Jewel has claimed her estranged mother embezzled $US100 million (approx. $149 million) from her after she found success as a singer.
The Who Will Save Your Soul singer, 48, spoke candidly about her mother Lenedra – who she says abandoned the family after divorcing her father – and alleges she once “stole” millions without her realising.
Speaking on the Verywell Mind Podcast, Jewel said she only discovered the alleged financial deception when she was in her 30s, years after she skyrocketed to fame with her hit album Pieces of You.
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“I didn’t really realise what my mum was until I was 30-something. I woke up and realised she embezzled all of my money, over $100 million,” Jewel claimed.
“Thirty-four years old, realise I’m $3 million in debt, realise my mum stole it, realise everything I thought my mum was, isn’t what she was, very difficult psychological thing to come to terms with.”
Jewel said her mother left the family when she was aged 8 after a bitter divorce. She was raised by her father, who she alleges was an abusive alcoholic.
“My mum and dad got divorced when I was 8, and we went to live with my dad. Nobody told me it’s because my mum didn’t want to be a mum. She left us, and so my dad took over raising us. I didn’t know that at the time,” she continued.
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“My dad was this volatile alcoholic that hit me, very easy to identify ‘bad guy.’ My mum seemed like the opposite. She was calm, she was soft, she never yelled, obviously never hit me.”
She added: “And I didn’t realise I was being abused in another way at the time.”
Jewel reconnected with her mother after she found fame as a musician and said she relinquished control of her finances, thinking she was doing the right thing.
In her 2016 memoir Never Broken, she revealed she was in crushing debt despite selling millions of albums.
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“I found out that not only was all my money gone, but I was several million dollars in debt,” she wrote.
“The same year I came to believe that my mum, who was also my manager, was not the person I thought she was.”
According to reports, Jewel fired her mother as her manager and the pair stopped talking.
However, the singer has also defended Lenedra in the years since. While promoting her album Picking Up The Pieces in 2015, Jewel softened on her stance and said her parents weren’t bad people.
“My mum isn’t a villain,” Jewel said at the time. “My dad isn’t a villain. People get some things right and people get some things wrong.”
Lenedra has never publicly commented on Jewel’s allegations of embezzlement. Her father Atz Kilcher has also never commented on Jewel’s allegations of alcohol abuse and violence.
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