In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m kicking off Wondermind’s “Thanks for Sharing” campaign. Wondermind held a team dinner in West Hollywood, and Selena showed up noticeably drunk, slurring her words, and announcing to the table that she’d be leaving shortly to go have sex. “It was like pulling teeth,” a staffer said.
“We’d have to call her publicist four times.” Many employees believe the scene was more grim, with Mandy treating her office space as her drug den. Either you’re crazy or you’re normal. Hey everyone, and welcome back to Scandalous Media. It’s Alana. The Cut dropped an article titled “What Happened at Wondermind,” which takes a deep dive into how Selena Gomez and Mandy Teefey turned their mental health journeys into a buzzy startup, and how it all fell apart behind the scenes.
Wondermind was supposed to be a mental health safe place. Instead, former staff say it became a source of chaos, instability, and panic behind the scenes. According to The Cut, employees allege that Selena Gomez was largely absent, disengaged, and unwilling to step in as the company unraveled, even as her mother, Mandy Teefey, struggled to keep things afloat.
Staff described a workplace marked by missed paychecks, emotional violation, angry outbursts, and mounting fear, with some saying that the lack of leadership and business instability triggered serious anxiety and panic attacks. What’s emerging now is a story not just about a failed startup, but about what happens when a brand built on mental health allegedly neglects the people holding it together.
Selena has dedicated a large portion of her career to talking about mental health. She has been incorporating the topic in interviews, in campaigns for Rare Beauty, and eventually joined her mom, Mandy, in creating the mental health startup titled Wondermind. Everything appeared to be fine on the surface until reports revealed that Wondermind had laid off % of its staff and was struggling to pay employees on time with claims that Mandy even took out a loan against her home to cover payroll.
This turn of events confused everyone online who has been fed the story that Selena is a billionaire who cares about mental health, but according to the Wondermind staff, Selena enabled her mother’s behavior and didn’t care that the fallout would affect the employees the way that it did. Wondermind employees say that it was obvious that Selena didn’t take the company seriously and was often chased down by them to offer some simple promotion to her large-scale platforms.
A lot was happening behind the scenes, and today we’re taking a closer look at what really went down and how things ended up here. Make sure to get comfortable because the Wondermind staff doesn’t hold back in this interview. We’re going in chronological order, so make sure to watch till the end to see Selena’s role in Wondermind unfold.
There will be video chapters, so make sure to follow along. Mandy and Selena co-founded Wondermind and launched the media platform in April with a young entrepreneur named Daniella Pierson. We’ve covered Selena and her mom before because their relationship has been complicated both behind the scenes and in the public eye.
There have been long stretches where they weren’t on good terms and reportedly didn’t speak for months at a time. If you want a deeper dive into their dynamic, be sure to check out the two videos we’ve already done on them. Make sure to give this video a like and subscribe. Make sure to check us out on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Follow us on our social media. And now, without further ado, let’s unpack what happened at Wondermind. Mandy Teefey’s erratic behavior. Mandy Teefey, similar to her daughter Selena Gomez, has had a long battle with mental health struggles and an erratic personality. Mandy was a teen mom who experienced heavy mood swings and was diagnosed with manic episodes during her pregnancy.
Mandy was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which was a misdiagnosis, and she eventually got diagnosed with ADHD. She’s had a very long history of battling depression, having suicidal thoughts, and heavy mood swings. Selena herself has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis she received after experiencing psychosis.
She struggled with extreme mood swings, mania, and severe depression. She has also been very open about having an addictive personality, meaning she could become attached to certain patterns of behavior, whether that’s social media, unhealthy dynamics, or other habits. Because of that, there have been reports over the years suggesting that she struggled with substance abuse.
That’s the background information you’ll need for when we get into this part about the employees of WonderMind saying that they were used to Mandy’s erratic and harsh behavior. On Thursday night in late September , around : p.m., Mandy had sent her employees a string of texts that were confusing to read, showing her panicking over someone breaking into the building of WonderMind.
