It looks like Stephen “tWitch” Boss’ family rift may reach new heights.
Following the release of his widow Allison Holker’s memoir This Far—which contains several bombshell allegations about the Ellen DeGeneres Show alum—Stephen’s mother Connie Boss Alexander shared her family’s plans to take legal action against her.
“Due to the unproven statements published in Allison’s memoir, we have decided to seek legal counsel to examine this matter,” Connie wrote in a post on Instagram Feb. 12. “There are a lot of unanswered questions and we want answers.”
In the message, Connie said her family was “completely appalled by the misleading accounts and inconsistencies” included in the memoir, released Feb. 5.
“As a family, we have repeatedly shown compassion toward Allison despite her disrespectful and evasive actions since Stephen’s passing,” she continued. “Her portrayal of Stephen appears to reshape his story into a narrative that aligns with her perspective.”
Connie added that Allison—who shares kids Weslie, 16, Maddox, 8, and Zaia, 6, with Stephen—had caused “unnecessary hurt” through her allegations in the wake of the TV personality’s death.
“Stephen does not deserve this treatment, in life or death,” she stated, “and her accounts cause us to doubt everything she has uttered publicly and privately.”
E! News has reached out to Allison’s rep for comment but has not heard back.
Steve Granitz/WireImage
Among the many revelations in This Far, Allison alleged that Stephen—who died by suicide in December 2022 at age 40—had left behind a “cornucopia of drugs” in their home—an accusation his mother has publicly questioned.
“I don’t believe that there was that type of issue, that type of problem,” Connie told Gayle King in an interview on CBS Mornings released Feb. 11. “And don’t get me wrong, I applaud speaking about mental health awareness, ’cause of course, there was something going on there at the end that we’re not aware of.”
She continued, “If that was the intent of the book to make people aware, look out for these type of signs, there’s a way to say that in general without denigrating the memory and the legacy that he built and that’s there for his children.”
Following criticism for her decision to publish the memoir, Allison insisted she made the decision “to help other people.”
“If you decide to read the book,” she wrote in an Instagrams Stories post in January, “hopefully you’ll see my intention is to celebrate the love and life I shared with Stephen and our three beautiful children.”
For more on what Holker had to say in her book, keep reading.
“I believed that I was a terrible person and that God hated me,” the author wrote. “And then, at seventeen, I had an experience so traumatizing that it seemed to confirm in my own mind the worst that people were saying about me.”
Allison declined to go into detail about what happened, but noted that “the fallout touched every part of my life.”
“There was an incriminating little voice inside my head telling me that it was my punishment from God for having turned my back on religion,” she added, “which I now can see was a terrible insult to God.”
Wanting to “put the incident behind” her, Allison continued, she kept it a secret.
“In retrospect, I wish I had taken action,” she shared. “I have so much sympathy and compassion for those in similar situations who are too scared to speak out. I hope by giving voice to my regrets, I motivate others to stand up for themselves.”
Allison further opened up about her experience in a recent interview.
“I had some older man really take advantage of the vulnerability that women go through, especially in the dance community where we look up to our teachers and we just trust them,” she said on the Jan. 27 episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show. “And dance can be very physical. It can be very sexual, even at a young age. That was taken advantage of.”
However, their meet-cute didn’t actually occur there.
“In my mind, Season 7 is when we met,” Allison wrote, “but that’s not technically true.”
Instead, the pair met five years prior at a party hosted by her season two dance partner Ivan Koumaev.
“One of the people Ivan knew from the hip-hop world approached me during the party,” Allison shared. “‘Hey, I’m tWitch,’ he said. tWitch huh? ‘That’s cute,’ I said. ‘What’s your real name?’ He appraised me admiringly. He’d been in Los Angeles for a while, he explained, and I was the first person who had asked him that. ‘Stephen Boss,’ he replied.”
Still, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.
“It was obvious he had fun energy, but I could not get past his appearance,” Allison admitted. “His fishnet top revealed piercing in both nipples—those in addition to piercings in his nose, eyebrows, lip and chin. Also, he had dyed his hair blond and was rocking a mohawk! It was too much for this Utah girl, okay?”
Looking back at a “memorable meetup” in the early days of their relationship, she recalled how Stephen was part of a dance ensemble for the opening act of the Glee Live! In Concert tour and how they had been exploring the arena at one of his shows in Dublin before things got steamy.
