefey responded, “I’m watching footage, and I can hear him rustling under.” Another staffer, who lived nearby, drove to the building and found an LAPD cruiser parked outside. (This employee declined to comment.) When the staffer called Teefey from the lot, she thanked him for coming and said, without any explanation, that he could go home. The police made no arrests and noted in their report that there was “no evidence of trespass” at the building.
Teefey did not write again to the group thread that night, and she did not address the incident when they returned to work the next day. Some staff were rattled, but they weren’t exactly shocked. Employees at Wondermind had come to expect erratic behavior from their boss, like disappearances that lasted days or even weeks and unpredictable angry outbursts. Since the company was launched a year and a half before, Teefey had gone through phases of sleeping in her office, where she had two couches. She seemed to stay for days without bathing — there was no shower in the suite — and sometimes without changing her clothes.
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Early on, Teefey had explained her overnights by saying she was too busy to drive the 20 miles back to her home in Woodland Hills, where she lives with her husband and preteen daughter. But according to former staffers, Teefey treated the office like her “refuge” from the world and her homelife, where she could do whatever she wanted. Through the glass walls of her office, employees saw her watching Schitt’s Creek on a flat-screen TV for hours at a time in the middle of the workday, surrounded by takeout boxes and packages from luxury brands. She often ordered delivery food multiple times a day — McDonald’s, Krispy Kreme, Chinese food — and several staffers say the boxes tended to accumulate, gathering flies. At one point, her parcels of designer goods nearly filled a nearby room. “It wasn’t ‘Oh, I spent $500 on Amazon,’” one former staffer explains. “This would be, like, $40,000 from Neiman Marcus.”
Some employees say the scene was more grim. They believe that Teefey was sometimes intoxicated. One calls Teefey’s office her “drug den.” Accounts of what she allegedly used vary. One staff member recalls being in her office when she snorted what they believe was a line of Ritalin.
A rotation of nurses regularly came by to give Teefey vitamin IV drips — not so uncommon for a wealthy Angeleno. But often, toward the end of the workday, a second nurse would arrive, employees say, one who was “missing some teeth and a little bit erratic.” People present heard both Teefey and the nurse say that Teefey was receiving liquid Benadryl, typically administered in medical settings to treat severe allergic reactions. While concierge clinics commonly offer IV drips that include the antihistamine for seasonal allergies or migraines, the frequency of use was unusual. The drug can be used as a downer, and in high doses it can cause hallucinations and delirium. Teefey told former staffers she needed the injections to deal with allergies and the aftermath of severe COVID and double pneumonia in late 2021, which she described as a near-death experience. Employees say that after the injections, Teefey spoke slowly and seemed drowsy. (Occasionally, Teefey’s younger daughter came to the office for sleepovers, which worried employees.) To some with knowledge of what happened that September night, the Benadryl helped explain Teefey’s actions: The “man” she claimed had entered the building seemed to them to be an illusion.
Wondermind was supposed to build a world of mental-health-related content — through a website, podcasts, TV shows, and films — and its mission was lofty: to “destigmatize” mental-health problems and “democratize” its care. The project seemed fitting for Gomez, who has made mental-health advocacy an explicit part of her public identity. In 2020, she revealed on an Instagram Live that she is bipolar, describing the diagnosis as a type of gift: Embracing the truth had “empowered” her. During Wondermind’s first year, she starred in a documentary, Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, intended to offer a behind-the-curtain view of her struggle with her mental health and the effects of her chronic autoimmune disease, lupus. Ahead of the film’s release, Gomez told Rolling Stone she’d been checked into mental-health treatment facilities four times. She described her anxiety about sharing her story but said it was the right thing to do. “Because I have the platform I have,” she said, “it’s kind of like I’m sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose.”
Something to the opposite effect seems to have played out at Wondermind. Out of 29 former and current employees, 14 agreed to speak with me, most on the condition of anonymity. According to dozens of conversations, the company’s grand mission and basic operations were tanked by Gomez’s and Teefey’s personal and family dysfunction, including the denial of Teefey’s instability.
