Gomez Says She Never Ran the Wondermind Investors Backed

Selena Gomez asked a Delaware federal judge on Aug. 26 to drop her from a securities fraud suit over Wondermind, the mental health company she co-founded. Two investor vehicles say they put nearly $1.2 million into the startup in 2022 after being told she would help build and sell it. Her lawyers now say she never managed the company at all.

That gap is the whole case. The 2022 pitch sold her as head of marketing. The motion treats that same distance as proof she could not have defrauded anyone.

Gomez Was Sold as Head of Marketing

Wondermind Global Inc. went public as a media project in November 2021, with Gomez, her mother Mandy Teefey, and newsletter founder Daniella Pierson as co-founders. Gomez had already talked openly about bipolar disorder and about wanting a daily place where people did not feel alone. Pierson, in the launch video, compared the mind to a muscle that needs work every day, and the company promised daily mental fitness tools online plus a journal and a podcast.

By the summer of 2022 the pitch had hardened into a stock sale. The 48-page Delaware federal complaint says the company, through the three founders, told the plaintiffs three things that were false.

THE 2022 PITCH THE SUIT CALLS FALSE

• Gomez’s job: She would be actively building the company as its head of marketing, with a brand the complaint calls unmatched on social media.
• Pierson’s record: She was a $200 million executive whose earlier businesses made $40 million a year and who had already locked employer deals with JPMorgan and Fidelity.
• The product slate: Ad deals, celebrity cover stories, and a “groundbreaking” app were already underway.

Those claims, the investors say, were the reason they bought Series A preferred stock. Gomez, the complaint adds, “purported to sign a contract obligating her to perform and then ignored it.” Her title on company materials was co-founder and Chief Impact Officer, and the filing says she still listed the CIO role on LinkedIn. It also puts her stake at about 16%.

Five Names Behind the $1.2 Million

The plaintiffs are not fan clubs. They are two special-purpose vehicles that closed in May and June 2022, buying preferred shares while Wondermind was showing a pro forma cap table with a $95 million pre-money value, a $5 million raise, and a $100 million post-money value. The complaint says Gomez, Teefey, and Pierson together controlled about 90% of the shares, and that earlier backers had already put in about $12 million.

Funding notices that August said Serena Ventures led the $5 million round. Brent Saunders, a former Allergan chief, is both in those notices and inside one of the plaintiff LLCs.

WHO PUT IN THE CASH

Together that is $1.175 million, the figure the complaint rounds to nearly $1.2 million. SRS 44 is a Florida LLC. Bespoke is a Delaware LLC with its principal place of business in Florida. Wondermind Global Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in New York. The stock purchase agreement sends fights to Delaware court and Delaware law, which is why the case sits in Wilmington as 1:26-cv-01028, filed Aug. 13, 2026, with a jury demand.

What the Delaware Complaint Alleges

The investors say they were not told, for more than three years, that the partnerships did not exist, that the app was not built, and that the company was coming apart. They say they learned the scale of the mess from a Sept. 3, 2025 article, not from the board. Until then, they say, the limited updates they did get still described a company that was doing well.

The partnerships did not exist. The initiatives never materialized. The app was never built. And for three years, while the Company quietly collapsed around them, not one of its founders, officers, or directors said a word to the investors whose money was funding the collapse.

Wondermind SRS 44, LLC and Bespoke Wondermind SPV I, LLC, complaint, U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware

The filing points to a Dec. 8, 2022 note and a March 9, 2025 note as examples of upbeat messages sent while, in the investors’ telling, the business was not thriving. Pierson left in January 2023. The plaintiffs say they thought at the time that she had walked out on her own. After a 2025 investigation into her newsletter company, The Newsette, they asked Teefey what was going on. The complaint says Teefey then told them Pierson had taken investor money, including their money, for a personal lifestyle that included rent on a New York apartment the filing puts at $60,000 a month.

Pierson is the only defendant also hit with conversion and unjust enrichment counts, plus a separate securities claim tied to what she allegedly said about The Newsette and about Wondermind’s path. The company itself faces a breach of contract count under the stock purchase agreement. All four defendants face federal securities fraud under Rule 10b-5, plus common-law fraud. The plaintiffs want rescission, meaning the stock sales would be undone and the cash returned. They also ask for damages, interest, and fees.

The Motion That Cuts Her Loose

Two weeks after the filing, litigator Mathew S. Rosengart asked the court to throw Gomez out of the case. The motion, dated Aug. 26, calls the claims against her vague, generalized, and contradictory. It says she could not have engaged in any fraud, is not liable, and “as a matter of law, must be dismissed from this lawsuit.”

Rosengart writes that Gomez agreed to support her mother, invested, and holds a minority stake, but “never agreed to and did not manage the Company.” Management, the motion says, sat with Teefey and Pierson as co-CEOs and board members. Wondermind kept Gomez as a consultant and gave her the CIO title. She did not hold a full-time executive job, the motion says, and she was not listed as a key employee in the stock purchase agreement. One of the few notes the complaint ties to her is a December 2022 email from Pierson that copied Gomez. Her lawyers say there is no claim she knew anything in that email was false, and they say she did not even speak with the plaintiffs or handle the offering.

In a statement issued with the papers, Rosengart said the plaintiffs “never should have dragged Selena Gomez into this case,” called the claims meritless if not frivolous, and said the firm is looking at sanctions, including under Rule 11. The motion asks that every count against her be dismissed with prejudice. The judge has not ruled.

If that account of her role is right, it helps her in court. It also restates the thing the buyers say they were not told in 2022: the famous co-founder was not going to run marketing. The investors named Gomez while targeting operators is already the shape of the file, and her motion leans into that split on purpose.

