Chapter 1: What complexities arise in the mother-daughter relationship of Selena Gomez and Mandy Teefey?
Anyone who has a mother probably knows that that relationship with your mother can be complicated. But what happens when both mother and daughter struggle with mental health, and one of them is one of the most famous people in the world, and the other isn't?
Add in trying to make a business out of mental health, and you've got the story of Wondermind, Selena Gomez's ill-fated and little-known mental health startup. Today, we're talking about Disney star-turned-beauty mogul Selena Gomez and her mom, Mandy Teefey. In 2021, Selena and Mandy co-founded Wondermind, a startup that aimed to destigmatize mental health and democratize its care.
But what actually happened at Wondermind was very different. Selena's mom, Mandy Tiffey, was Wondermind's CEO, and an erratic one at that. In many ways, Wondermind's unraveling echoes some of the epic startup downfalls of the last decade plus, such as Theranos or WeWork. But it's also much more personal than those. It's about child stardom and mental health, and what we really owe those we love.
Mandy Teefy was a teen mom. She gave birth to Selena when she was just 16 years old. The pair lived in a rough neighborhood in a small town in Texas, where Mandy struggled to make ends meet as a single mom. Here's Selena talking about Mandy.
She was so young, still in school, and eventually tried every job you could possibly imagine. She said, this is what we're going through, but I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to give up. I'm going to make life better than this. But making life better would come at a cost.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is Infamous. I'm Natalie Robomed. With us today is Angelina Chapin, a features writer for The Cut, who wrote a fantastic story for The Cut titled What Happened at Wondermind. Angelina, welcome to the show.
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Chapter 2: How did Wondermind aim to change the conversation around mental health?
Hi, Natalie. Thanks so much for having me. I think let's start by just talking a little bit about who Selena Gomez is. Where did she come from?
Her mom was actually trying to be an actress as well. And so she would bring Selena to local theater productions. And Selena said, Mom, I want to be an actress, but I want to be a film actress. Mandy supported this dream. She really gets her big break when she's seven and she beats out more than a thousand other kids to land a role on Barney. I was seven years old when I got my first job.
I was proud because I got to go escape my life and be in Barneyland and just play and sing. I don't know, I just fell in love with these escape things.
And little known fact, her co-star was Demi Lovato. So they obviously both went on to become very famous. And Mandy sort of started to become her stage mom at that point, like shuffling her to and from the set. And then there was a period of time where she was trying to get another gig when Barney ended and she was auditioning, doing lots of pilots for the Disney Channel.
But her next big break really comes about five years later when she lands the lead role in Wizards of Waverly, which was this Disney Channel...
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Selena and Mandy face while co-founding Wondermind?
series where she played a teenage wizard from a family of wizards. That's what really put her on the map more than anything. And she moved to L.A. and became super famous, basically, when she started dating Justin Bieber.
So she was a Disney kid, but not sexed up like Britney Spears.
No, very wholesome. She was more playing... Honestly, age-appropriate roles. Like, she was a little kid in Barney. She was a teenager roughly when she was a teenager on Wizards of Waverly. So she wasn't really positioned as this song-and-dance young little virgin tart. She was just kind of allowed to be goofy and fun, and they weren't putting, like, fake eyelashes on her when she was five.
I watched her documentary, My Mind and Me, last night. And even in that, from footage when she's 24, she looks at least five years younger. I mean, she just looks very young to me.
She's very cherubic. She's got, you know, she's got the apple cheeks. And yeah, she does look young. It would be weird to sex her up in the way they did Britney. I don't know if they could pull that off.
She really has that heart-shaped face. I mean, her face is, when you say heart-shaped face, there's nobody with a more heart-shaped face.
It's her. It's her. She's in the dictionary for heart-shaped face, 100%.
I interviewed Justin Bieber for the cover of Rolling Stone. It was his first cover.
What year was that, Vanessa?
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Chapter 4: How did Mandy Teefey's past influence her role in Selena's career?
He's becoming this bad boy and she just really doesn't have that reputation. So I think there was a sense from Mandy's perspective of she's head over heels in love. with this bad influence and he's kind of ruining my daughter's life, but she's so in love with him that nothing can be done.
But at this point, her mom and she are close and her mom's her momager and everything's all good or not so much?
Yes, they're very close at this point. Mandy becomes her momager. She's got a stepdad at this point. The stepdad moves with Mandy. They're sort of her team. And, you know, if you read media reports at that time, Selina will say she was thankful for her mom, like she kept her out of trouble. She wouldn't let her go to the after parties where whatever nefarious behavior was happening.
She sort of talks about her as this protective force who, at least from the outside, it sounds like she has some appreciation for.
But I think oftentimes when a relationship is so close between mother and daughter, when the daughter tries to kind of strike out on her own and gain independence, that can cause some tension. And at least from the outside, that seems to me what happened here, because in 2014, Selena went ahead and she fired her mother and stepfather.
And in the documentary, Mandy said that she learned news that she was fired from TMZ. But she told you that was she told you something else.
She told me something different. She said, Oh, it was actually a series of conversations. And I knew about it. And actually, you know, I was more worried about her because she wouldn't have this protective field around her anymore. And she didn't really realize how much I did for her. But I think we can take that with a grain of salt.
I mean, as Selena became older and more powerful, and honestly probably had other people who were much better suited to manage her, much more savvy, much more connected, she's going, why is my mom here? Like, I don't want to be hanging out with my mom. I'm in my early 20s. Like, this is not fun. And who knows the psychodrama that was happening.
But I think the main takeaway I had from the reporting was just... Mandy was very controlling and Selena just didn't. She was too famous to need to put up with that, frankly.
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Chapter 5: What led to the estrangement between Selena Gomez and her mother?
And then you have Mandy come in a meeting being like, hey guys, so we're doing something with Jessica Chastain and we're going to roll out this snack that's going to be like Cheetos with ashwagandha powder. And we're going to put lights in Central Park for Mental Health Day. And they're going, with what money? We're not even working because there's nothing even to do.
So people did have empathy for Mandy, but I think she squandered a lot of her goodwill, you know, whether it was conscious or subconscious delusion by just failing to admit everything. This project is not going well.
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I just want to go back to Selena and her presence in this whole thing, because it really strikes me that employee kind of saying to you that she should have stepped in. It kind of makes me think, well, without sounding too harsh, that employee probably doesn't have a mom who was their momager who put so much. You have to imagine pressure and exerted so much control over her.
Perhaps if they'd had a different relationship and if she'd been a different mom, then Selena may have stepped in. But it's kind of like putting all the responsibility on Selena doesn't seem particularly fair to me. And also, I also wonder how much she actually knew about what was going on at the company.
Yeah, she's definitely not in the books looking at the dollar amounts. I think that was never going to be her level of involvement. I think she probably did have a good sense that her mom was struggling mentally, and it seems like she saw that with her own eyes. But yeah, to your point, Natalie, I think...
You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't love a person who has a serious mental illness. And it's really complicated. If that's what's going on with Mandy, again, we don't know. I'm just going off of the reporting and the behavior. It seems like she's working through something. She's had previous diagnoses. Something's going on. It's really tough. And obviously Selena is bipolar.
So she's got her own mental health issues. So I think what I liked wrestling with in this piece is like, where does personal responsibility lie? What are you supposed to do for someone you love who is struggling? Maybe you don't install them as a CEO, but are you really...
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