In March, Wondermind failed to pay employees on time. In May, after paychecks failed to go out on schedule once again, and the debacle leaked to the press, staffers were furious but not surprised.
“I will say this with the utmost certainty — no doubt, hesitation in my mind,” one says. “Selena knew her mother was not well enough to be running that company.”
Gomez has many times described her childhood with Teefey as “very Gilmore Girls,” referring to the wholesome, quippy relationship at the center of the early-aughts TV show about a young mother and her teen daughter. And like Lorelai Gilmore, Teefey gave birth at 16, when she was still in high school. But Gomez’s upbringing seems to have been far less sunny, and by Teefey’s own telling, Gomez was burdened with her mother’s troubles from a young age.
In a conversation in August, Teefey told me she grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas. She was adopted at birth by a working-class family and raised in a neighborhood rife with gang violence and other crime. Her mental-health struggles began when she was very young. Her family was stable and kind, she said, but she had a persistent feeling of “disconnection.” “I always felt like I was alone,” she told me. “It was almost like I was watching a movie.” When she was 7, she tried to commit suicide.
She was bullied in high school for looking like an outsider — dyeing her hair purple and wearing combat boots “before Claire Danes,” she said — and, later, for being a teen mom.
During her pregnancy with Gomez, Teefey began having mood swings, which escalated into what were later diagnosed as manic episodes. Her understanding at the time was simply that she was “crazy,” and she often felt doomed. She began drinking — “self-medicating,” as she sees it now — when Gomez was a young child.
When Gomez was 5, Teefey was deciding whether to leave Gomez’s father. The people around her, she said, were telling her that ending the relationship would ruin her daughter’s life, but she knew it couldn’t work. Teefey told me a story of breaking down in tears one day as she was putting on her makeup. Gomez began comforting her, she said: “She just started, like, playing with my hair.” Teefey recalled looking into the mirror and telling her daughter, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Gomez replied, she said, “You’ll figure it out, Mommy. You’re beautiful.” Teefey and Gomez’s father split up in 1997. Elsewhere, Teefey has described the same period, saying her daughter would “vent and yell” at her for breaking the family apart.
Teefey started going to therapy in her early 20s and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A variety of initial medications were ineffective, but she eventually found relief, she said, in an anti-seizure medicine.
Teefey wanted to be an actress, and after high school she attended a conservatory. She began performing in community theater while working as a receptionist, bringing Gomez along to rehearsals, and soon her daughter wanted to be an actress too. In 2000, when Gomez was 7, she auditioned for Barney & Friends and was selected out of 1,400 kids to be one of the children program’s handful of singing and dancing stars. Barney shot in the Dallas area; Teefey began working as a TV extra, including on Walker, Texas Ranger, and soon started pursuing a production career through her contacts on the show.
After Gomez aged out of her role on Barney, she began auditioning for parts in the Disney universe. She shot a couple pilots that weren’t picked up and then, in 2006, she landed the lead on Wizards of Waverly Place as a teenager with magical powers.
With Waverly came real money and fame. Gomez, Teefey, and Teefey’s new husband, Brian Teefey, moved to L.A., and Gomez’s mother and stepfather became her managers. Gomez has described her mom as “fantastic” in the role during those early years. She wasn’t allowed to go to industry after-parties, and she has said Teefey “would never, ever put me in a room by myself. She was just very aware of things that I didn’t know.”
Teefey still had ambitions of her own. Shortly after arriving in town, she’d come across a young-adult novel about suicide, 13 Reasons Why, at a Barnes & Noble in Hollywood, and in 2011, after establishing a production company, she bought the rights to the story and made a deal to produce it as a film for Universal Pictures with Gomez in the lead.
Gomez, meanwhile, was reaching a new stratosphere of fame. Since 2009, she’d been putting out albums with the band Selena Gomez & the Scene, each one cracking the top ten on the Billboard charts. By 2011, she’d started dating Justin Bieber, then the biggest teen star in the world, and the pair’s on-again, off-again relationship was manna for the tabloids. In 2013, Gomez was diagnosed with lupus, which the singer has said causes her joint pain, depression, and anxiety. The next year, she checked herself into a luxury treatment facility for two weeks. At the time, TMZ reported that she was detoxing from narcotics and alcohol. Gomez later said she was recovering from chemotherapy related to lupus. In the years since, she’s said she began experiencing manic episodes and suicidal thoughts around that time.