Mandy was in the LA office that sits in West Hollywood, and it was known by employees that she sometimes slept in there. She sent them a text saying, “There is someone drilling on the day, and they told me to go to sleep on a whisper through the ring. I’ve called the cops, but I’m scared.” An employee who was alarmed replied, “Oh my god.
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” And Mandy wrote back, “I’m shaking. I answered him and said I’m not going anywhere, and he said neither was he.” The employee checks the ring camera from their phone and sees no one there. Mandy responded by saying that she’s watching the footage and can hear him rustling under. This prompts another employee who lives nearby to drive to the building where they find an LAPD cruiser parked outside.
Mandy thanked the employee for coming, and without any explanation as to what was happening, told him he could go home. The police made no arrests and noted in their report that there was no evidence of trespass at the building. The next day at work, Mandy went back to normal and did not address the incident or update the group chat about anything that happened after.
The employees at WonderMind were rattled, but they were not exactly shocked as they were used to behavior like this from their boss. Employees at WonderMind were used to Mandy’s disappearances that lasted days or even weeks and unpredictable angry outbursts. Since the the of the company, Mandy had gone through phases of sleeping in her office, staying in the office for days without bathing, and sometimes she wouldn’t even change her clothes.
When employees started noticing what Mandy was doing, she explained that her overnight stays had to do with the fact that she was too busy to constantly make the drive back and forth miles to her home in Woodland Hills, where she lives with her husband Brian and their preteen daughter Gracie, aka Selena’s little sister.
Former staffers explained to The Cut that they believed Mandy used this office as a refuge where she could get away from the world and her home life. Through the glass walls of her office, employees saw her watching Schitt’s Creek on TV for hours at a time in the middle of a work day, surrounded by takeout boxes and packages from luxury brands.
Sounds like a good time. Mandy’s staycations at the office exhibited unhealthy behavior. She was ordering food multiple times a day, whether that be McDonald’s, Krispy Kreme, or Chinese food, and leaving the takeout boxes as they accumulated, gathering flies. Employees also drew attention to Mandy’s unhealthy shopping habits and said that Mandy nearly filled a nearby room with designer goods.
One former staffer explains, “It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I spent $ on Amazon.’ This would be like $, from Neiman Marcus.” Mandy’s overnight stays and shopping habits weren’t the only weird thing she was doing at the office. Many employees believed the scene was more grim, with Mandy treating her office space as her drug den. Employees believed Mandy was sometimes intoxicated when she spoke to them, and one staff member recalls being in her office when she snorted what they believed was a line of Ritalin.
When this article came out, Mandy was quick to defend herself, saying she didn’t do any drugs at her office, and she never snorted Ritalin. Mandy said she was disappointed that a few disgruntled employees with an axe to grind can spread lies, and was disappointed that the media would amplify their lies. But if you know anything about the media, or Selena Gomez’s long struggle with mental health and drugs, or anything about her mother’s relationship with her daughter, then you’d know that the media didn’t just jump to amplify lies.
What the former employees are saying goes hand in hand with the relationship Mandy has with herself, and more importantly with Selena. When Selena made the executive decision to have her grandfather walk her down the aisle rather than her mother, Selena waited a whole month to break the news to her mom because she knew Mandy would create a problem.
Selena and Mandy clearly have their own struggles both individually and together, and when you work with someone who is struggling with their own mental health or physical health, sometimes what you get is exactly what the employees are describing. To continue with our story, the employee said that a rotation of nurses regularly came by to give Mandy vitamin IV drops.
The Cut notes that this is not uncommon for a wealthy Angelino, but what was uncommon was the fact that often times towards the end of the work day, a second nurse would arrive who employees said was missing some teeth and a little bit erratic. Mandy was receiving liquid Benadryl, which is typically given in medical settings to treat severe allergic reactions.
