Perjury, Perchance? Erika Girardi’s American Express Scandal Unpacked

Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” For Erika Girardi, the statistic was a $787,000 refund from American Express. For Chris Psaila and Marco Morante, the statistics were a nine-count federal indictment against Psaila, countless millions in lost business and the incalculable harm to the reputations of the business partners. 

They say it was all built on lies Girardi told to federal investigators. There was no conviction, but there are lawsuits – one in Florida state court and one in a California federal court. A closer look at documents Erika Girardi submitted in the California case may push those lies Chris says she told, damned or otherwise, into the deep end of the dishonesty pool – perjury.

Chris Psaila spent four long years as an accused thief in the eyes of The U.S. Government. He’s suing because he is certain that Erika Girardi lied to federal agents and a federal prosecutor to build a phony fraud case. “There are a lot of people that lied throughout this process,” Psaila said in an interview with Exhibit (A) List. “There has been no accountability for those lies.”

In some cases, lying to federal officers is not just mean. It’s a crime. That is not the issue here. It’s what she said in the federal lawsuit that might create a Pretty Mess for Girardi.

Just what is it that Erika Girardi may have lied to the feds about? Money, mostly.

Erika Girardi is one of the Real (well, separated) Housewives of Beverly Hills in the Bravo network reality show of the same (minus “separated”) name. She came to the show after almost ten years as a Dance Club Song chart-topper performing under the name Erika Jayne. She launched her entertainment career in 2007, a few years after she married powerful Los Angeles attorney Tom Girardi and his prodigious wealth.

While performing her music in Las Vegas casinos and night clubs around the country, she wore flashy costumes designed and created by Hollywood (California) boutiques. In 2014, still in the middle of a decade-long run of #1 dance club hit songs, she turned to Marco Marco, run by business partners Chris Psaila and Marco Morante. Erika met them through her stylist and an assistant. In court documents, Erika said she chose the boutique because of Marco’s “bold, playful and sparkly bodysuits” which she said “suited my style.” She was so happy with Marco Marco’s work, she said praised Marco’s design on her social media accounts. The firm was her main supplier of costumes for her performances from 2014-16.

Let’s face it, you don’t get to be a Real Housewife on TV by hitting thrift stores and garage sales. If Sesame Street invited the Real Housewives, the letter L would stand for “lavish” and “luxury.” Erika Jayne said it herself in her song, “XXPEN$IVE” when she sang, “It’s expensive to be me. Looking this good don’t come for free.” 

Her own words in court documents back that up. In a declaration in Psaila’s California lawsuit against her, Erika said, “I did not know how much I spent per month or per year.” She said her husband’s law firm paid the bills. Tom Girardi currently awaits sentencing for his federal conviction for stealing money from clients during the period of time that roughly corresponds to his wife’s entertainment career. In a news release following Tom’s conviction, federal prosecutors said Tom Girardi used the stolen money to fund his wife’s lifestyle and entertainment career.

Although she claimed, in court documents, to have had no clue about how much of her husband’s money she was spending, Erika said she chose Marco Marco because she thought it made “good budgetary sense.” She called Marco “an up-and-coming designer with a much smaller clientele in 2014, and I believed that they would be a lower cost alternative” to her previous designer. This Real Housewife, who once said on the show that being poor “sucked,” was becoming a smart shopper.

In late 2016, Erika, the self-proclaimed smart shopper who claimed to know nothing of her spending habits, said she got a talking to from her husband, who she said began (after 15+ years of marriage) to complain to her about spending too much with her American Express card. Erika, who said, under oath, that Tom never gave her “visibility into our finances,” decided to look into the spending she never knew (cared?) about before.

Erika’s detective work got some extraordinary assistance from a fan. Lucky for Erika, the fan answered the phone at the credit card company. In her declaration for the Psaila lawsuit, Erika said, under oath, that she called American Express to access to information about the account. She admitted she didn’t know of the security information. No matter, said the American Express customer service agent. Erika said the agent, “reassured me that she recognized my voice from watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and gave me access to the AMEX account.”