“We ended up in the scaffolding above the stage—don’t ask me how—and started making out,” she remembered in This Far. “One thing led to another until we were in flagrante delicto. I can’t lie. It was one of the hottest things I’ve ever done. We were almost caught in the act by a security guard who appeared out of nowhere, shined his flashlight near us, and announced, ‘Who’s up there?’ We stifled giggles until the coast was clear, then hastily got dressed and rejoined the concertgoers.”
The Pressures of Social Media
Fast-forward to 2013 when Allison and Stephen tied the knot. Already parents to Weslie (born in 2008) from Allison’s past relationship, together they welcomed son Maddox in 2016 and daughter Zaia in 2019.
The family members offered glimpses into their lives on social media, posting footage of everything from their dance parties and Halloween costumes to their everyday lives at home.
However, Allison wondered if social media “became a stressor for Stephen toward the end.”
“He had it in his head that we should always look like that perfect family,” she wrote, “which was unrealistic.”
And Allison believes the constant praise Stephen received for his overwhelmingly positive personality created a level of pressure.
“As his fan base grew by leaps and bounds, he couldn’t step out in public, not to go grocery shopping or to the movie or out to eat, without being complimented on how joyous he was, how loving he seemed, how much positive energy he spread to everyone,” she wrote. “How he must have pushed himself to always come across as the person whom others saw. How exhausting it must have been for him.”
Still, Allison stressed the joyful moments captured in their videos were real.
“Stephen was navigating a complex emotional landscape,” she added. “He fluctuated between genuine happiness and profound sadness, flipping between the two as if his brain were a dimmer switch.”
“He was sad to leave his other ‘home,’ but at the same time he saw it as an opportunity to shed his deejay role and branch out into new, more ambitious ventures,” she wrote. “Would he have liked to have taken Ellen’s place and become the host? One thousand percent yes, but several months of discussions with the network went nowhere. Stephen was disappointed, but in typical tWitch fashion he framed it in a positive light.”
Because they were quite booked and busy.
“I don’t believe the end of the show was destabilizing, because he wasn’t out of a job,” she said. “We had so many projects in the pipeline.”
However, it caused a “shift in Stephen’s routine.”
“For nine years, the show had given his days a structure and rhythm,” she explained. “No longer bound to a schedule, Stephen had more time to spend inside his head. The dark corners of his mind were not a healthy place for him to poke around in. The internal turmoil that he had suppressed while portraying happy-go-lucky tWitch on a daily basis started bubbling to the surface.”
According to Allison, Stephen also became more irritable, lost sleep and showed disinterest in work, hanging out with friends and participating in activities he used to enjoy.
“The experience, which is guided by a shaman, is known for inducing intense hallucinations, altered perceptions of reality, and deep introspection,” she shared. “Stephen’s motivation was to confront the pressures of fatherhood, grapple with the absence of father figures in his own life and address his feelings of abandonment.”
However, things didn’t go as intended and Stephen had a friend pick him up early.
“I’ve come to understand that the recommended duration for such experiences is three to seven days, with weeks of follow-up work supervised by the shaman,” she wrote. “Stephen returned home after less than 12 hours and threw himself back into work.”
Allison suggested that only exacerbated the situation.
“I’ve since learned that for individuals with underlying mental health issues, ayahuasca can exacerbate deep-seated problems,” she wrote. “It can bring those issues to a boil, if you will, if there is not close supervision.”
As the Dancing With the Stars alum put it, “Stephen was never the same afterward.“
“The energy he gave off was different,” she continued. “It was not joyful, not so generous. It was like every day he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. He wasn’t angry or mean to people; he just seemed agitated.”
She knew that he smoked marijuana, she acknowledged, however, “I had no idea that Stephen was in an almost constant state of being high. He was even sneaking out to smoke on the Ellen set. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody knew.”
After later going through his phone app, Allison “realized he was visiting one of the handful of dispensaries in our area every night.”
Following Stephen’s death in December 2022, she recounted, she was going through his closet to pick out a pair of his beloved sneakers for his wake.
“What I found was a lot more than shoes,” she wrote. “There were ziplocked bags of psychedelic mushrooms—some of the bags were full; some were half-empty; a few contained only one or two mushrooms. There were other substances that I had to look up on my phone. It was a cornucopia of drugs. I was stunned.”
An autopsy obtained by E! News in May 2023 determined Stephen had no drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of his death.
During their weekend getaway, they discussed having more kids, purchased a sculpture together and she shared with him a song she wrote called “Better Together.”
He, in turn, gifted her a black Prada suit.
Now, she reflected, “The questions are endless. Did he buy me a black Prada suit so I’d have a nice outfit to wear to his funeral? And if he did, was it one last gesture by an incurable romantic or just messed up beyond belief?”