While clinics commonly offer IV drips like this for seasonal allergies or migraines, the frequency of use for Mandy was unusual. Not only was her use of IV drips unusual, but it’s something that you usually get done at a clinic rather than your workplace office multiple times a day. ; ; Liquid Benadryl can be used as a downer, and in high doses it can cause hallucinations and delirium.
Mandy told staffers she needed the injections to deal with allergies and the aftermath of severe COVID and double pneumonia, which she described as a near-death experience. This is what Mandy reiterated in the media as well. Employees say that after the injections, Mandy would speak slowly and seem drowsy.
They also said that occasionally Gracie would come to the office for sleepovers as well, which worried the staff. ; ; When The Cut asked Mandy about this, she said Gracie only slept over once. The high dose of Benadryl Mandy took explains why she hallucinated the man she claims had entered the building and whispered to her, although Mandy herself rejects the claim that she hallucinated him, even though there was no evidence of an intruder.
To employees at Wondermind, what the company stood for and what was going on behind closed doors seemed to be paradoxical. Wondermind aimed to create mental health content from podcasts and websites to TV shows and films with the goal of destigmatizing mental health and making care more accessible. It seemed like the perfect fit for Selena who has been open about her own struggles.
In she revealed on Instagram live that she’s bipolar, calling the diagnosis a gift that’s empowered her. Selena has also said getting the correct diagnosis explained a lot of her own erratic behavior, which was deemed extremely unpredictable and unstable. During Wondermind’s first year, she released the documentary My Mind and Me giving a raw look at her mental health journey and life with lupus.
Before its release, she told Rolling Stone she checked into treatment facilities four times and admitted she was nervous about sharing her story, but felt it was worth it. Because I have the platform I have, it’s kind of like I’m sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose, she said. Before the documentary’s release, she also admitted to going to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings saying that she’s related to those sharing their stories.
As much as Selena and Mandy intended to help, you can’t run from the fact that these two are not fit to run a mental health startup. For starters, they aren’t even in the right mental space to run a company about mental health. ; ; According to the employees out of who spoke to the cut, they all agreed that the company’s brand, mission, and basic operations were tanked by Selena and Mandy’s personal and family dysfunction, including the denial of Mandy’s instability.
In March , Wondermind failed to pay employees on time. In May, after paychecks failed to go out on schedule once again, the story was leaked to the press. The staff were furious, but nowhere near surprised. One employee said, I will say this with the utmost certainty, no doubt, hesitation in my mind, Selena knew her mother was not well enough to be running that company.
Wondermind staff do put some blame on Selena for being a part of a company that she didn’t actually care for. The start of Wondermind. Selena and her mom are smart business women. They know how to venture off and capitalize on their opportunities. Shared common struggles of finally making it out of the gutter will do that to someone.
Selena has always invested in real estate which increased her net worth and gave her some side money that she could lean on if music and acting weren’t making as much. This was before Rare Beauty. As early as , Mandy established a production company titled Kick to the Curb and bought the rights to the novel Reasons Why and set off to make a deal to produce it as a film for Universal Pictures with Selena as the lead.
Clearly we know that didn’t work out and the novel was later turned into a show. Not starring Selena, but allegedly being executive produced by her. ; ; And I say allegedly because the stars of Reasons Why have shaded Selena’s lack of presence yet huge role in the media. Selena Gomez is on board as an executive producer.
What does that entail? Does she come to set? What’s she doing? I Selena is a very busy lady. Like, let’s not lie. She’s very busy. Um I think you know what when at the point at the time that we were shooting ; ; The point of the story is that Selena and her mom are smart enough not just to rely on Selena’s acting and music to bring in the big bucks.
I mean, think about it. If it wasn’t for Rare Beauty, Selena wouldn’t be able to proudly, yet falsely, claim she’s a billionaire. Before Rare Beauty, Selena’s net worth was estimated to be about $ million in . By July , she was estimated to be worth somewhere between to million dollars.
