Miss Jessie’s co-founder Titi Branch’s (left) suicide late last year was a shock to the hair care industry, and everyone who knew her.
The 45-year-old hair care entrepreneur seemed to have the perfect life: a booming business, a great family, and a loving boyfriend with whom she had launched a line of beard care products with.
But according to her sister Miko Branch, Titi’s boyfriend Anthony Spadafora treated her “like a human ATM” and continually siphoned off money from her.
According to The New York Post, in court papers filed at Manhattan Supreme Court, Branch alleges that Spadafora’s “undue influence” led him to “extract hundreds of thousands of dollars from Titi to launch his own beard-care business, Maestro’s Classics; $420,000 to buy and renovate a Pennsylvania house; and a $135,000 interest-free loan.”
Miko also alleges that Titi was ready to end her relationship with Spadafora when she found out he made sexual advances towards her trainer, but the 43-year-old “took extreme measures to stop her . . . sending compromising photographs that he had taken of her.”
According to the court papers, just days after her death, Spadafora sent the Branch family a barrage of emails claiming that Titi had drafted a new will giving him 50 percent of everything.
Spadafora, who calls Miko “the bully of Brooklyn,” counters that the two sisters had a falling out in September 2013, which caused Titi to remove sister as the beneficiary of her $2 million life-insurance policy. He claims he planned to start a family with Titi and multiple rounds of in-vitro fertilization left her drained and despondent.
“My love failed. I thought it was good enough if there wasn’t a baby,” he said.
“My sister’s death has been a devastating blow,” Miko told The Post. “It was only after Titi’s death that we learned more about what she’d been going through and how her affairs were being managed.”