When the CEO of one of Canada’s then-largest cryptocurrency exchanges QuadrigaCX suddenly died in India back in 2019, his wife Jennifer Robertson’s life fell apart, according to her new book.
Speaking on CTV’s Your Morning Tuesday, Robertson said the aftermath of her husband Gerald Cotten’s sudden death from complications of Crohn’s disease has haunted her, after it quickly became clear that the millions of dollars worth of investors’ cryptocurrency her husband handled were locked away in offshore bitcoin wallets that only he had the passwords for.
What followed were allegations of her husband faking his death, that she was somehow involved in what was described as a Ponzi scheme, and questions about her naiveté regarding her husband’s business and their previously lavish lifestyle.
Now she is telling her side of the story.
“I decided to write this book because I wanted to be able to have a platform where I could say exactly what I wanted to say, and the media wouldn’t be able to twist it,” Robertson said of ‘Bitcoin widow: Love, Betrayal & The Missing Millions.’ “I also had a lot of grief and things I had to work through so I had to make sure that I was ready to write the book and have it be published.”
Robertson said that her new book is very clear about her mental health struggles in the hopes that her experiences will help others “going through something difficult” make a turnaround.
When asked how she felt about investors turning to her for answers about their millions disappearing with her husband’s death, Robertson said she felt “very betrayed” by him.
“He had mentioned that if anything were to happen to him, there would be this ‘dead man switch’ which would provide me with all of his financial information or his parents might have got it, he said – and then it never came,” she said. “It threw us and Quadriga into absolute chaos, he affected so many lives and he hurt so many people.”
Robertson said dealing with the conspiracy theories about her husband faking his death have been “difficult.”
“I saw him die, I brought his body back to Halifax with me from India and there have been numerous people who have seen his body, including his mother and his father,” she continued. “I so badly wanted Gerry to obviously be alive, one because he is my husband and two because he could sort this all out or provide answers, so when the world is screaming ‘he’s still alive,’ and you know that he’s not, it can be difficult to deal with that when you’re grieving.”
Speaking about when the Ontario Securities Commission determined that Cotten was basically running a Ponzi scheme and Robertson was forced to hand over the majority of the assets left to her in her husband’s will, which was signed two weeks before his death, Robertson said she lost her home but just “had to keep pushing forward.”
She eventually went back to school and fell in love with teaching, she said, and is looking forward to “a new chapter” in her life, telling Your Morning that she is now in the third trimester of pregnancy.
But some things are hard to forget.
“I think the most misunderstood part of everything that happened was that I had something to do with Gerry’s disappearance or Gerry’s death, or that I hadn’t cared about the investors, which is absolutely not true,” Robertson said. “I tried to do everything that I could to the users – I gave access to all of Gerry’s laptops, all our personal conversations, everything I could do.”
Robertson said she never suspected anything in all those years with Cotten.
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