Some sites such as Bloomberg estimate her net worth to be . billion, but Forbes has clarified that Selena has not reached billionaire status yet and sits somewhere in the million rank. I also feel like it would be smart to mention that this doesn’t mean Selena has million dollars sitting in the bank.
It’s nowhere near that number in cash, same for other celebrities. Net worths are just a total estimate of how much one is worth based on what they own in total, not what they profit from. Selena’s mom having her own production company has opened doors for Selena to produce as well, which we all know in Hollywood is the golden rule.
The reason I’m saying this is because people assumed Mandy and Selena would take care of a company like Wondermind because they were passionate about mental health. And while they had good intentions spreading awareness about it and trying to do something about it, Wondermind wasn’t some passion project. It was just a business opportunity.
; ; And when the people running the business don’t actually care about it, it’s not all that surprising for it to fail. Wondermind started with Mandy, Selena, and Daniella Pierson, a young entrepreneur who owns the Girlboss newsletter, The Nuset, which is a multi-million dollar company. Daniella seemed like the perfect fit for Wondermind.
They launched in April after sitting together for an interview looking like the perfect mental health startup family. They raised $ million in series A funding. Their goal was ambitious, to create a mental health ecosystem offering tools similar to those Mandy experienced at an inpatient facility that cost up to $, a day.
Mandy and Daniella would serve as co-CEOs. Daniella with a background in media and VC would run the New York office focusing on content for the newsletter and website aiming for a sexier, more entertaining take on mental health media. Mandy would lead the LA office developing podcasts, films, and TV shows modeling her vision after Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine.
One staffer said Mandy always compared her intentions to Reese. While Mandy and Daniella each had their roles, Selena would serve as the chief impact officer, an expectedly indeterminate title for a busy celebrity partner. A chief impact officer is basically the person responsible for making sure a company actually delivers on its mission and creates real-world positive outcomes, not just profits.
The cut delivers this line with a tongue-in-cheek tone, basically hinting that Selena wasn’t going to do heavy hands-on work. And this title sounds impressive, but it’s extremely flexible and relies more on influence than anything else. In the beginning, having Selena on board gave the company a safety net.
Her reach is insane, being the most followed woman on Instagram, and her bank account is impressive thanks to Rare Beauty. It didn’t seem like Selena would allow a company with her name on it to fail. And this is what Wondermind employees thought as well, that they could trust Selena and Mandy’s vision.
Although, it seemed like the company was destined to struggle from the beginning. In May , Mandy, Selena, and Daniela presented an image of a happy heart-chosen family. Vulnerable, but healed women on a mission to share the wisdom they found. Selena herself said, “If I’m going to be known for anything, I hope it’s simply for the way I care about people.
” Which is comical, but I’ll spare her and you guys the -minute drag I could go into. But old habits die hard. You want to be known for how you care about people, yet the staff at the company you’re associated with believe you should share blame with your mom for the instability you both brought. I mean, I could honestly keep going.
In that same interview, Mandy got choked up while describing how she had to learn to take better care of Selena during her mental health struggles. This prompted a reaction out of Selena and Daniela to put their hands on Mandy while she talked. How cute. Except that Mandy and Daniela’s relationship was hostile from day one.
A staffer said, “Mandy and Danny didn’t trust each other. Arguments reportedly got so heated between Mandy and Daniela that Mandy’s assistant would turn on a white noise machine just to drown out her yelling. Many staffers felt stuck in the middle, caught in a New York versus LA office divide.
The staff feeling like it was a New York versus LA divide had to do because Mandi and Daniella each needed someone else to blame other than themselves. Daniella reportedly viewed Mandi as one staffer put it as someone unable to deliver on anything she promised. Other workers started to suspect the same thing about Mandi and it was only in the business’s first few months that Mandi started sleeping in her office and spending the work day on the couch.
She planned to host a podcast, allegedly a top priority for her, but she never delivered on it. ; ; Employees say that if Mandi ever thought of Daniella as a real asset, she quickly changed her mind. Staff said that Mandi saw Daniella as an opportunist riding on Selena’s fame. Many employees were not even fond of Daniella, calling her egotistical and pushy, making big decisions on her own whenever she could.
