I Sold Twenty Million Country Records. My Old Backup Singer Was the Only One Who Noticed My Manager Was Stealing From Me

We sat at my kitchen table for five hours.

Ava had gone back to school after she left the band. She’d become a CPA, then a certified fraud examiner. Now she worked for a firm in Nashville that audited music royalties for artists and their estates.

Six months earlier, she’d been hired by another artist to audit Rick Thornton’s management company.

She found a pattern. Royalty payments that went into a company Rick controlled instead of to the artists. Fake expenses. Investments in real estate deals that didn’t exist.

Then she found my name in the files.

“He’s been skimming your royalties for at least eleven years,” she said quietly. “Maybe longer. The music publishing money especially. And he filed some of your tax returns with deductions you never authorized. If the IRS audits you, you’ll be the one who owes the penalties.”

“How much?”

She turned the folder toward me and pointed to a number at the bottom of a page.

I read it three times.

Thirty-four million dollars.