She and Zaia had returned from taking Maddox to school, she wrote, and Stephen was talking to their assistants and nannies before driving Weslie to class.
“As they headed out the door, I said, ‘See you. Love you,'” Allison remembered. “I didn’t even say goodbye.”
After a Starbucks run, she continued, Stephen took Weslie to school and told the teen, “I wish I could have been your Superman.”
“It was an odd statement, but Weslie didn’t dwell on it; she dismissed it as a weird dad moment,” Allison said. “They exchanged I love yous before he pulled out of the school lot. It was the last time she would see him. I can’t get it out of my head that Stephen was already saying goodbye in his own way hours before he disappeared.”
Later, Stephen didn’t meet her at the gym or office as planned but still replied to messages from their team about a video shoot set for the next day. That afternoon, Allison saw his car in the driveway but soon realized he wasn’t home.
In the book, she recounted trying to contact Stephen but receiving no answer—leading her to reach out to his assistant, brother, friend and hospitals and file a missing persons report. While Allison says she thought Stephen had possibly checked into a recovery center, police then informed her he died by suicide Dec. 13, 2022.
“I raced down the hall shrieking,” she wrote. “The sound that escaped from my throat was feral.”
In the book, Allison noted there were elements of the service she and his family disagreed on, including his family wanting an open casket. Ultimately, she decided a small group of his family members could view the open casket before it was closed for the remainder of the wake—adding that no photos or videos could be taken out of fear they’d somehow end up online.
“At the advice of my lawyers, I insisted that everybody who viewed the open casket sign a nondisclosure agreement to protect Stephen’s privacy, a requirement that exasperated his family,” Allison shared. “‘If we have to sign NDAs,’ they said, ‘then everybody has to sign NDAs.'”
According to the book, a funeral was held the next day followed by a Celebration of Life event—with Allison, Weslie, Ellen DeGeneres, Loni Love and Wayne Brady being among the speakers at the February memorial.
“Notably,” Drè added in the Instagram post, “it seems to stem from the fact that the family did not agree with the original terms of the NDA you presented the family to sign.”
Dré also shared that Weslie, Maddox and Zaia’s interactions with Stephen’s relatives “have been noticeably limited.”
In her book, Allison acknowledged she learned that members of Stephen’s family “were criticizing me on social media for my handling of the funeral, for the NDAs, and for failing to attend a Boss family reunion that I hadn’t even been invited to.” However, she said that she tried to “practice empathy for a woman who had given birth to the love of my life.”
Allison also denied the allegation that she was keeping the children from them, writing that she flew Stephen’s mom from Arizona to California and back for a Grandparents’ Day event at school, has had the kids FaceTime her and has sent photos.
In addition, she alleged that someone in Stephen’s family that she declined to name blamed her for his death.
“The person would later apologize, and I would forgive them,” she wrote. “But there would be no forgetting those words.”
“A few of his entries would allude to sexual abuse he endured as a child at the hands of an adult male,” she wrote, “a trauma he detailed in strict confidence to his friend, who relayed the conversation to me only after Stephen’s death.”
“It’s a misconception that I inherited Stephen’s wealth,” she detailed. “The reality is quite different. He had given away substantial sums of money to family and friends and spent recklessly on drugs and his weird art collections. The tax bill that he left me with for the year he died was $1 million. I’m not sure who was more distressed, me or the accountant who had to deliver the news.”
According to Allison, “Paying that debt depleted his accounts.” In addition, she wrote that Stephen’s death by suicide put her in breach of contract with certain business partners, that some brands stopped working with her, and that she had to catch up on bills.
However, Allison appeared to send a message to anyone accusing her of just releasing the book for money.
“All of my proceeds from this book are going to fund the mental health focused foundation I started in Stephen’s honor, Move With Kindness,” she wrote in a Jan. 8, 2025 Instagram Stories post. “My hope is that we don’t need to lose another husband, brother, father or friend to suicide.”
“I experienced a slideshow of memories; then everything went black,” she recalled in This Far about one dream she had two days after his death. “I started shaking, and the whole room became a moving set. A face appeared like the full moon in the night sky. It kept morphing into three faces, only one of which I recognized. It was Stephen. His lips started to move. I could clearly make out what he was saying: I’m sorry. I love you.”
After Allison woke up, she continued, she felt a sense of peace.
“My husband no longer existed, but for the first time since he died, I could feel his presence,” she wrote. “‘Thank you, my love,’ I said, ‘for comforting me.'”