One called her a chaos monster, another compared her to a bullet train, while Mandi, according to staff, would stick her foot in the quicksand and just sink. About a year after Wondermind’s launch, Daniella was no longer with the company. Accounts of what happened vary, but sources close to Wondermind agreed that the two CEOs sought control, and Mandi ultimately came out on top.
Wondermind staff were not all that concerned about Daniella’s sudden leave, with some even relieved. By this time, things seemed to be going well. Wondermind’s finances seemed to be sturdy and the company was valued at a hundred million dollars, making Inc.’s annual list of the fastest growing private companies.
Revenue was coming in from advertising on the newsletter and website, while the podcast, film, and TV production sector hadn’t yet had any real success, Wondermind was hiring more employees. Things seemed to be going well until they weren’t. How Wondermind started falling apart. Wondermind raised five million dollars in Series A funding in for a media plus mental health startup tied to a massive celebrity name, that was seen as strong but not an outrageous amount.
It showed that investors believed in the idea, the brand, and especially the visibility Selena Brock. Series A funding is what tells investors if a company is ready for Series B funding. Series A is usually a company’s first major round of venture capital after its initial seed funding. At this stage, the goal is to start scaling the product or service, hire more staff, and really grow the business.
Investors are essentially betting on whether the company’s business model works and if it has the potential to grow long-term. If it does, that’s when we get into Series B funding. Having $ million in Series A was supposed to give the employees and company enough confidence that they could expect the company to grow.
This means clearly something is working. The reason this is linked to the Wondermind scandal is that Wondermind employees were not expecting chaos or financial strain. At the time, the employees weren’t aware that there was going to be a financial strain because Mandy made it seem like Series B funding was right around the corner.
Mandy was frequently talking to employees about the company’s Series B funding that she believed it was just about to come in. Series B is the type of funding that happens after a company has already raised some money and started proving itself. It’s usually meant for serious growth and expansion of a company. A staffer says, “Mandy was able to keep the facade up that she was getting her hands around things.
Most people pretty much bought into that.” Eventually, the staff became concerned when they realized that Mandy would not be placing Daniella with another co-CEO. Employees felt like Mandy didn’t have enough experience to run the business on her own. Although Mandy has a production company, that production company isn’t a large-scale operation on its own.
It’s operated by two people and has credits on only three projects. A staffer says it would have been great had Mandy decided to hire a real CEO and she took on an adversary role. Mandy had been credited with having big ideas and being creative, but her energy is often scattered, making her someone who talks a big game but doesn’t have the actions to prove it.
Employees noticed that after Danielle’s leave, Mandy became less reliable. She was missing Zoom calls, repeatedly canceling meetings, delaying conversations for months or even a whole year, and she started coming into work less and less, often being completely unreachable. “Mandy would disappear for weeks,” one says. “She wouldn’t respond at all.
” This type of leadership, if you can even call it that, started to affect people’s livelihoods. Employees were left investing their energy, time, and trusting of the vision, only for the company to reach a point where it couldn’t even pay them, ultimately leading to layoffs. And it has nothing to do with the idea itself being unrealistic.
Wondermind had real potential. The problem was that to Mandy and Selena, it seemed more like another project to profit from rather than something they fully cared about. The company needed a CEO who actually knew how to run it, especially once Mandy started noticing cracks in the finances, like the promised series B funding that never came through.
Projects continued to be delayed. For example, there was supposed to be a tennis docuseries Wondermind had signed on to produce with Venus Williams titled Behind the Racquet, which was endlessly stalled. Another example was that Mandy needed to give notes on a script that the company was considering for development at the beginning of , and it took Mandy until to get it done.
Staffers say that when Mandy was around, she seemed desperate to assert control, lashing out if she found out that projects moved forward in her absence. Several staffers said that she would unexpected angry emails and texts and would lose her temper frequently. ; ; An example of that was when Mandy called a staffer in her office and berated them for not responding to work emails while being on vacation.
