Wall Street Journal<\/a>\u00a0what Thompson allegedly said to her during a trip to British\u00a0Columbia.\u00a0<\/p>\nWhile Richardson said she did not accept the romantic invitation, Thomson claimed this awkward exchange never happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘This is all false,’ a spokesperson for Thomson bluntly told the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thomson’s friend also told the outlet that when he asked her if she was interested in Richardson, she replied: ‘No, she’s my friend.’<\/p>\n
Regardless, Richardson and Thomson decided to form a COVID pod – a small group to socialize with safely during the pandemic – the following year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But with the pandemic came financial troubles for Richardson, who was working as a development executive at Insurgent Media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While she had previously been well-off, she suddenly found herself strapped for cash and needing a new source of income.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She sought out guidance from celebrity psychic\u00a0Michelle Whitedove and subscribed to her $25 per month newsletter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Richardson](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/101502801-15029475-Richardson_said_she_often_visited_Thomson_s_Bel_Air_mansion_pict-a-4_175604835606.jpeg\")
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Richardson said she often visited Thomson’s Bel Air mansion (pictured), which she sold for $27 million in 2023, to cook Sunday dinners with the heiress’ daughter<\/p>\n
Whitedove, who passed away in 2022 at 54 years old, was a well-known psychic and medium who was a self-proclaimed ‘expert futurist,’ according to her Instagram bio.<\/p>\n
In 2021, she made a prediction that caught Richardson’s attention – the rise of a cryptocurrency called Persistence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Persistence, this is another dark horse that\u2019s going to come up on everybody and be a big dog. Get it and sit on it, which is what I would tell myself,’ Whitedove wrote at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From April to May of 2021, the Persistence coin, called\u00a0XPRT, went from being valued at $3 each to $13 each.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richardson thought this was a promising trend and alerted her wealthy then-best friend, who had allegedly been cruel to her about her dwindling finances.<\/p>\n
‘Taylor has been borderline cruel to me consistently, throwing barbs my way if I speak and making sure I know that my lack of wealth and status makes me uninteresting (literally),’ Richardson wrote to a healer in 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thomson then took Richardson’s proposition to her own spiritual advisor, astrologer\u00a0Robert Sabella.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sabella wrote to Thomson in August 2021 that Bitcoin would plunge in October, but other crypto coins were looking up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"She](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/101504247-15029475-She_sought_out_guidance_from_celebrity_psychic_Michelle_Whitedov-m-8_175604942064.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
She sought out guidance from celebrity psychic Michelle Whitedove (pictured) and subscribed to her $25 per month newsletter<\/p>\n
‘”Theta” has a very high reading on it (a \u201810\u2019). “Persistence” does as well (even higher),’ Sabella wrote in an email to Thomson, who forwarded it to Richardson.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Taylor trusts her own instincts and would use Robert as a sounding board,’ Thomson’s spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘By no means would she make substantial life decisions based on his suggestions.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
With Richardson’s assistance and eagerness to tackle the world of cryptocurrency, Thomson dumped more than $40 million into the coins.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At first, messages between the pair, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, depict Richardson praising Persistence’s early success.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richardson also invested tens of thousands of dollars into the psychic-approved XPRT coin, spending her days slumped over at her computer, watching Thomson’s money and trading for her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richardson, who had no financial background, said it was stressful moving her friend’s assets around. She was not paid for doing so, she said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But according to the lawsuit, Persistence gave Richardson an allegedly undisclosed kickback for recruiting wealthy people, including Thomson, to invest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She allegedly ended up with $783,702 worth of XPRT from Thomson’s investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This ‘kickback’ scheme was allegedly never made clear to Richardson, who was only aware of ‘finder’s fee.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
At its peak, Thomson’s crypto investments – all of which Richardson was single-handedly managing – were worth about $140 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In one written correspondence between the women, Thomson wanted to buy $60 million of the XPRT token.<\/p>\n
![\"Thomson](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/101503277-15029475-image-a-18_1756047465027.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Thomson (pictured) claimed Richardson lost about $80 million of her money through poorly invested crypto\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Are you sure you want 60?!! I will try. Still think you should deversify [sic],’ Richardson responded.<\/p>\n
The same day, Thomson allegedly wrote to her brothers in pursuit of what she believed to be her chunk of her family’s wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the note, she acknowledged she had ‘always been one for riskier investments than the rest of the family,’ and had been intrigued by crypto, according to the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Thomson’s representative told the outlet she never sent this email to her brothers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As she continued investing most of her time – up to 20 hours a day – monitoring Thomson’s finances, Richardson’s mental health started declining from the stressful situation. She turned to alcohol to cope.<\/p>\n
By the end of 2021, Richardson said she was confident Thomson’s investment would skyrocket into the millions despite Persistence’s fluctuating value.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the crypto market soon crashed and the coin essentially became worthless by the middle of 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richardson moved to her childhood home in Monterey County, California and became an Uber driver.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thompson has hired a private investigator to probe Richardson’s crypto management, claiming the former executive recklessly lost $80 million of her money.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The investigative firm,\u00a0Guidepost, told the Wall Street Journal they are working to ‘to recoup the tens of millions of dollars of Ms. Thomson\u2019s money lost under Ms. Richardson\u2019s control.’<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/101504131-15029475-They_had_met_through_a_mutual_friend_film_producer_Beau_St_Clair-a-3_175604835605.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
The women had met through a mutual friend, film producer Beau St. Clair (pictured), who died in 2016 at 64, at her stunning Malibu home<\/p>\n
In 2023, Thomson sued Richardson and Persistence, demanding at least $25 million of the funds she lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richardson then countersued the heiress for $10 million, claiming that Thompson was trying to defame her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She could not afford to keep a lawyer, so she started using ChatGPT to represent herself in court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the midst of the chaos, Richardson relapsed after being nearly two years sober, allegedly texting Thomson: ‘Because of you I have lost everything, and you decided to sue the person who had nothing left to lose.<\/p>\n
‘I loved you more than anything.’<\/p>\n
Thomson has denied all of the accusations, with a spokesperson telling the Daily Mail that Richardson allegedly took their story to the media for personal gain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘After spending years living a lavish lifestyle on Ms. Thomson’s dime, Ms. Richardson has taken her bogus story to the media in an attempt to extract more money from Ms. Thomson — which we know because Ms. Richardson has threatened multiple times she will do just that,’ the spokesperson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The legal wrangling continues.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A billionaire heiress is battling her ex-best friend after an allegedly ill-advised $80 million crypto investment and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[97,59,50,86,31762,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-90123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-dailymail","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uber","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Taylor](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/101502437-15029475-image-a-14_1756047418517.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/101502509-15029475-The_beginning_of_the_end_was_in_2019_when_Richardson_says_she_tu-m-5_175604870011.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n