The first thing Jennifer Robertson says when she answers the phone is, with a laugh, “I’m not on an island with Gerry.”
That would be with Gerald Cotten, her former husband, a controversial Canadian cryptocurrency businessman who suddenly died in 2018, leaving behind a trail of missing millions, lawsuits, investigations, and wild conspiracy theories related to his company QuadrigaCX.
Most people do not have to repeatedly assure the world that they’re not hiding out in the tropics with their deceased spouse, but as Ms Robertson details in her new book, Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions, her last few years have been unlike anything most people experience.
By the time Quadriga folded, it owed its approximately 76,000 investors $215m, and Ms Robertson realised, along with thousands of people, she had been deceived on an extraordinary scale.
“I love the person that I knew,” she told The Independent from her home in Hallifax, Canada. “The person that has been reported on, I don’t love that person, I hate that person. That person, what he did to everybody else, what he did to me, I don’t understand it.”
(QuadrigaCX)
Founded in 2014, Quadriga was for a time Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange platform, and grew rapidly as digital assets became more mainstream, handling more than $1bn in its third years.
Cotten became an outspoken public spokesperson for crypto, appearing at conferences and events and telling one podcast, “It’s pretty…