Missed Paychecks Reached Staff First

A candor brand is a hard product to sell if the people inside it are the last to hear bad news. Former staff in the September 2025 account the complaint relies on described a West Hollywood office above an art gallery at Melrose and Harper where Teefey sometimes slept, ordered delivery through the day, and, some said, seemed intoxicated. In late September 2023 she texted employees about an intruder on the Ring camera. Police found no trespass.

Pay was the part that left the building. Staff in that account said Wondermind missed payroll in March 2025 and missed it again in May. One former employee said Gomez knew her mother was not well enough to run the company. Those are staff claims, not findings. They are also the first hard signal many outsiders got that the $100 million paper value had not turned into a working payroll.

FROM LAUNCH TO THE MOTION

1. November 22, 2021: Gomez, Teefey, and Pierson announce Wondermind as a mental health media company set to launch the next year.
2. May and June 2022: SRS 44 and Bespoke buy Series A preferred stock for $425,000 and $750,000.
3. August 2022: Wondermind is presented as a $5 million raise at a $100 million post-money value.
4. January 2023: Pierson leaves. The plaintiffs say they then thought the exit was voluntary.
5. March and May 2025: Staff say paychecks fail. A September 3 article then lays out the office fights and the stalled app.
6. November 2025: The investors send a rescission notice and ask for their money back.
7. April 2026: The complaint says Teefey emailed that she “thought we had returned your investment” when nothing had come back, and that she had pointed to an escrow account that did not exist.
8. August 13, 2026: The suit is filed. On August 26, Gomez moves to dismiss.

The escrow story is the detail that turns a sour investment into a fraud theory about delay. The complaint says Teefey told Andrew Resnick, a Bespoke member, to hold off on suing because an escrow account would repay them, then went quiet when he asked for details. “In short, there was no escrow account,” the filing says.

Pierson Denies Taking Investor Money

Pierson’s office has denied the personal-spend claims in plain terms. “Daniella categorically denies the allegations against her and welcomes the opportunity to present concrete documentation and financial records that establish the facts,” the statement said. “To be clear, she has never used investor funds for personal expenses. Quite the opposite: Daniella invested her own money into the business and did not draw a salary from the company.”

That denial sits next to a separate fight about The Newsette, the daily culture newsletter she founded before Wondermind. The complaint says she showed the Wondermind buyers a track record of about 1.3 million subscribers and a business worth more than $200 million, figures later challenged in 2025 reporting that compared her public claims with internal counts. Those Newsette numbers matter here only because the complaint says they were part of why the Wondermind buyers trusted the operator in the room.

Teefey has not issued a public response to the dismissal papers that matches Gomez’s filing. Wondermind itself has not posted a rebuttal of the cap-table claims. The company did ship some of what it sold in 2021. It ran a site with articles and worksheets, a newsletter, and two podcasts. The app that was supposed to be the centerpiece, including a late-night “After Hours” room Teefey later described as ready to go, did not launch. Celebrity cover interviews did appear early, including Camila Cabello speaking with Gomez, but the complaint treats the broader ad-and-app machine as vapor.

The Intent Question the Judge Must Answer

A bad outcome is not securities fraud. Federal law is narrower than a failed startup story, and the investors have to clear that bar even if every product missed. untrue statement of a material fact is the core of Rule 10b-5, along with an omission that makes a statement misleading, used in connection with the purchase or sale of a security. They also have to show they relied on the statement, that it was material, and that the speakers acted with wrongful intent, not just hope or sloppy forecasts.

Gomez’s motion is built for that last piece. If she did not talk to the buyers, did not run the offering, and did not manage the company, her lawyers will argue, she cannot have intended to mislead anyone about JPMorgan, Fidelity, or an app. The complaint answers with control-person language: it says that at all relevant times she had the power to influence Wondermind’s statements and did so, as a co-founder, CIO, and large holder. Those two versions of her job cannot both be fully true. The court will have to pick which one the 2022 papers and the later emails actually support.

This was not a raise aimed at first-time angels. Saunders is a longtime drug-company executive. The 2022 notices named a Williams-led fund as lead. People who write those checks know a celebrity title can be a marketing line. The suit still has to prove the line was a lie they were entitled to trust, and that silence after 2022 was concealment rather than a private company going quiet. Naming Gomez makes the caption travel. It does not move the scienter needle by itself.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The filing: The Aug. 13 complaint in Delaware seeks rescission or damages over $425,000 and $750,000 in Series A stock, plus other counts against Pierson.
• The motion: Gomez’s Aug. 26 papers ask that she be dropped with prejudice and raise Rule 11 sanctions.
• The product gap: A site, newsletter, and podcasts existed. The complaint and later staff accounts agree the app did not ship.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Fraud intent: No court has found that any founder made a false statement with wrongful intent.
• The escrow: Teefey’s alleged repayment account is a claim in the complaint, not a bank record in the public file.
• Personal spending: Pierson denies using investor cash for herself and says she put her own money in and took no salary.

Wondermind sold the idea that talking is healthy and that hiding pain is the problem. The buyers now say the people who took their checks went quiet for three years, and that when money was supposed to come back, the account was a story. Gomez’s answer is that she was never the person with the keys. The next hearing will test which of those sentences the 2022 documents will bear.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a pending civil case, and it is for information only. It is not legal advice, investment advice, or a view on whether any party committed fraud or should buy, hold, or sell any security. Readers who have a stake in Wondermind, a similar private round, or a related dispute should consult a licensed securities lawyer or a qualified financial adviser before taking any action. Figures, job titles, and case status reflect the complaint, the Aug. 26 motion, and public statements as of Sept. 2, 2026, and all of those can change with the next filing.