help me & my cats recover from homelessness

UPDATE 08/21/24: Please be sure to take a look at my updates as I have been evicted and have reoriented my gofundme around this fact. I am keeping the original description up for the record.

Hi, my name is Erin Shade. Some of you may know me from USC film school, my Hollywood assistant era, my time as a writer for Cartoon Network, or most recently, my spiritual media project on Twitch where I go by the alias Serpentine.

While the title/image of this fundraiser may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, I am doing my best to keep the levity alive because I'm actually in a pretty serious situation where I have been financially abused and abandoned by members of my wealthy family and and I am facing imminent financial ruin and homelessness. This is on top of dealing with chronic burnout/adrenal fatigue/CPTSD from prior issues (+ my ADHD/neurodivergence) that I have not been resourced enough to effectively treat and that are now being exacerbated by these recent events.

I have struggled for about a month to figure out how to write this, as I have been rather emotionally unwell due to everything that has gone down and this story is somewhat long and involves ongoing litigation/matters that have yet to be instigated on my end legally. To complicate matters, I have no resources to retain a lawyer, which makes me nervous to speak out. However, I cannot remain silent any longer, so I am going to do my best to summarize everything and trust it will all work out somehow.

My intention with this gofundme is to be able to meet my basic survival needs and afford the craniosacral therapy/biomechanical therapy sessions I need to restore functionality to my nervous system so that I can get back on my feet as I continue to grow my business and explore employment opportunities.

Below you can find the TL;DR version and then the whole story of the past 3 years or so in a more detailed form.

TL;DR: In 2021 my animation writing career got destroyed by vertical integration, my affordable apartment got demolished and I had to move to a more expensive place due to LA rent increases. In 2022 I was severely retraumatized by an article I participated in for New York Magazine and was likely blacklisted from my former agency due to said article. I started living off money in my trust fund (that I did not have direct access to) to buy time to figure out my future, but in the past few months discovered it was being weaponized against me by my father to essentially function as an pseudo-conservatorship for 4 years. All of this only came to light because my aunt sued my dad last year for breach of fiduciary duty of the family trust he became sole trustee of after my grandfather's death in 2022. My wealthy family members who know I have been the victim of financial abuse on top of my other traumas are refusing to help me out while I work to rebuild my life from all of the losses I have incurred.

To see other ways you can help, you can scroll to the bottom of this page. If you are interested and wanna get the full tea, keep reading~

LOSING MY JOB / APARTMENT

In February 2021 I lost my job at Cartoon Network when the show I wrote for was cancelled. 4 days into unemployment, I received a call from my landlord who informed me that they were going to demolish my building. They offered me money to leave since Ellis Act was still suspended at the time and they had no other way to get me out. With no job, no reps (they dropped me in 2018), dwindling savings, and Cartoon Network's future uncertain due to the fallout from two corporate mergers, I felt like I had no choice but to take the buyout cash which amounted to $20k. This began what has been 3 years of financial insecurity.

As I was moving in May/June 2021, I released my YouTube series Erin the Snake Whisperer which detailed some traumatic events that happened to me while I was an assistant on the TV show Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and my spiritual awakening journey that unfolded in the years since. I did this mostly for my own healing process as I felt my silence had been detrimental to my wellbeing. It debuted to very little fanfare.

By July 2021 I began to feel a bit more rooted in my new home, but I still felt out to sea when it came to my career or what I was going to do about money. In the midst of all of this, my middle sister was getting married in the Fall which required me to travel out of state several times in the second half of the year.

Given the burn rate of the $20k from the move (new rent, deposit, old rent, moving expenses, etc.) and increased cost of living due to LA rent hikes, I focused on securing unemployment backpay from the EDD. This wound up taking a huge amount of time (2 months) and energy (calling almost every day nonstop), but by the end of September 2021 I managed to receive another $17k or so from EDD just as the last of the buyout cash ran out.

THE ARTICLE

Towards the end of October 2021, I was contacted by a journalist named Lila Shapiro. She was working on a piece about my former boss/friend from Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. for New York Magazine, and had heard about me from a mutual friend who told her about Erin the Snake Whisperer and encouraged her to reach out to me to talk about my experience. To be honest I was somewhat wary of speaking to the press at that point, but agreed to hear her out.

