Selena Gomez forcefully responds to fraud lawsuit against her mental health brand

All of this was laid out in a fairly brutal September 2025 article in The Cut, which talked to several anonymous former Wondermind employees about the not-especially-pleasant-sounding experience of working for Teefey, who the article portrayed as unwell, disorganized, and generally not up to the strain of running a company alone. (Pierson, founder of The Newsette—and the subject of her own takedown article in Forbes last year—exited Wondermind a year after its 2021 founding, reportedly after conflict with Teefey.) The lawsuit says investors got seriously worried about getting their money back when Forbes ran a report back in May 2025 that the company had failed to pay its employees; Gomez reportedly stepped in to cover the debts.

(Meanwhile, if you’re wondering what Wondermind—which bills itself as “The World’s First Mental Fitness Ecosystem—actually does or makes, the answer is: Not very much, as far as we can tell. The site has run a blog, which has only intermittently been updated in recent years, and ran two short-lived podcasts in the past. But plans for snack offerings, a docuseries about Venus Williams, an app, and film projects have all failed to materialize. Many of the staffers quoted in The Cut article noted that Teefey—whose biggest professional success was pretty objectively the period where she served as Gomez’s manager in the early years of her career, before being fired by her daughter in 2014—was good at suggesting projects, but not at actually bringing them to fruition.)

Gomez, like we said, sounds pretty angry to be getting her name and brand dragged through the mud with all this. Per People, her legal team put out a statement this weekend, stating that “The allegations that Selena Gomez engaged in any way whatsoever in any purported ‘fraud’ or other wrongdoing are completely meritless, both factually and legally. We will vigorously defend these false allegations and indeed are filing a motion to dismiss the baseless claims against her.” Teefey and Pierson, both named as co-defendants, haven’t made public statements as of yet.