Mandy IN WONDERLAND

Selena Gomez's mother, Mandy Teefey, helped elevate her daughter from child actor to one of the biggest stars in the world. For her second act, Teefey would run their buzzy mentalhealth start-up, Wondermind. What could go wrong?

- Angelina Chapin

Gomez and Teefey at SXSW in Austin last year.

ON A THURSDAY NIGHT in late September 2023, at close to 11:30, Mandy Teefey, the CEO of mental-health start-up Wondermind, sent a startling series of texts to a group of her employees. Teefey, then 47, had co-founded the company almost two years before with her famous daughter, the actress and pop star Selena Gomez, and a young entrepreneur named Daniella Pierson. The texts were muddled by typos, but the recipients were able to deduce that Teefey was in the L.A. office, a small suite above an art gallery at the corner of Melrose and Harper Avenues in West Hollywood, where she sometimes slept, and that she believed she'd seen an intruder on the security footage.

The first sentence was especially difficult to make out: "There is someone drilling on the day, and the told me to go to sleep on a whisper through the ring. I've called the cops but I'm scared." An employee replied, alarmed, "OMG???" Teefey wrote back, "I'm fucking shaking.

I answered him and said I'm not going anywhere. And he said neither was he." The employee checked the office's Ring cam remotely and said she didn't see anyone. Teefey responded, "I'm watching footage, and I can hear him rustling under." Another staffer, who lived nearby, drove to the building and found an LAPD cruiser parked outside.

(This employee declined to comment.) When the staffer called Teefey from the lot, she thanked him for coming and said, without any explanation, that he could go home. The police made no arrests and noted in their report that there was "no evidence of trespass" at the building.

Teefey did not write again to the group thread that night, and she did not address the incident when they returned to work the next day.