Allison Holker, the widow of late hip-hop dancer Stephen “tWitch” Boss, has revealed the financial burdens and emotional stress she endured following her husband’s death.
Boss, 40, committed suicide on Dec. 13, 2022. The longtime “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” DJ and producer reportedly passed away without a will.
During a recent interview with Vivian Tu for the SoFi YouTube channel, Holker, 36, spoke about the difficulties caused by tWitch not having written documents allocating access to his assets and properties.
“We never had access to each other’s accounts, ever,” she admitted when asked how the couple split their finances during their nine-year marriage.
She continued, “I was always so financially independent on my own and I just loved that. And he always had his own. And we both, for the most part, made the same income. Almost every job we ever did, we made the exact same pay.”
Holker and Boss wed on Dec. 10, 2013, in Paso Robles, California. They share three kids: son Maddox Boss, 8, daughter Zaia Boss, 4 and Holker’s 16-year-old daughter, Weslie Fowler, from a previous relationship, whom tWitch adopted.
Before their 2013 wedding, both tWitch and Allison appeared as contestants on the television dance competition series “So You Think You Can Dance” in different seasons. Boss finished second in the show’s fourth seasonal installment in 2008. Holker made the Top 8 for the second season. She returned as an all-star for seasons 7 through 11.
The Minnesota-born, Utah-raised woman was also cast as a professional dance partner on four seasons of the reality competitive dance show “Dancing with the Stars” beginning in 2014.
The couple found individual and joint success as social media influencers by dancing in videos online and promoting brands such as Dick’s Sporting Goods.
During her sitdown with SoFi, Holker admitted being surprised that it could be seen as a “weird thing” for married couples to have separate bank accounts.
While she kept her income separate from her husband, Holker did acknowledge they had businesses together. She reflected on having to set up meetings with financial advisers about taxes and contracts the day after tWitch passed away.
Additionally, Vivian Tu questioned Allison about how separating her account from Stephen ended up causing her to have to legally prove her marriage to him in the state of California after he took his own life.
“No one preps for this kind of situation. So everything I was learning and going through was a first. I didn’t know that there’s all these steps that you have to go to just to access an account,” Holker explained.
She added, “But it took a very long time. I never took ownership over his accounts for about four to five months. Now, luckily, I had my own accounts and my own finances that were in a really, really healthy, great place, because that could have been four or five months with no money.”
The former backup dancer for pop star Demi Lovato went on to express the emotional toil of having to present her husband’s death certificate and other paperwork to various institutions to prove she was married to her deceased spouse “a lot of paperwork”
“It’s not easy to constantly be handing someone a death certificate over and over again. It’s a really emotional thing to have to do that in every single place. [To] prove that you were married, prove that there was a death. It’s emotional.”
YouTube users voiced their thoughts on Holker’s revelations about dealing with tWitch not leaving a notarized last will and how it affected her family emotionally and financially.
One person wrote, “What a strong lady!!! How horrible she was publicly treated upon the news of his death and then all this financial nonsense she immediately had to deal with on top of the ignorant court of public opinion. It makes it all so much more tragic.”
A like-minded commenter posted, “Wow, I never thought of all the practical demands that come after a death. All you want to do is grieve but the world keeps spinning. Allison is so strong!”
In contrast, a critic declared, “Love her. Strong woman. I sometimes do feel like she has anger still towards twitch still because of what happened. I hope I am wrong.”
Elsewhere during the interview, the Emmy-nominated choreographer said she has always allowed her kids to see her grieve and cry, even as she screamed in her backyard over losing her spouse of nearly a decade.
“It also shows that he was under a lot with a lot of stress as well,” Holker said about tWitch’s possible state of mind at the time of his suicide. “And he wasn’t letting someone else like me or other people share in that stress that he was maybe undergoing.”
She continued, “So it also made me feel really bad and sad that he was holding on to so much. But then, unfortunately, he left it on me to take care of [it]. It honestly made me a little angry at times at him, a little mad, not only for an outrageous decision that was made, but I didn’t even know this was going on.”
Nearly two years after tWitch’s death, Allison Holker says her family is in “much lighter times.” Her daughter, Weslie, gave her the blessing to find love again as she has with technology entrepreneur Adam Edmunds. Holker and Edmunds presented their relationship’s “soft launch” with an Aug. 28-dated Instagram post.
The new couple appeared together in public for the first time at a 2024 New York Fashion Week event nine days later. Edmunds serves as the chief executive officer for the property management software company Entrata.