In the tabloids, Teefey was rumored to blame the relationship with Bieber for her daughter’s distress: Bieber had recently been arrested for drunk driving and accused of vandalism. (He later pleaded guilty to lesser charges of careless driving and resisting arrest.)
During roughly the same period, Teefey herself was experiencing severe depression, which she attributes, in part, to a miscarriage in 2011 at the age of 35. She’s described feeling at the time as if she’d failed both her unborn baby and Gomez. She wondered, she’s said, if she should have kept her daughter from show business and given her a normal childhood.
In 2014, Gomez fired her mother and stepfather. In the past, including in My Mind & Me, Teefey has said she learned the news from TMZ. After TMZ’s report, she told the publication she was “having a hard time processing” Gomez’s choice. Teefey told me, however, that the decision was made over a series of conversations with her daughter and that she was more worried about Gomez than anything else: “It was from more of an Oh shit, she doesn’t know I protected her from so much.” At the time, news outlets reported that the mother and daughter had stopped speaking.
Both women continued to struggle with their health. In 2017, Gomez had a kidney transplant related to lupus, and over the next few years, she experienced a series of manic episodes and entered inpatient mental-health treatment. The same year, Teefey said, she began having grand-mal seizures and received a new mental-health diagnosis. Her doctors believed she was not bipolar but had ADHD and PTSD. (Teefey has now been prescribed Ritalin and no longer takes medication for bipolar disorder.)
Though she and Gomez were estranged, Teefey continued to talk about her daughter in public — both to the tabloids and on social media. (A representative for Teefey claimed that she did not speak to the tabloids.) When Gomez got back together with Bieber after briefly dating Abel Tesfaye, the musician known as the Weeknd, Teefey told a website called Gossip Cop that she was “not happy” about the decision. After Gomez shot a movie with Woody Allen, A Rainy Day in New York, Teefey claimed in an Instagram post that she’d tried to dissuade her daughter from taking part in the film but her advice had fallen “on deaf ears.” That December, Teefey and Gomez unfollowed each other on the platform. Teefey confirmed that Gomez did not speak to her for some time, saying her daughter believed she was too “controlling.”
When Gomez landed in a mental-health facility again, according to My Mind & Me, Teefey once more learned the news from TMZ. “She didn’t want anything to do with me,” Teefey says in the doc. “I was scared she was going to die.”
When we spoke, Teefey described herself as hesitant to discuss her relationship with her daughter but said they had reunited in 2019, when Gomez was “ready.” The next year, mother and daughter sat for an interview with Daniella Pierson for her girlboss newsletter, The Newsette, which she’d grown into a multimillion-dollar company since starting it five years earlier when she was in college. In the interview, Pierson opened up about her own obsessive-compulsive disorder. Gomez and Teefey spoke for the first time about how their respective mental-health issues had affected their relationship, or, rather, as they presented it, how their relationship — communicative and honest — had helped them manage their conditions.
The three women launched Wondermind in April 2022 and raised $5 million in series-A funding. The initial plans for the business were ambitious. The founders wanted to create a “mental-health ecosystem,” providing “tools” that, in Teefey’s telling at the time, would match those she was offered at an inpatient “facility that cost $1,500 a day.” Teefey and Pierson would be co-CEOs. Pierson, who would later be accused of repeatedly inflating the revenue, investment, and subscriber numbers for The Newsette and for her VC firm, Chasm (established in 2025), had significant and seemingly sound business experience, particularly in media. (Pierson has called the accusations against her “defamatory lies.”) She would head up the New York office, which would be focused on producing mental-health-related content for the company’s newsletter and website, intended to be, in Pierson’s words, “a sexier, more entertaining” alternative to publications like Psychology Today. Teefey, who at that point had worked on and off as a small-scale film and TV producer for 20 years, would be in charge of the L.A. office, developing the podcasts, movies, and shows. The goal was something akin to Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media operation. (“Mandy always compared her intentions to Reese’s,” one staffer says.)