Upon getting on the phone with her, I was shocked to discover that she had just returned from a trip to LA where she had spoken with him in person. She had also started to watch all of my videos. Given how unheard I had felt about what had happened to me and the impact it had (and still has) on my life and career, and feeling like this journalist was genuinely open to what I had to say, I agreed to participate in the article.

It's important to note that I agreed to participate in this with the understanding that no matter what I did (participate or not) that the publication of this article would likely severely retraumatize me. However, I felt that participating was what I was meant to do, so I went forward with it. We spoke multiple times over a few weeks in late October/early November before she went off to work on drafts and I went off to Houston to officiate my sister's wedding.

In December, I received a monetary gift from my elderly grandfather (all of the grandchildren received this). I used this to pay the last of my outstanding debt from my 2019 unemployment and to live on for the next few months which I suspected were about to be extremely unpleasant for my mental health.

The article was published on January 17, 2022. As I suspected, my mental health quickly deteriorated and I became essentially bedridden from the PTSD retraumatization. By February I had developed a pinguecula on my right eye from how much I had been crying, and had to go on milk thistle supplements for several weeks to calm my liver and heal my eye.

By the end of March 2022 I was out of money, and still in an incredibly dark state. A former client sent me money in cryptocurrency which I used to pay for April rent. How I was going to go from there, I did not know.

MY GRANDFATHER'S DEATH

Towards the end of April 2022, I was starting to emerge from the worst of my acute trauma response when I got a call from my father. He told me that our family was all gathering in Houston to visit with my elderly grandfather, who was at that point living in an assisted living facility and nearing the end of his life. My grandmother died in 2020 and I was unable to visit her or go to her funeral due to COVID, so I agreed to fly to Houston because I didn't want to have a repeat of that.

On this same call, my dad told me he would send me money from my trust fund to help cover my rent and living expenses. It's important to note that while I had been receiving modest monthly assistance from this trust fund since around summer 2020 during the pandemic, I did not have full access to this money nor any of the investments in it. In fact, I did not have access to any official or written information about this trust at all, including any reports or the founding document. All I knew was that it existed, a little info about what some of the investments were, and that I would not get full access to it until I was 35 -- according to my dad.

In early May 2022 I flew to Houston to visit my family. It was during this trip that I told my dad about the article (I had not mentioned it to him until that point) and gave him a copy of it. I also had a bit of an emotional breakdown in front of my Aunt Susan (dad's middle sister) as I was trying to explain to her my life situation.

You see, at this point I was feeling like my Hollywood career was dead, and that I had to figure out something else to do with my life. Considering I had spent every waking moment since I was 15 trying to make my TV writing career happen, the sunk cost was a little over half my life. The grief was deep and immense.

At the same time, I realized I needed to be practical about being able to survive on a basic level. I asked my dad to continue to be supported by the liquid cash in my trust so that I could buy myself some time to figure out how I was going to move forward because the reality is, I hadn't really had any time to do that since I had originally lost my job and was immediately forced to move, travel, officiate my sister's wedding, and then get fucked up by the article.

He agreed to do this, but it was essentially on his terms. I did not get any access myself, and I wound up getting into this toxic pattern of needing to call him every couple of weeks for more money, because he would only send me a little bit at a time. In other words, I was living in a paycheck-to-paycheck way but with my own money that I had no direct access to.

In June 2022 my grandfather passed away. It was at this moment that my dad became the sole trustee of his estate in the form of the Family Trust. While my Grandfather had called me in September 2021 to assure me that I and my sisters and cousins would be taken care of, none of us grandchildren were left anything directly in his will. All of it went into this trust that my dad was supposed to then divide between him and his 2 younger sisters, Susan and Nancy.

While I did not know this at the time, I later discovered that this did not happen.