Mandy said to them that when she sends an email, they need to answer. By the summer of , Mandy no longer pretended she had Wondermind’s finances under control and told the staff bluntly and offhandedly that Wondermind’s financial situation was untenable. According to a staffer, Mandy told them that she and Selena both contributed a total of $ million from their own money and that she was struggling to secure series B funding.
Mandy, in one of her rages, tells the staff, “I’m carrying the entire company. If the company went down, me and Selena will be fine, but none of you will be fine. I’m doing this to make sure you all have jobs.” Selena and her mom really don’t need a DNA test to know they’re both related since outbursts other seem to be a shared family trait.
Mandy, who was unreliable and absent at work, is now upset that she has to rely on Selena’s money just to cover employee payroll, a clear sign she’s not fit to run the company. And at the same time, she’s throwing a guilt trip about having to use her own money saying that if Wondermind goes under, she and Selena will be fine, but the employees won’t.
Classic victim mentality. At the same time, Mandy has the Wondermind employees on a mental goose chase working on new projects that, you guessed it, don’t follow through. In this time frame, she was working on a Wondermind app with an external developer that was supposed to serve as the company’s web content and offer a variety of interactive mental fitness tools that never took off.
By the fall of , Wondermind’s financial status was undeniably dire. Mandy no longer wanted to spend money on marketing, which was the main driver of traffic for the company’s website and newsletter. The LA office managed to produce a successful podcast titled Baggage Drop about healthy emotional habits, but those working on it couldn’t get the $, needed to make a season two.
On top of that, key programs were canceled and subscriptions were cut by Wondermind COO Bhavik Trivedi. This led to several LA staffers resigning. ; ; By the end of , only two of the original seven West Coast employees remained. By March , , Mandy had emailed her employees telling them that they would not be getting paid on time.
They would also be losing their health, dental, and vision insurance. Mandy told the cut that it was one of the worst days of her life, that apparently a deal had fallen through, and she emphasized, as she always did, “Startups are difficult. Nothing is guaranteed.” Even as Mandy is speaking, the reporter could tell she isn’t taking responsibility for her role in Wondermind’s downfall, instead blaming it on how difficult startups are to navigate and how fleeting success can be.
After emailing her employees about not paying them on time, everyone had an all-staff call, where according to employees, Mandy did not accept responsibility for her role at Wondermind. Mandy described the incident as a little hiccup and said that she would have covered their payroll had her business manager not prevented her.
It makes me laugh that she was saying it so reassuringly when in reality it was yet another band-aid being slapped onto their financial problem. She also went on a rant about how confident she is about the series B funding arriving because singer Michael Bublé is going to be an investor. It was only a week later that Mandy went down a rabbit hole with her employees about all these new projects Wondermind would be a part of.
All of them had nothing to do with the company’s vision or the company’s financial situation. Mandy claimed that Wondermind was working with actress Jessica Chastain and the producers of Silver Linings Playbook on a movie, saying the script was already finished. She also mentioned that the company was negotiating with an unnamed partner to launch a snack food, which led to jokes among employees like Laraza pancakes and fruit snacks with just a little bit of Xanax.
Staff say Mandy had been inspired by Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, who were creating a vegan egg, and even suggested the idea of a Cheeto-styled snack infused with a supplement like ashwagandha powder. What does any of this have to do with mental health? You guessed it, nothing. Just another one of Mandy’s delusional rants because remember, the company’s finances weren’t even sorted at this point, and there was still no series B funding.
At the end of April, Wondermind’s paychecks failed to go out again. Mandy held a meeting and according to an audio recording of the conversation, she said that the staff would receive their checks soon and that she’d taken out a loan on her home. When questioned about this, Mandy said that she was just being hyperbolic, that she’s exaggerating mid-convo.
