Mixing business and family is not always a good idea and the singer Jewel Kilcher (Payson, Utah, 48 years old) is new proof of this. The four-time Grammy nominee claims her mother, Lenedra Carroll, who was also her manager, took more than $100 million from her estate over the course of her music career. “I really didn’t realize what my mother was until I was in my late thirties. I woke up and realized that she embezzled all my money, ”she confessed this Monday in the podcast Verywell Mind from psychotherapist Amy Morin.
The American singer-songwriter, author of songs like you were meant for me either Foolish games, has sold more than 27 million albums worldwide since he began his career, at the age of 21, in 1995. But, as he explained in the interview, at 34 he discovered that he had a debt of three million dollars. “I realized that my mother had stolen from me, I realized that everything I thought my mother was, was not true. It was a very difficult thing to accept psychologically,” she admitted.
Jewel’s parents divorced when she was an eight-year-old girl, and she and her two older brothers, Shane and Atz, went to live with their Mormon father. “Nobody told me it was because my mom didn’t want to be a mom. She left us, so my father took over raising us. He didn’t know it at the time,” she recalled. Even so, her father, also a musical artist Atz Klicher, did not fare well either and branded him an “abuser”: “He was a volatile alcoholic who hit me, very easy to identify as a ‘bad boy.’ My mom seemed the complete opposite,” she explained. “She was calm, she was soft, she never yelled…Obviously, she never hit me. And I did not realize that she abused me in another way at that time, ”she commented on the alleged embezzlement of her parent.
In 2016, Jewel already assured in her autobiographical book, Never Broken, that his childhood was not easy at all. Furthermore, at that time the singer also released a companion album, Picking up the pieceswhich included songs like My Father’s Daughter(which could be translated as daughter of my father) in duet with Dolly Parton, and Family Tree where he tells how to learn to live with his family’s legacy. “My mother is not a villain,” Jewel considered at that time, seven years ago: “My father is not a villain. People do some things right and some things wrong. and the song family tree It’s about that.”
In the interview on Monday, however, Jewel took the opportunity to criticize that her concerns fell on deaf ears when she went to her mother for support. “Let’s say that when I would show up at her door, she would say things like, ‘Our minds are very powerful and I think you, Jewel, are so powerful that you could sit here and look at this light bulb and turn it off with your mind,” he recounted. . What then seemed to him a show of love, now he attributes it to indifference: “The truth, that meant that my mother did not want to stay there and be with me and she took care of me by making me look at light bulbs. So the appearance of a figure, sometimes, is not what it seems”, the singer was honest, who this January released a duet with Julio Iglesias Jr.
This unhealthy relationship with her parents and her early success have negatively influenced the singer’s mental health, as she herself has stated on more than one occasion, but they have also made her a great activist for the cause. In fact, the artist co-founded the NGO Inspiring Children Foundation (together with businessman and philanthropist Ryan Wolfington) more than 20 years ago with the aim of improving the mental health of young people and, recently, launched her own mental health app, Innerworld, that makes resources accessible through a virtual world. “I didn’t have a confident figure growing up,” Jewel acknowledged in the chat with Morin, “but that’s also why I created our youth foundation, because there’s real hope for kids like that.”