Gomez would be Wondermind’s chief impact officer, an expectedly indeterminate title for a busy celebrity partner. In the company’s early days, employees saw her involvement as providing a degree of built-in security. Her reach was massive — she was, and still is, the single-most-followed woman on Instagram — and her pockets were unusually deep, even for an A-list star: She’s estimated to be worth somewhere between $700 million and more than $1 billion, much of that money made through her makeup business, Rare Beauty, which she started in 2020, now valued at $2 billion. It seemed unlikely Gomez would allow a company with her name on it to falter.
In a conversation with ABC News in Wondermind’s first month, Teefey, Gomez, and Pierson presented an image of a happy, part-chosen family: They were vulnerable but healed women on a mission to share the wisdom they’d found. Gomez said she was the most content she’d ever been. “If I am going to be known for anything,” she told the reporter, “I hope it’s simply for the way I care about people.” Teefey got choked up while describing learning to better take care of her daughter during Gomez’s mental-health struggles: “We had to learn how to recommunicate with each other. And it’s been amazing ever since we took the time.” Gomez and Pierson, who sat on either side of her, each briefly and stiffly placed a hand on her shoulder.
According to employees, the relationship between Teefey and Pierson was openly tense, even hostile, from the company’s first days. “Mandy and Dani didn’t trust each other,” says one staffer. Conversations were so contentious that Teefey’s assistant, another says, would turn on a white-noise machine to dampen Teefey’s raised voice. (In a comment, a representative for Teefey called this a “gross distortion.”) Many of the company’s staffers — a half-dozen in each office — felt pitted against one another, New York versus L.A.
Pierson assessed Teefey, in the words of a staffer, as “unable to deliver anything” she’d promised, and some employees were starting to suspect the same. It was in the business’s first few months that they began to notice that Teefey was sleeping in her office and spending much of the workday on the couch. She planned to host a podcast, supposedly a top priority, but the project was perpetually in limbo.
If Teefey had ever seen Pierson as an asset, she’d quickly changed her mind: Staff say she viewed Pierson as an opportunist hitching herself to Gomez’s fame. Many of the staff, for their part, found Pierson egomaniacal and overly forceful, making unilateral decisions whenever given the opportunity. One calls her a “chaos monster.” Another describes her as a “bullet train,” while Teefey, they say, “would stick her foot in the quicksand and just sink.”
Just shy of a year after launch, Wondermind staffers were told Pierson was no longer with the company. Accounts of precisely what happened vary, but sources close to Wondermind agree that the two CEOs had vied for control and Teefey had come out on top.
The staff were not terribly concerned by Pierson’s sudden departure; some were even relieved. Wondermind’s finances seemed to be sturdy. The company had been valued at $100 million and had made Inc.’s annual list of the fastest-growing private companies. Revenue was coming in from advertising on the newsletter and website, and though the podcast, film, and TV production arm hadn’t yet had any concrete success, Wondermind was hiring more employees. Teefey frequently referred to the company’s series-B funding, which she said would be arriving imminently. “Mandy was able to keep the façade up that she was just getting her hands around things,” one staffer says. “Most people pretty much bought into that.”
Staff grew concerned, however, when it became clear that Teefey would not be replacing Pierson with another co-CEO. Teefey didn’t seem to have the experience to run the business on her own — her production company was a two-person operation with credits on only three projects — and employees had seen the way her energy often waned. “She’s a creative and has big ideas,” one staffer says. “If she had had the wherewithal to be like, ‘Hey, let’s hire a CEO, and why don’t I take an advisory role?,’ that would have been great.”
Shortly after Pierson’s departure, staffers say, Teefey became less reliable. Almost every employee I spoke with told me she frequently missed Zoom calls and repeatedly canceled meetings, in some cases delaying conversations for a few months or even as long as a year. She came into work less and less and was often unreachable. “Mandy would disappear for weeks,” one says. “She wouldn’t respond at all.”