Well. It looks like membership really does have its privileges. Erika said the helpful folks at American Express sent an email giving her online access to her account. She said she used that access to identify what she and her assistant, Laia Ribatallada, believed were questionable charges against the account by Marco Marco. Lots of them, Erika said.

Erika claimed there were too many charges for more costumes than she would have needed for a limited performance schedule. In her declaration, Erika reported that she reached out to Marco Marco and was assured by Psaila, who managed the business end, that these were bookkeeping errors that he would look into and fix.

Erika claimed the bogus charges continued. She’d had some experience with credit card fraud. In her declaration, she said the United States Secret Service had contacted her in 2009, at a time when, according to her declaration, her husband gave her no insight into their finances or how much she was spending. She said the Secret Service told her it was investigating alleged credit card fraud by an aesthetician Erika had used.

Armed with this experience and concerns from her husband about their money, Erika said she reached out to the Secret Service, since she understood the artists formerly known as T-Men investigated credit card fraud cases. It probably didn’t hurt that the agent in charge of the Los Angeles office was Robert Savage, a family friend. In her sworn declaration, Erika said that just as she was in the dark about her family finances and her own spending habits, she was ignorant of the business relationship between the Special Agent in Charge and her husband the attorney.

In fact, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, Tom Girardi represented Savage and his wife, who were suing Volkswagen over a faulty minivan braking system. The Times reported Savage wanted a larger cash settlement. Girardi reportedly did not charge the Savages for his services. He also paid the Savages more than $7,000 of his own money when their effort to get more cash did not succeed.

It was about that time, the Times reported, that Erika, who claims she didn’t know Robert Savage was a pro bono client of Tom Girardi, contacted Savage about her belief that Marco Marco was taking advantage of the evidently cash-strapped multi-millionaire Girardis.

The Secret Service office, led by a client for whom Erika’s husband worked for free and paid $7,500, began its investigation of Marco Marco. Agents even put a hidden wire on amateur sleuth Erika for a meeting with Psaila to discuss the charges in question. Erika didn’t leave home (in Pasadena, not Beverly Hills) without American Express, and the company refunded her $787,000.

According to Secret Service documents, agents in the office led by pro bono Girardi client Savage outlined seven “unauthorized charges” Assistant U.S. Attorney George Pence IV identified by email. The memo went on to say that Pence would handle the case up to a possible grand jury indictment, then hand it off to another Assistant U.S. Attorney. The memo from Special Agent Kenneth Henderson reported “(n)either Mrs. Girardi nor Ms. Ribatallada could find any emails, text messages or invoices supporting the (American Express) charges.”

Pence convinced a federal grand jury to hand up an indictment in April 2017, charging Psaila with fraudulently using Erika Girardi’s American Express card on seven occasions in 2015 and 2016, totaling $62,667. That is considerably less than the $787,000 refund American Express gave the Girardis. In her declaration for the lawsuit Psaila filed against her, Erika Girardi said Marco Marco had charged her more than $900,000 in 2015 and 2016.

In that same declaration, Erika recounted her own efforts to investigate all the charges to her account by Marco Marco. “Based on this review, Laia and I could not account for all of the transactions by Marco Marco on my credit card.” Based on Erika’s story to federal investigators, Psaila became an accused felon.

Psaila spent more than four years under the cloud of suspicion, facing a federal indictment. Federal prosecutors tried to get a judge to order Psaila jailed until trial. In court documents, prosecutors claimed that “because no condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure” Psaila would appear for court or wouldn’t hurt someone. He did not go to jail.

Psaila says Erika lied to investigators from the federal government and American Express. What did he tell them when they questioned him about Girardi’s accusations?

Nothing. They never asked. Psaila said he was never contacted by American Express or the Secret Service. He said the first evidence he had that he was under investigation was when armed federal agents burst into the Marco Marco studio. “It was terrifying,’ he said. “They didn’t even tell me why they were there.”