Nothing about Wondermind and the conversations there seemed like it needed more of Mandy’s false emphasis on things and I don’t even think she was exaggerating. I think her representatives only said that so we don’t think what the staff was already thinking. If things were so desperate, why hasn’t billionaire Saint Selena stepped in to bail out the company and her mother? Selena’s absence from Wondermind.
In the early days of Wondermind, staffers noticed that Mandy emphasized that this company was to be independent from Selena’s name and brand. She stressed that this site is not Selena’s site. We don’t want to be like, this is Selena’s brand. From a business standpoint, this made no sense, especially since Selena’s brand was what the company relied on for engagement.
; ; If Rare Beauty was a success and tied down to Selena’s name, why wouldn’t we want the same for Wondermind? Especially because Selena’s role in Wondermind was mainly to promote engagement for the company. Employees think that Mandy’s insistence that this just isn’t Selena’s brand comes from some sort of resentment about being known as her mom to the public eye.
This is where we struggled because one thing you need to know about Selena’s mother is that she had hopes and dreams of becoming a successful actress when she was younger. And when that didn’t play out, she pushed for Selena to become that successful actress instead. So, being resentful because you wanted bigger and better for yourself and you feel like you’ve been downgraded as just as being your famous daughter’s mom makes a lot of sense and gives us a different viewpoint about the relationship which was often cold.
Employees said that that wasn’t enough for Mandy to just be seen in that light. Mandy had said Selena’s fame has made it hard for her to build her own reputation as a producer with the momager label still following her, or as she calls it, nepo parent. She shared a story about pitching a new Wondermind platform with a male colleague only for the investor to credit him for the presentation and remark to her, “Oh, and you gave birth.
” Mandy said she used Selena’s influence sparingly and very intentionally, believing Wondermind wasn’t yet stable enough for her daughter’s fame to be utilized at its best capacity, whatever that means. She didn’t want to rely heavily on Selena’s fame to promote or grow Wondermind, and this was a deliberate choice.
Multiple former employees said that they saw Mandy repeatedly turn down opportunities with companies and investors who were interested in Wondermind specifically because of Selena. Some employees viewed her rejection of these deals as a personal attack on Mandy rather than a business decision, personally suggesting that Mandy found the interest in Selena to be offensive.
One staffer claimed that the company even walked away from a potential project with Mattel because the company wanted Selena included as a producer. Mandy claims she never rejected any of these deals. However, Wondermind staffers had a different issue with Selena, and it wasn’t just her mom refusing to use her brand to grow the company, it was the fact that Selena herself wasn’t particularly present.
It was rare for staffers to see Selena and Mandy interact at the Wondermind office, and when they did interact together, their relationship seemed strained and uncomfortable. “I can tell there’s a distance between the two of them, a lot of hurt,” one says. “They don’t interact like typical mother and daughter. They interact like two women who put up with each other, not even two co-workers.
The air was like cold between them.” Staffers said that at best, Selena was uninterested in the company. Many of them believed that Wondermind was a way for Selena to keep Mandy out of her orbit. Selena did not often visit the Wondermind office in LA, and when she did, she spent most of her time talking to her mother behind closed doors.
She was not treating the staff or the company as an extension of herself whatsoever. The staffers say she rarely mentioned Wondermind in public appearances, and any social media posts promoting the company were a result of her team pushing her hard to do so. “It was like pulling teeth,” a staffer said.
“We’d have to call her publicist four times.” Damn. Imagine having to beg the celebrity whose name is literally on the company you work for to pretend to care and post something just to drive engagement. Yet, ask her to retell you the story of how Hailey Bieber stole her life, and she’d do a one-woman Broadway show for free on Instagram live.
Also, the thing about Selena that makes her an interesting person, to say the least, is that she is non-stop promoting Rare Beauty and consistently tying in the idea that her liquid blush is somehow linked to mental health. But yet, when it’s time to talk about an actual mental health startup that she is allegedly on the board with with her mom, and it’s crickets.