Projects continued to be delayed. Behind the Racquet, a tennis docuseries Wondermind had signed on to produce with Venus Williams, was endlessly stalled. One staffer tells me they’d needed Teefey to give notes on a script the company was considering for development at the beginning of 2023 and it took Teefey until 2024 to get it done. (In our interview, Teefey said, “I do cancel meetings a lot, given it being a busy start-up lifestyle.” She told me she was at times absent owing to long-term COVID but denied she’d ever been gone for weeks at a time.)
Staff say that when Teefey was present, she seemed desperate to assert control, lashing out if she found out that projects moved forward in her absence. Several say she sent unexpected angry emails and texts and lost her temper frequently. One recounts being called in to Teefey’s office after a vacation and getting berated for not responding to work messages while away. According to the staffer, Teefey jabbed a finger in their face and yelled that when she sent an email, they needed to “fucking answer.” (When we spoke, Teefey said she could not “discuss that particular employee.”)
In the summer of 2023, Teefey began to let it be known, bluntly and offhandedly, that Wondermind’s financial situation was untenable. According to one staffer, Teefey said she and Gomez had contributed $8 million of their own money and that she was struggling to secure series-B funding. “I’m carrying the entire company,” the employee remembers her saying angrily. “If the company went down, me and Selena will be fine. But none of you will be fine. I’m doing this to make sure you all have fucking jobs.” According to several staffers, Teefey said Gomez had stepped in multiple times to cover employee payroll.
At the same time, Teefey seemed to continue pursuing new projects. She was working on a Wondermind app with an external developer: It would serve as a hub for the start-up’s web content and offer a variety of interactive “mental fitness” tools. Whatever work was being done to build it, however, was a black box.
By the fall of 2024, according to employees, the company’s finances were undeniably dire. Teefey no longer wanted to spend money on marketing, previously the main driver of traffic to the website and newsletter. The Los Angeles office had managed to produce one reasonably successful podcast — Baggage Drop, about healthy emotional habits — but those working on it couldn’t get the $20,000 needed to make a second season, according to one staffer. Wondermind’s COO, Bhavik Trivedi, told staffers to cancel the business’s subscriptions, including a program used to track social-media engagement. Several staff members in L.A. resigned. By the end of 2024, only two of the original seven West Coast employees were still working for the company.
Teefey visited New York in late March. At the Malin, an upscale members-only office space in Soho, Teefey’s chief of staff, Emma Wright, presented screenshots of the long-promised app’s interface. According to several staffers, Teefey seemed tired or sick, though she spoke up to propose a light installation in Central Park to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month, upcoming in May.
It was three days later, in a March 31 email, that Teefey told employees they would not be paid on time. They would also be losing their health, dental, and vision insurance. When we spoke, Teefey described the day as “probably one of the worst days of my life.” She said a deal had fallen through and emphasized, as she did at other points in our conversation, that start-ups are difficult — nothing is guaranteed.
The next day, on an all-staff call, according to employees, Teefey seemed not to accept responsibility. She described the incident as a “little hiccup” and said she would have covered payroll herself had her business manager not prevented her. She was confident the series-B funding would be arriving soon; the singer Michael Bublé would be an investor.
Staff payment was resolved a few days later. A week after that, Teefey posted a message to Slack announcing a collection of projects that sounded both far-fetched and distinctly detached from the company’s financial reality. She claimed Wondermind was teaming up with actress Jessica Chastain and the producers of Silver Linings Playbook to make a movie — the script, she said, was already written. Wondermind was also, she said, in negotiations with an unspecified party to develop a snack food. (An employee group chat lit up with jokes: “Lorazepancakes”; “Fruit snacks with just a liiittle bit of xanax?”) One staffer says Teefey told her she’d been inspired by Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, who were “making a vegan egg.” Staff say she’d floated the possibility of a Cheetos-like snack topped with a supplement, such as ashwagandha powder.
