By Maverick
Welcome to Part 4 of this series about the latest docuseries. Tina also revealed that there was no money at Selena’s boutiques to pay payroll and the Selena Etc. boutiques were undergoing financial troubles due to salaries being too high. There also wasn’t a sufficient number of customers to generate the revenue to continue paying these high salaries. According to Yolanda, she was brought in to help Selena get her business back on track, as they were already tanking according to some records that Tina showed from the summer of 1994.
Yolanda said she and Selena went to Nations Bank, and the President of the bank told Selena that her businesses are crumbling, creditors were calling him, paychecks are bouncing, and there was no money in the bank whatsoever. All we have is Yolanda’s word on that, but I do believe her businesses were struggling since she was doing a lot of this by herself. The director of the docuseries then brings up one imperative question, asking about the actual amounts of money stolen. Joe Nick Patoski said in his book that it was $60,000, but in a newspaper article, it was $90,000. There were inconsistencies about the amount of money Yolanda allegedly embezzled. Joe then laughed and said, “Sure, make it $90,000 because it sounds better for the public to swallow up.
Carlos Valdez ambivalently said it was several thousand, probably between 30 and 90 thousand dollars. Valdez said that it might have been more, but he stopped counting during the investigation. Why stop counting, and why wasn’t she charged with embezzlement as well? Why didn’t the IRS charge her for anything if she was stealing from a nonprofit organization like the fan club? Obviously, the case was centered around Selena’s death, but the embezzlement is the official catalyzing event as to why this happened to begin with. Another problem with the embezzlement is that the money was never found, if it was indeed stolen. So Yolanda had no bank passbooks or statements for any of her accounts just lying around somewhere? If hypothetically she was covering her tracks by opening and closing accounts, then why didn’t she dispose of the checks she cashed to herself that Abraham magically stumbled on to begin these accusations against her? So many questions, very few answers, just believe it and keep quiet is what these propagandists want.
The embezzlement was the zeitgeist narrative, and the prosecution needed to sell this as the motive, along with alleging that Yolanda was an obsessed fan. Yolanda said during her trial, the prosecution never proved that she was stealing anything, and even Carlos Valdez said there was no evidence to charge her with embezzlement. Again, it was more about selling Abraham’s narrative to the jury, that it was his “suspicion” that Yolanda was committing theft, and less about actually proving that she broke the law. Valdez said that whatever little evidence of embezzlement existed, it was never presented to a grand jury because it wasn’t necessary since she was on trial for murder. I see that as a total cop out and a swift move to dodge the subject. If there is no concrete and legitimate motive, then why was Selena Quintanilla Perez shot that day, resulting in her life being taken?
In Abraham Quintanilla’s 2021 book “A Father’s Dream”, he mentioned that on March 10th, 1995, the day after the hostile meeting between him, Yolanda, Selena, and Suzette, Yolanda had stopped by Q Productions, Abraham’s HQ, for anything music-related, to get inside. Yolanda was accompanied by Selena’s boutique hairdresser and Corpus Christi boutique manager, Lori Rothe. Abraham claimed that his brother had called him to inform him that Yolanda was on the premises, so he drove over there to tell her that she was no longer welcome there. He threatened that he would involve the police, but he never did, just empty threats on his part. The reason he gave to former Univision reporter, Maria Celeste Arraras, for not calling the police on Yolanda was that he figured she would move on and find another job. Immediately after Selena died, he was enacting retribution, suing people left and right for trying to sell unlicensed Selena merchandise and for pirating her music, but he couldn’t move swiftly to sue the woman he alleged to have stolen anywhere from $30,000-$100,000? Make that make sense.
Abraham also claimed in his book that Yolanda made a $15,000 charge on Selena’s corporate credit card for a down payment on a car for Selena’s hairdresser and manager, Lori Rothe. How did this go unnoticed if it’s actually true? Once again, Abraham never provided any proof, but we’re supposed to just lose our objectivity and trust him at his word because he is Selena’s father, despite the level of ridiculousness he disseminated. What about the $3,000 Faberge egg ring that Yolanda allegedly bought Selena, also using Selena’s corporate credit card? Selena and Chris never spotted this exorbitant transaction that Yolanda had conducted? Yolanda allegedly collected money from Selena’s employees, claiming she wanted to buy Selena a gift, then pocketed the money. Note that this is all alleged to have happened, and no incontrovertible proof was ever presented.
Many of the negative things said about Yolanda, everything she was accused of doing, are all he said/she said derived. I don’t want to accuse anyone of lying, but without some form of tangible evidence, how can anyone just take someone’s word for accusations like those? Many people did initially, and I was one of them. Once again, there was no way to prove she pocketed the money once she cashed those checks. It just doesn’t make sense why she would make herself so obvious. Yolanda was also alleged to have stolen under $10,000 from her former employer’s dermatologist practice. She was never arrested for that, and it was simply settled out of court to where she was supposedly paying restitution. It would be helpful to see some convincing evidence that she did, in fact, steal from her former employer. It’s unknown to the general public if any evidence was submitted during the murder trial, proving she stole nearly $10K back then.
To be continued in “Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them” – Episode 1 Part 5…