Not only is it crickets, but it’s some poor employee needing to chase her down by contacting her publicist four different times. You’d think with how often Selena uses Instagram as a personal therapy session, she’d be more than willing to use that same platform to promote accessible mental health tools.
Just like Wondermind’s finances were fleeting, Selena’s ability to stay professional and sober were also fleeting. According to a staffer, in June , Wondermind held a team dinner in West Hollywood, and Selena showed up noticeably drunk, slurring her words, and announcing to the table that she’d be leaving shortly to go have sex.
Wondermind staffer said that it seemed obvious that Selena didn’t take the company or her mother seriously. My hope is to genuinely be an avenue, be a safe space, um, an informed, trustworthy place that people can lean on, and we’re not in competition with anyone. ; Selena and her mother’s relationship seemed to be more strained behind closed doors, contrasting the narrative that they had in the public eye about how they’re both healed and closer than ever.
The staff members couldn’t believe that Selena did not step in to help her mother after seeing the state Mandy was in. Multiple staff members have said that if they saw their mother struggling that much and in the same state as Mandy, they would have stepped in. Selena knew Mandy was struggling to function because staffers recalled seeing Selena asking her mom in a concerned tone, “How long have you been here? Have you gone home?” after one of Mandy’s in-office sleepovers.
The staff recalls that Selena has arrived at the office on multiple occasions when Mandy was using it as a home. Selena once found her mother lying on the couch covered in blankets, her hair must, and wearing these slippers and sweatsuit that she’s had on for days. “If I had seen my mom in that state,” one employee says, “I would have intervened.
I would say, ‘This isn’t right.'” “Tiffy is culpable,” the staffer says, “responsible for Wondermind’s failures and their fallout. But Selena, in my opinion, is just as culpable.” The majority of the staff have said they believe Selena knew her mother did not have the capacity to run the company and she should share the blame for the effects on their lives.
“It’s messed up to think that Selena and her mom could easily play with the lives of those they have employed. If you’re going to start a company with the advantage that you’re an A-list celebrity, then you shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t your fault when it all came crashing down.” Some of the former employees at Wondermind have developed new or worsened the panic disorders and depression that they attribute to both Mandy’s behavior and the business’s instability.
One member did note that they had real empathy for Selena after a harsh lecture from Mandy thinking, “Wow, if she’s talking to me like this, what does she say to her own daughter?” While employees felt that Mandy led them on, some felt compassion for her saying, “She did lead us on, but it wasn’t malicious.
There will always be people who are dangerously unstable. What’s worse is somebody like Selena who sees it firsthand and doesn’t do anything.” On May th, Forbes published a report on the funding crisis at Wondermind. Two days later, nine of the people employed at the company were laid off in meetings with the COO.
The COO had told the staffers that he’d been pushing for Mandy to downsize for the last couple of years. Even after Forbes published the report, Mandy told The Cut she was optimistic and that Wondermind’s app was ready to go. She described it as a community style platform with mental fitness tools that were medically guided.
One feature she kept highlighting was called after hours, a digital space open from midnight to : a.m. when she said most people are most vulnerable, filled with games and therapeutic style content so users wouldn’t feel alone. The app also included things like an interactive journal that would flag negative self-talk, though it wasn’t meant to replace actual therapy.
She also wanted to launch some sort of edible product that would involve somatic experiencing that would dissolve and fizzle like an Alka-Seltzer. The idea of Wondermind had a lot of potential and I think the idea of an after hours app is promising. Unfortunately, Mandy and Selena were both not fit enough to run a company like this.
Selena, who doesn’t care all that much, and Mandy, who suffers with her own mental health and random outbursts. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Make sure to give us your thoughts down below about what else you think happened at Wondermind and what does this mean for the future of the company? Do you guys think that Mandy and Selena will be able to keep the company and rebrand into something more reliable or is Wondermind going to fizzle out just like that Alka-Seltzer dupe Mandy wanted to market? Make sure to give this video a like and
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