At the end of April, Wondermind paychecks failed to go out once again. At a meeting the following week, according to an audio recording of the conversation, Teefey said staff would receive their checks soon and that she’d taken out a loan on her home. (Teefey’s representative later said she was being hyperbolic.) Employees wondered why, if things were so desperate, Gomez hadn’t stepped in to bail out the company — and her mother.
In the early days of Wondermind, staffers noticed that Teefey often emphasized the business’s independence from Gomez, drawing what seemed to be an unnecessarily hard line. “This site is not Selena’s site,” she stressed, employees say, when the editorial team was designing the newsletter and website. “We don’t want this to be like, ‘This is Selena’s brand.’” From a business standpoint, this seemed counterintuitive — Gomez was a power influencer if ever there was one, and her other company, Rare Beauty, was an enormous success. To employees, Teefey’s impulse was obviously personal. She resented her public image as “Selena’s mom” — especially now that she was no longer her daughter’s manager. “That’s not enough for her,” one staffer said.
Teefey has complained to the press at times that her daughter’s celebrity made it difficult to build her own reputation as a producer, and when we spoke, she said the “momager” title still follows her. “I call it ‘nepo parent’ instead,” she said. She recounted a story of pitching a new Wondermind platform to an investor alongside a male colleague. At the end of the meeting, she claimed, the investor credited her colleague with the presentation. “And he looks at me,” she said, “and goes, ‘Oh, and you, you gave birth.’”
Teefey said that she’d used Gomez’s influence sparingly “very intentionally” — that the company had not yet arrived at a stable enough place for her daughter’s sway to be “utilized at its best capacity.” To multiple former employees, it seemed Teefey had refused to grab hold of ready lifelines: They say she repeatedly rejected deals with companies and investors drawn to Wondermind through their interest in Gomez, that she’d found this interest offensive and taken it as a personal slight. According to one staffer, Wondermind pulled out of a potential project with Mattel because the company wanted Gomez to be included as a producer. (Teefey said she has not rejected any such deals.)
On the rare occasions staffers saw Teefey and Gomez interact, according to some, their relationship appeared strained and uncomfortable. “I can tell there’s distance between the two of them, a lot of hurt,” one says. “They don’t interact like a typical mother and daughter. They interact like two women who put up with each other, not even two co-workers. The air was, like, cold between them.”
Staffers describe Gomez as disinterested, at best, in the company. Many believe Wondermind is effectively, as one puts it, “a way for Selena to keep Mandy out of her orbit.”
In Gomez’s few visits to the L.A. office, staffers say, she spent most of her time speaking to her mother behind closed doors. She rarely mentioned Wondermind in public appearances, and her social-media posts promoting the company, according to employees, were the result of the team pushing on her hard. “It was like pulling teeth,” one says. “We’d have to call her publicist four times.” (In contrast, Gomez frequently publicized Rare Beauty’s own mental-health initiatives, including fundraising for youth-mental-health services.)
In June of the company’s first year, Wondermind held a team dinner at Tower Bar in the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood. To staffers present, it seemed obvious that Gomez didn’t take Wondermind seriously. Several employees say she arrived noticeably drunk, slurring her words and telling the table, over a martini, that she’d be leaving shortly to go have sex. (A spokesperson for Gomez did not offer comment.)
Some staff couldn’t believe that Gomez would not step in to help her mother when, by outward appearances, Teefey was struggling to function. It’s just not what they would have done, they imagined, if their mothers were in that state. Several say that Gomez had, on multiple occasions, arrived at the office on days after Teefey had slept in the suite. One employee recalls Gomez finding her mother lying on a couch, covered in blankets, her hair mussed, wearing slippers and a sweat suit that she’d had on for several days in a row. “How long have you been here?” the staffer recalls Gomez asking, sounding concerned. “Have you gone home?”
“If I had seen my mom in that state,” one employee says, “I would have intervened. I would say, ‘This isn’t right.’” Teefey is “culpable,” the staffer says — responsible for Wondermind’s failures and their fallout — “but Selena, in my opinion, is just as culpable.”
The vast majority of staff members who spoke with me say they believe Gomez knew her mother did not have the capacity to run the company and shares blame for the resulting effects on their lives. Some have developed new or worsened panic disorders and depression that they attribute to both Teefey’s behavior and the business’s instability.
