Plato gets credit for the notion that art imitates real life. If the Greek philosopher could drop in 2,300 years or so after he did his thinking, he might dial up Erika Jayne’s song “XXPEN$IVE” on his iTunes account to make his point. In it, the artist legally known as Erika Girardi sings, “It’s expensive to be me. Looking this good don’t come for free.”
If not bobbing his head to the music, Plato might be nodding in agreement. So might her 80-plus-year-old estranged attorney husband Tom Girardi and some of his clients. Her friend, Florida attorney Jim Wilkes, might also agree. You’d likely get an “Amen!” from Erika Jayne’s costume designers Marco Morante and Chris Psaila, too.
Erika Jayne Girardi is also known as one of the cast of the Bravo channel’s reality TV show, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Plato, and many others might opine that phony schemes got real money for Erika and real trouble for many others in the orbit of this Real Housewife star.
American taxpayers may also have unwittingly picked up some of the tab for Ms. Girardi’s expensive (XXPEN$IVE?) lifestyle, as part of two apparently inflated Paycheck Protection Program loans, Wilkes, now in his mid-70s, received in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic may show.
The U.S. Government loaned Jim Wilkes’ law firm more than $4 million in 2020 and 2021 to help the firm meet its payroll during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilkes told an interviewer for an ABC documentary that he had helped Erika Girardi with approximately $2 million to help her in her separation from her husband after she filed for divorce. Court documents acknowledge Wilkes and Erika Girardi shared a Florida bank account at that time. Had Erika spun silver into gold a second time in her life?
Real life may have been imitating art when Erika, born Erika Chahoy, made her way to Los Angeles in the mid-90s. Remember the 80’s hit, “Don’t You Want Me?” by The Human League? Well, Erika was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when she met lawyer Tom Girardi in 1998. Two years later, she and Tom were married. She had come to L.A. with dreams of being a singer after her first marriage ended in divorce. Marrying a successful attorney 32 years her senior may have been the break she needed to break into show business.
Erika Girardi became recording artist Erika Jayne in 2007. The future Real Housewife enjoyed some real success, as her debut single, “Roller Coaster,” rose to the top of Billboard magazine’s Dance Club Songs chart within two months of its release. It was the first of nine singles she would place at the top of the Dance Club chart.
As she topped the charts for the eighth time in 2015, her star continued to rise even higher, as she joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The timing was good, as many other things seemed to be taking a downhill turn.
Her hitmaking had slowed. She had one more #1 on the Dance Club Charts – her last, to date, “How Many F*cks” came in 2016. Husband Tom’s career was in the middle of a yet-to-be-discovered, years-long scheme that would ultimately lead to his downfall, and put the funding for Erika Jayne’s lifestyle and entertainment career in jeopardy.
Federal prosecutors discovered that Tom Girardi had been playing a shell game with money owed to his clients from settlements and successful lawsuits. It was alleged that Tom Girardi and his law firm got paid, while many of his clients did not. A federal jury indicted Tom for wire fraud. He was convicted in August 2024, and now awaits sentencing. Tom Girardi, now 85, faces more than 10 years in prison.
The legal troubles forced Tom into bankruptcy in 2020 and shut down his law firm, Girardi Keese, the next year. In a videotaped deposition in September 2020 shown in an ABC News documentary, Tom Girardi was asked about his finances. He said he had at one time had between $50 million and $80 million in cash, and a stock portfolio worth $50 million.
“It’s all gone,” he said.
Also gone, it seemed, was Erika. She filed for divorce just a few weeks before Tom’s bankruptcy filing in 2020. She has repeatedly said in interviews and on the Real Housewives show that she had no idea that her husband had ripped off so many for so much.
As her marriage to Tom Girardi appeared to be failing in 2020, another successful attorney old enough to be her father entered Erika’s orbit to seemingly come to the rescue. James Wilkes, an attorney from Tampa, offered to help her. A lot. A conversation Wilkes had with one of Erika’s attorneys was shown on the ABC News documentary, The Housewife and the Hustler 2: The Reckoning. Attorney Evan Borges talked about how Wilkes had given Erika $150,000 to pay for a divorce lawyer and provide support, since she apparently was cut off from her husband’s money. In an interview for the documentary, Wilkes was asked how much he had spent on helping Erika. “I have no idea,” he said. “A couple of million. I can’t conceive of what it’s cost me and my practice.”
One person with knowledge of Wilkes’ law firm and its finances can point to at least $400,000 shared with Erika Girardi. In a sworn affidavit, private investigator Jonathan Ballard reported interviewing Timothy Kulig, the chief financial officer for Wilkes and Associates. Kulig said he had opened an account with Wells Fargo Bank in 2020. Jim Wilkes and Erika Girardi were named as account holders, with deposits made totaling $400,000. In a Florida lawsuit in which Erika is named as a defendant, she made a declaration in her own defense. In it, she states, “I had one bank account opened for me by a friend in the State of Florida. It was opened at the national bank chain where my friend did his banking. The account was used for personal, not business use.” Kulig told Ballard the money in that account came either from Wilkes’ personal funds or a distribution from the firm. Kulig pointed out that his job was to manage things and “move money around” for Wilkes’ multiple business entities.
One of those business entities, The Wilkes Firm, P.A., applied for and received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan in April 2020 to assist with the financial difficulties created for many businesses by the COVID-19 pandemic. The firm received a loan of almost $2.3 million, reporting it had 142 employees. The firm applied for and received a second PPP loan in January 2021. The Wilkes Firm cashed a $2 million check on an application reporting 140 employees.
It appears food and other prices may not have been the only things affected by inflation during the pandemic. Private investigator Ballard’s affidavit reports two people he interviewed – CFO Kulig and an attorney employed by Wilkes – told him the firm employed only about 100 people in 2020. If true, Wilkes and Associates inflated its number of employees by 40 percent.
