Jewel was dealt a very tough hand growing up. And in some ways, it only got worse after she became famous.
The four-time Grammy nominee opened up about her tough childhood and her mother’s alleged shady financial activities in a new podcast interview — Verywell Mind Podcast with host Amy Morin — on Monday. In it, the singer born Jewel Kilcher, claimed her mom “embezzled” an unbelievable amount of money from the recording artist early on in her career.
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The now-48-year-old singer recounted it shockingly plain language:
“I didn’t really realize what my mom was until I was 30-something. I woke up and realized she embezzled all of my money, over $100 million.”
OMG!!
A hundred million dollars?! How the f**k…
Jewel didn’t get into specifics about how the alleged embezzlement was supposedly carried out. But the Who Will Save Your Soul crooner — who has sold nearly 30 million albums worldwide across her long career — did explain the aftermath.
She was a 34-year-old celeb suffering through massive seven-figure debt with a fractured relationship with her family:
“Thirty-four years old, realize I’m $3 million in debt, realize my mom stole it, realize everything I thought my mom was, isn’t what she was, very difficult psychological thing to come to terms with.”
So sad for her! The financial aspects are bad enough, but the mistrust and deceit that comes with it is just… UGH!
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The Pieces of You songbird dove deeper into some of those awful domestic dramas, too. She recalled her parents divorcing when she was just eight years old. At that point, her father Atz Kilcher took on the more active role in her life. In fact, the singer claimed on the podcast, it was her mother’s apparent desire not to be a mom that set the family problems in motion:
“My mom and dad got divorced when I was 8, and we went to live with my dad. Nobody told me it’s because my mom didn’t want to be a mom. She left us, and so my dad took over raising us. I didn’t know that at the time.”
The singer, who alleged her father was an abusive alcoholic, then explained how she was being negatively affected by both parents while growing up. One case was physical pain, while the other was significant emotional neglect:
“My dad was this volatile alcoholic that hit me, very easy to identify ‘bad guy.’ My mom seemed like the opposite. She was calm, she was soft, she never yelled, obviously never hit me. And I didn’t realize I was being abused in another way at the time.”
She went on to recount how that unstable home environment carried directly into her musical career:
“I didn’t have a safe figure [as a child]. … I was bar singing as an 8-year-old. I was around predators, I had a very scary life. I had a very terrifying life. And I had a life where adults weren’t safe people, being in connection to people wasn’t safe.”
Ugh.
This isn’t the first time Jewel has opened up about her difficult home life growing up. The Family Tree singer — who was born in Utah and ended up being raised in Homer, Alaska — previously dissected her difficult childhood in her 2016 memoir Never Broken.
Related: Pastor Robbed Of $1 Million In Jewelry During Sermon Recreates Event
Referencing that memoir during this week’s interview, Jewel was surprisingly conciliatory about the effect her unstable younger days had on the rest of her life:
“I think that anybody that reads the book won’t consider this a salacious book, but it is incredibly forthright. … My dad grew up in an abusive household. My dad became abusive. What are cycles of abuse and what kinds of conversations can we have in America about emotional patterns?”
It’s a very good question… Still, that embezzlement detail. What a terrible thing to go through!
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[Image via Adriana M. Barraza/WENN]
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