One member of the L.A. team, however, says they have real empathy for Gomez. During one particularly harsh rebuke from Teefey, the staffer says, “I was like, Wow, if she’s talking to me like this, what does she say to her own daughter? ”
On May 10, Forbes published a report on the funding crisis at Wondermind. Two days later, nine of the 15 people then employed at the company were laid off in meetings with Trivedi, the COO. Trivedi told at least one staffer that he’d been pushing Teefey to downsize for “the last couple years.”
But for all this, Teefey, when we spoke in August, was optimistic. She told me that Wondermind’s app was “ready to go.” She described it as a community-building platform with “mental fitness” tools, all “medically advised and guided.” One of the tools she loved, she said, was After Hours, a “special room” in the digital world where users could spend time during the hours of midnight to 4 a.m. — when people have, she claimed, “the highest level of suicide ideation.” Inside the room was “therapeutic entertainment, games or whatever, so people don’t feel alone.” These activities, she said, would all be “guided and led” by therapists, but therapy would not be offered. In another feature, an interactive journal, the app would tell users when they seemed to be leaning into “negative self-talk.”
When I asked Teefey when it would be launched, she said the app was “ready to rock and roll” but the company was still in the process of raising its series-B funding. She was hoping for “pre-September.” She added that there would be some sort of edible product to go with the app — one she couldn’t “get too deep into” — that would involve “somatic experiencing.” “It’s not a supplement,” she said, “but like a sublingual.” It would dissolve and “fizzle, like an Alka-Seltzer.”
When I asked Teefey about the staff accounts of her behavior, she said she had slept in the suite occasionally (“when I was doing everything on my own”) because she’s not supposed to drive at night due to her seizures. (Her PR rep later commented that sleeping at the office showed she was working hard.) Teefey did have the TV on during business hours, she said: “I always have something playing in the background. It’s part of my ADHD — that helps me focus.” There was no mess of takeout food or delivery boxes, she said, and no gathering flies. Her younger daughter had spent the night at the office only once, she claimed.
As for the Benadryl injections from the nurse missing teeth, Teefey said she would use whatever nurse was sent and did not go into the specifics of the medication. Her reply to the allegation of snorting Ritalin in the office was more direct: “Absolutely not.”
Recalling that night in September when she’d texted staff and called the police, she rejected the suggestion that she’d hallucinated an intruder. She said the office was in a “very sketchy neighborhood … We had a huge homeless community that would roam in and out of our building.”
Following our interview, one of Wondermind’s four remaining employees, Jonathon Glucksman, sent me a video he said corroborated Teefey’s account of the night. But New York found no footage of a man speaking to the Ring cam, and we saw no evidence that anyone had attempted to break in, in line with the police’s findings. (Teefey’s rep insisted that the supposed intruder could be heard on tape.) Among staffers, only Glucksman, Wright (Teefey’s chief of staff), and one other current employee spoke on the record in support of Teefey
Several Wondermind staff members say they feel some compassion for Teefey. One tells me they do not believe she ever tried to deceive them. “She did lead us on,” they say, “but it wasn’t malicious.” “There will always be people who are dangerously unstable,” another says. “What’s worse is somebody like Selena who sees it firsthand and doesn’t do anything.”
Teefey gave an additional statement after we spoke: “I started Wondermind because I wanted to help people with mental illness. It’s unfortunate that a few disgruntled employees with an ax to grind can spread lies about me and distort the truth. Even more disappointing that the media is willing to amplify their lies.”
She would tell me very little about her current relationship with Gomez. She said the two had developed healthy boundaries and that their dynamic is supportive. She was much more forthcoming about Selena’s younger years. “We had a very close relationship. But I was living with a little bit of fear and uncertainty,” she said, “and also not knowing where my mental health was. It was always just, like, everything was happening — life was happening — while I was trying to plan for life to happen.” Everything would have been different, she told me, without Selena: “I would have gone down a completely rougher path and might not even be here today. She saved my life.”
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