As of April 2024, Department of Justice reported it had charged more than 3,500 people for alleged PPP fraud totaling more than $2 billion. Prosecuting PPP fraud isn’t a cut and dried proposition. We talked to a retired federal prosecutor who worked on PPP cases. She said PPP fraud was generally not obvious from the loan applications because the applications were designed to be easy and quick to complete and require only basic information. She added that Inflating the number of employees on a PPP loan application could be viewed as evidence of fraud, however, the issue may not be as simple as counting heads because of considerations such as part-time vs. full-time, seasonal workers and affiliation rules, among other things. Building a criminal fraud case, whether PPP or not, requires an intent to defraud. For civil cases, the burden of proof is lower and may just require proof of negligence.
It is important to note that neither Wilkes nor Wilkes and Associates has been charged or implicated in any fraud investigation to date. Wilkes has not responded to an email or a text message seeking comment on the information included in this report.
The indictment accusing Tom Girardi of wire fraud in stealing from clients charged, among other things, that he used the stolen money to fund his and Erika’s lifestyle and pay American Express bills. When Tom was convicted of those charges last August, a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Central District of California named Erika as a beneficiary of her husband’s crimes. The release said Girardi “diverted tens of millions of dollars from his law firm’s operating account to pay illegitimate expenses, including more than $25 million to pay the expenses of EJ Global, a company formed by his wife related to her entertainment career, as well as spent millions of dollars of Girardi Keese funds on private jet travel, jewelry, luxury cars, and exclusive golf and social clubs.”
Neither Erika nor EJ Global has been charged with any crimes. Both Erika and EJ Global are, however, named as defendants in a $50 million lawsuit filed by a Chicago law firm that worked with Girardi Keese on a lawsuit against Boeing involving a 2018 fatal air crash off the coast of Indonesia. The suit accuses Girardi Keese of not paying clients owed money from a settlement.
The lawsuit filing is not an indictment. It just reads like one, laying out a series of allegations that Erika knew well what her husband was doing with the law firm’s money. Quoting from the filing in the Federal District Court of Northern Illinois, “the firm was siphoning off millions to fund Tom’s and his wife Erika’s all-consuming need to spend—funding a lifestyle so lavish that Erika was a cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” It shines a harsh light on Erika herself, claiming, “EJ Global acted as a shell entity with no capital, corporate books, or indicia of corporate formality. EJ Global was created for the purpose of funneling money from Girardi Keese to benefit Erika.”
The lawsuit also alleges that financial records show that more than $25 million of Erika’s expenses were illegally paid by Girardi Keese. That includes, the suit charges, that more than $14 million in American Express charges were made by Erika on a Girardi Keese card issued to her by the Girardi Family Enterprise, as well as more than $11 million in vendor payments that the Girardi Family Enterprise made for her benefit through the law firm.
American Express. Erika might be glad she didn’t leave home without it, since the credit card company helped her get some of that money back. It caused a Pretty Mess (Erika Jayne #1 Dance Club Chart hit in 2010) for Chris Psaila and Marco Morante. Together, they helped dress Erika XXXPEN$IVE-ly. It appears she tried to make them pay for her business.
According to court documents, Erika began dressing in costumes designed by Marco Marco in 2014. She and her backup dancers wore $900,000 in Chris and Marco’s handmade creations in her night club performances. Then near the end of 2016, as federal prosecutors charge her husband was halfway through a ten-year campaign of theft to pay for their lavish lifestyle, Erika claimed Marco Marco had run up unauthorized charges on her American Express account. Her complaint prompted a federal investigation of Marco Marco and ultimately an American Express refund to Erika of $787,000. The investigation, headed up by Secret Service agent and Girardi family friend Rob Savage, culminated with a grand jury indictment of Chris Psaila. The 2017 indictment charged Psaila with nine counts of fraud and identity theft.
Chris Psaila vigorously denied the charges. In 2021, a judge approved federal prosecutors’ motion to dismiss the case. For this article, the U.S. Attorney’s Office repeated a statement it gave to the Los Angeles Times in 2023, saying, “We ultimately determined that law enforcement evidence preservation issues undermined our ability to prosecute the case and the interests of justice supported dismissal.”
Both Psaila and Morante filed multimillion dollar lawsuits against Erika Girardi and people who allegedly helped in her efforts against Marco Marco. Psaila’s federal suit in California names Erika, Savage and American Express, among others. Morante is suing Erika in Florida state court. Both cases are making their way through the courts. Both cases contain exhibits that show Erika Girardi performed in costumes she claimed were fraudulently charged to her American Express account, and for which she received a refund from American Express.
Through it all, Erika Girardi has, to date, not been charged with any crime. Multiple lawsuits, but no criminal charges.
Reviewing all the information about the Girardis and the way they’ve spent, as prosecutors and at least one jury believe, other people’s money, it reminds this reporter of a prosecutor’s closing arguments in a 1980s court room in Fort Smith, AR, and how he thought a jury should view circumstantial evidence. Ron Fields was the Prosecuting Attorney for Sebastian County, AR for more than 20 years, and briefly served as the state’s acting Attorney General. When closing his jury trials, Fields would ask the jury to consider a scenario. “Imagine that when you went to bed one night, there was no snow on the ground,” he’d say. “Then when you woke up the next morning, there was snow on the ground. You did not see it snowing, but a reasonable person could conclude that it snowed.” Civil juries in at least two states may face a similar notion to consider one day.
In the end, one might wonder how all this trouble concerns Erika Girardi. Consider the lyrics of her last #1 Dance Club hit, 2016’s “How Many F*cks.” How many does she give?
She sang, “None, Not One, Zero, Zero, Zero, Done.”
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