Her earnings were funnelled into several trusts, one of which was to safeguard assets Amorosi hoped would someday be her nest egg. Her mother and then stepfather were directors.
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In 2009, Amorosi released her fourth album and had another smash hit – a few years later she moved to the US and bought an impressive horse property in California with a loan for $1.2 million.
But the singer started hearing warning bells when she was told by her mother that she couldn’t afford to stay there and might have to sell up.
“I wasn’t happy, because it just didn’t make any sense, and then that’s when the questions started to rise.”
Questions the singer says would ultimately create “a shitstorm among the family behind closed doors”.
Amorosi was born in 1981 to Frank Amorosi and Joyleen Robinson, but when she was a child her parents separated.
The singer is now preparing for another tour.Credit: Vanessa Amorosi
In the Supreme Court of Victoria in October 2023, Vanessa hinted at the violence she endured at the hands of her father as a young child – but now she has revealed how that experience forged an unbreakable bond with her mother, who is also a domestic violence survivor.
Through tears she disclosed how the trauma of those early years didn’t stop when her father left, but instead created “a weirdness” in the household dynamics and a paranoia about trusting anyone outside family.
“Wanting to keep people out … creating this barrier that everybody is the enemy, you know? I’ve been raised where, when I became successful, is to not trust anybody. You know, everybody’s out to get you, your friends, your boyfriend, anybody. All of them out to get you … they don’t want you, they want what you have.”
There is no suggestion of misappropriation or mismanagement of the trusts, but Amorosi said when she began questioning her mother about money and the family home, it was seen as the ultimate betrayal of trust.
Looking back at some of her media coverage.Credit: 60 Minutes
“So once I started asking these questions, I didn’t know the severity, but I knew that questioning and asking those hard questions would create emotions and create this massive split.”
In court, Amorosi sued her mother for the family home. But her mother claimed Vanessa had wanted to give her the house and she’d refused.
Joyleen argued they had struck a deal in 2001 around the kitchen table, where Joyleen could repay Amorosi the original purchase price and own the house outright.
Joyleen argued that she had honoured that deal when she sold a property she owned and gave her daughter more than $700,000 to help pay the spiralling debt on her US home.
In August 2025, the court found no evidence the pact existed and described Joyleen’s evidence around the alleged agreement as “vague, changeable and inconsistent”.
It ruled the Boundary Road home belonged to Vanessa. But it also ordered Amorosi to pay back her mother the money she had given her from the sale of her own house, plus interest.
Despite her best efforts, Amorosi couldn’t hold on to her LA home and was forced to downsize to another property in the US – but said she was now “clean” of any debt.
The animosity didn’t cease in the courtroom.
In April this year, Joyleen did an interview with A Current Affair and said her daughter changed after she suffered “a brain aneurysm” and had “to have all this medication”.
Amorosi vehemently denies this as “a straight-up lie”.
“Do you know how angry that makes me when I listen to this person speak in front of a whole country, taking away my credibility that I’ve lost my mind, or someone got in my ear that I’m so easily manipulated or stupid?”
Since the court case, Amorosi has been preparing for a comeback tour in Australia. She has been campaigning for legislative change to allow 15 per cent of a performer’s earnings to be automatically locked away in an untouchable trust until they turn 18 or even 25.
The singer believes if a law like this existed it could have stopped the rift in the once-close family.
But when asked whether the bond with her mother can be repaired, the singer is less optimistic.
“You know how people say, like, a mother’s love is unconditional? Mine comes with conditions. And that’s the only way I can make it simple.”