Psaila said he asked Secret Service Agent Kenneth Henderson why agents raided the studio. “He seemed confused himself.” Psaila remembered Henderson’s answer. “He kind of like scratched his head, and was, like, ‘I’m not really sure why we’re here, honestly. It’s not like you’re driving a Ferarri.’ Even to them, it seems like this wasn’t necessary.”

As the old saying goes, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” In the end, Chris and Marco accuse Erika of blowing smoke. The case federal prosecutors based largely on Erika’s story ultimately fell apart. In the fall of 2021, prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the indictment. In a statement, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office told Exhibit A-List, “We ultimately determined that law enforcement evidence preservation issues undermined our ability to prosecute the case and the interests of justice supported dismissal.”

One way to read that, they didn’t have the goods. No fire to go with Erika’s smoke. She said in her declaration she didn’t have records to prove the charges she called fraud. A memo from federal investigators said she found no evidence of invoices, texts or emails regarding the charges.

Maybe Erika didn’t look hard enough. Or worse.

Erika and her assistant said they couldn’t find anything to back up their claims. Chris and Marco provided a lot to back up their side of the story. Psaila’s lawsuit includes 27 pages of exhibits, including texts between Marco Marco and Erika Girardi’s team. They also have photos of Erika performing in the costumes she swore she did not authorize. Morante included those 27 pages in his lawsuit in Florida.

The American court system is grounded in the notion that the burden of proof in a criminal case rests squarely on the shoulders of the prosecution. By their own admission, federal prosecutors acknowledged they did not have sufficient evidence to convict Chris Psaila. Evidence they seemed to have based entirely on the word of Erika Girardi and two people on her payroll. Chris Psaila is under no obligation to offer a defense or to provide evidence of his innocence. Still, he has produced more than 100 exhibits he says prove Erika and her team knew exactly what they were paying for and what they were paying for it.

Erika Girardi tried to get Psaila’s lawsuit thrown out of federal court, claiming it violated California’s anti-SLAPP laws. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. The law protects individuals from lawsuits filed to harass or silence them for exercising their right to free speech or petition the government. Girardi’s attorneys argued that because she was cooperating with authorities investigating her claim of a crime, she should be immune from Psaila’s lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald appears to have SLAPPed down that argument. In a Civil Minutes document from the lawsuit, Fitzgerald writes that because the government dropped its case against Psaila, there is some doubt about the truthfulness of Girardi’s complaint. Fitzgerald allowed the lawsuit to continue, writing, “(b)ased on the evidence, a jury could decide that Defendant Girardi had access to text messages, email and social media posts that would coincide with at a minimum the seven charges used in the indictment against Plaintiff (Psaila). Therefore, a jury could find that the evidence establishes that Defendant Girardi relied upon facts which she had no reasonable cause to believe in to be true.”

You could summarize the judge’s legalese by saying, “Erika knew she was lying.” If she did, it would be lies submitted in her declaration in the lawsuit that could create the real problems for her. Federal law, in 18 United States Code (U.S.C) 1621, a person who testifies falsely or submits false statements in a federal court proceeding puts themselves at risk of a perjury charge, which is a felony that can carry fines, more than a year in federal prison, or both.

To date, Erika Girardi has not been charged with perjury or any other crime. Although federal investigators decided they didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute Chris Psaila, there is no evidence that American Express has made any attempt to recover the $787,000 it returned to the Girardis, despite the fact that no theft was ever proven nor any persons convicted of fraud.

Psaila filed his lawsuit in his ordeal two years after federal prosecutors dismissed the indictment. The suit originally named as defendants Erika Girardi, her assistant Laia Ribatallada, her creative director Michael Minden, American Express, American Express investigator Peter Grimm, retired Secret Service Agent Robert Savage, and agents Kenneth Henderson and Steve Scarince. The three Secret Service agents have since been dismissed from the lawsuit, which now awaits a jury trial.

For the four years he was under indictment, Chis Psaila said he dreaded court dates. Now he looks forward to his lawsuit getting its day in court.