SHIFTING MY FOCUS TO TWITCH

Meanwhile, as the summer went on I began to get the sense that the best bet for me in the long term would be to pivot to content creation, specifically my Twitch stream. I had already experimented with Twitch in 2020 and 2021 with TRANCE-FORMATION, an interactive sound healing stream that synthesizes electronic dance music DJing with Vedic astrology and tarot card reading to guide people through the collective energies. At that time I had always seen it as more of a side project and I wasn't consistent about it. By this point however, I felt like it was the best way to build community and use it as a way to promote my services and be seen more.

So in late summer 2022 I attempted to reboot my stream. This was a failure however, as I quickly realized my setup was too low budget and difficult to assemble / take down repeatedly to be able to stream consistently, which is the main key to Twitch growth. I knew that if I wanted to do this in a sustainable way for the long term that I needed to invest in a better setup.

In September 2022 I began researching in depth on how to build computers and made a list of desired computer parts. However, because I was getting so little at a time from my dad to live off of, I knew it would take me a while to amass them all. By November I had managed to save up enough to get the GPU (the most expensive part). I spent the next few months gathering more parts. In the midst of this I traveled to Texas again for my sister's baby shower and to visit my nephew after she gave birth in January 2023.

Upon my return from Texas in late January 2023, I purchased the rest of my computer parts, and in February I finally built my computer. However, upon turning it on I quickly discovered that there were issues with the motherboard, and I suspected it may be defective. In March I took the computer to a repair guy and he told me I did a great job on my build but that yes, I had some bad luck and got a defective motherboard. I wound up having to buy a replacement and I had the repair guy rebuild it for me.

By the end of March despite my computer setback, I was feeling better about my progress and soon began an intensive tech & design buildout of my new stream. I worked nonstop on this for all of April.

BUYING TIME, LEGAL RUMBLINGS, AND RELAUNCHING MY STREAM

However, in late April everything ground to a halt due to me realizing I had a horrible clothes moths infestation in my apartment. I had to shell out even more money for moth treatment and a lot of my stuff was damaged (some of which has still not been replaced).

On top of this, my dad called to inform me of how much cash I had left in my trust. I calculated that based on my burn rate I would only be able to make it to the end of the year, December 2023.

Not knowing what else to do, I took a job as a personal assistant to an actress to try and buy myself more time. At the jump this job was always going to be for a limited amount of time while she found an assistant who could be more long term. I of course was happy to help while she needed me, as she is a super lovely person, however, even when I was working 40 hour weeks it wasn't enough to cover my monthly expenses. On top of this I was in too much chronic burnout to work on the stream while also doing this energetically demanding job.

In August 2023 while I was at my boss's house, I found out from my sisters that my Aunt Susan was suing my dad for breach of fiduciary duty. Apparently he had told them about it himself while they were vacationing at his house in Breckenridge, CO (I did not attend as I was working), but didn't have many details beyond that. I was shocked to hear this, but my dad never spoke to me about it and I didn't really know if I should call my aunt or not given how awkward and intense such a thing is, so I just put in the back of my mind while I plotted my return to Twitch.

In September 2023 I knew my boss was gonna be gone for 3 weeks in Europe, so I planned to finally reboot my stream while I had some time off. I had done the bulk of the work in April, so there wasn't too much left to do to get everything ready.

Finally, on September 29, 2023, I relaunched my stream to great personal success. Within 1 month I achieved Twitch Affiliate status and was able to monetize my channel. I also scored a tarot reading event job for a casino family in Las Vegas and made a good chunk of money from that as well.

However, my dad informed me that he had to pay more taxes on the trust cash to the IRS than he thought, and that I was going to be $9K short from the amount he had told me I had left back in May. This shocked me because I had planned so much around what he had told me I had available and wasn't expecting to not be able to make it through the end of the year. I was already phasing out of the assistant job and didn't know what I was going to do.

TRUST ISSUES

In November I flew home for Thanksgiving to visit with my mom, sisters, brother in law, and baby nephew. This was my first time back home (Philadelphia Main Line) since November 2019.

On Thanksgiving Day, my sister informed me that my Aunt Susan was going to call us to finally tell us her side about the lawsuit.

On this phone call I learned that my dad was supposed to distribute the cash in the family trust to his two sisters, Susan and Nancy, but that he did not do this for many months after my grandfather's death. Susan kept trying to talk to him about it, and at the very least get documents that she could review. But my dad kept stalling and stonewalling her (his preferred negotiation tactic).

Finally, she realized she was never going to get an answer out of him willingly and wrote a "letter of demand" for the documents (in the state of Texas, trustees are obligated to send the beneficiary of a trust any and all requested documents on said trust within 90 days of the receipt of a letter of demand). When she was provided the documents 90 days later she discovered that my dad had used the trust to buy his mansion in College Station, TX, several millions of dollars worth of rare earth minerals (he is a collector of rare earth minerals), and shares in what is apparently an insolvent oil company that his friend owns.

It was during this conversation that I was like, "hey, I'm out of money in my own trust and I was told that I don't get access until I'm 35." My aunt was surprised to hear me say this as her daughter had the same trust as I did and she insinuated that that language is not what was stipulated in hers.

It was at this point that I began to realize that if my dad was abusing the family trust, the chances of him abusing mine were like a million percent higher than normal. My dad had been at the very least lying to me about my trust, and even worse, he could have stolen from it. I became gravely nervous about the implications of this.

When I got back from PA, my Aunt sent me a copy of the 7 page lawsuit (part of the public record). Upon reading it I found that my aunt also alleges that my dad manipulated my grandparents in their final years, taking more and more control over their assets and decisions.

The next day I spoke to my dad on the phone and asked him calmly and innocently if I could have the documents related to my trust. He immediately began accusing me of being involved in a conspiracy with my Aunt and my Mom. This told me all I needed to know about his guilt, because if there were no problem then he would have no issue being transparent with me. After talking him off the ledge, he agreed to continue supporting me through February, but said that he could not beyond that because he was "not liquid." I kept my mouth shut about what I knew because I needed more time to figure out what my next move was going to be.

I never received any documents from him.

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATORSHIP

In the meantime, I upped my streaming game and continued to grow my channel. I was invited into a Twitch DJ group called the Hotdoggers, and in mid-December they invited me to an underground rave in LA as well as a Hotdogger party that they livestreamed on Twitch. It was so uplifting to be accepted into this group of talented artists & streamers who have been incredibly supportive of me, especially as I was feeling an increasing amount of existential dread.

To keep the dread at bay, I continued to focus all my energies on my stream in January and February. While my following steadily grew and I managed to make some money through subscribers, bits, and donations, it unfortunately wasn't yet enough to make ends meet.

Towards the end of February I received a copy of the original trust from my Aunt who managed to find it in her archives (as she had been named successor trustee upon its founding). Indeed, per this document I was supposed to get full access to everything when I turned 30 in March 2020. Upon that day the trust was considered to be "dissolved." Upon reading this I realized that my dad has basically been weaponizing this "trust" which no longer even legally exists against me and using it to control me and keep me in what has essentially been a pseudo-conservatorship for 4 years.

On top of this, it is unclear if he has been paying taxes on this money or not (while he did mention he paid $9k to the IRS last year, I really can't believe anything he says at this point). If he hasn't, it's a breach of tax law and the IRS could come after me for back taxes owed. If he has, it's also a breach of tax law because you can't file taxes on someone's behalf like that.

I managed to barely make March rent. I finally hit zero a few days before my birthday and spent my birthday in bed, depressed. I did get a little birthday money, but my account immediately went into the negative by April due to rent and expenses. I have been overdrafted for most of this month and living off of Twitch tips that get sent to my paypal directly. It's basically all gone to cat food, food for myself, and what little personal care items I can afford.

My mother, who is financially well off, is not sympathetic to my situation and does not want to help me with money. She suggested to me that I put everything I own in storage and go move in with my dad in his College Station ranch for an undefined amount of time. Why she would suggest that I destroy everything I have built and leave my home city of 16 years to move in with someone who has been lying to me and financially abusing me, my sisters, and his own sisters (and even HER during their marriage and divorce tbh) for years and whose energy I personally cannot stand is truly beyond me. I do not feel safe with my father nor will I ever relocate to Texas, a place I consider to be unsafe for women.

Unfortunately, based on my recent conversations with my mom, I don't feel safe with her either and quite frankly I feel immense grief that after 7 years of working on our relationship (after having been no contact with her for 3 years due to fallout from getting fired off Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2014) that she has yet again decided to forsake me in one of my darkest times.

So basically, I am facing homelessness.

ON GENERATIONAL WEALTH & TRAUMA

Some people might be wondering why my wealthy family members are not interested in helping me. This is because my family is deeply dysfunctional. For basically my entire life I have be forced into the role of "scapegoat" which has made me the target of a lot of negative projections about my personality, abilities, and life in general. This has been the source of a lot of my mental health issues I have suffered since my early childhood, and it is also what made me susceptible to later abuses I suffered in my 20s.

I am the first person to say that I have lived a life of privilege in coming from generational wealth. But I would also like to emphasize that I have also been healing incredibly deep ancestral & childhood wounds for the past 7 years, and this work has largely taken over all aspects of my life to the point where I have essentially been a recluse from society. This work will undoubtedly continue. My trust fund was a financial asset that was created without my consent when I was 1 year old, and weaponized against me during an incredibly vulnerable and challenging time in my life by the person who should have been supporting and protecting me the most.

That being said, I don't expect everyone to sympathize with my situation regardless of how I explain my background, and that is totally fine. I know that so many people are struggling right now and I get that not everyone has the bandwidth.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

For those who made it this far and would like to help out, it would mean everything to me to be able to stay in my current 1 bedroom apartment with my 2 cats (who are my whole world) so I can continue to grow my stream, explore other creative/job opportunities, and recover from long term chronic burnout and CPTSD.

I know I am a talented person with a wide array of skills, and honestly there is really no reason why I shouldn't be able to make ends meet using them. I am frustrated and devastated that at 34 I am facing homelessness on top of everything else I have been through in these years. I would very much like to turn my life around and have been actively working hard to do so despite still dealing with all the chronic burnout and complex trauma.

So I am humbly asking for the help of you: the community. It is my hope that you can see my value and understand that with your assistance I can position myself to break out of financial prison, regain my sovereignty, and be of great benefit to others in what is proving to be an incredibly trying time for the world.

At the end of the day, all I want to do is fulfill my purpose of helping people through my creative contributions and spiritual guidance, and be able to make a decent living doing so. Despite the challenges I am experiencing right now I do feel optimistic that I can achieve this! I would be very blessed to receive your help, and I pledge that if I ever come into any significant money from my family in the future (which may or may not happen at this point) that I will pay it forward and use a portion of it to help others in need.

OTHER WAYS YOU CAN HELP

If you can't contribute money and/or would like to help another way, other forms of assistance I am welcoming at this time are:

- boosting my story on social media

- meetings with interested managers

- meetings with interested lit agents at any agency except CAA (I suspect I am blacklisted there but if you wanna prove me wrong lmk)

- meetings with showrunners for potential staffing opportunities (I have 5 years of room experience in animation but would like to be in live action)

- meetings with aligned creative executives who would be interested in reading my latest sample/hiring me for paid development, OWA, etc.

- helping me find a Texas-based lawyer with knowledge in trust laws

Loglines/writing samples are available upon request!

You can also enter into an energy exchange with me by:

- booking a private session with me

- subscribing to my Twitch channel

WHAT THESE FUNDS WILL HELP ME WITH

Again, my intention around this gofundme is to meet my survival needs + some self care stuff so I can heal my nervous system from chronic burnout/trauma and build a life that I can thrive in. A basic breakdown is as follows:

- rent ($2808.12)

- utilities/insurance (phone, gas, LADWP, spectrum, car insurance, getting back on health insurance as I am currently uninsured, etc.)

- cat care (cat food, treats, litter, etc.)

- basic self care (food, toiletries, basic beauty stuff, etc.)

- craniosacral therapy ($300, 1x month -- this has been my main form of self-care for the past 6 years)

- holistic biomechanics therapy ($90/week -- I hope to do this for 4-6 months to restore nervous system functionality)

THANK YOU!

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this. I recognize that many in the entertainment industry are facing financial uncertainty due to the big contraction that Hollywood is experiencing. My heart goes out to all of you who are similarly affected by this, and I am wishing you all the best in these intense times!