Chip and Joanna Gaines have been at the top of the design world for more than two decades, with only a handful of homebuyers getting the Magnolia treatment on the couple’s hit show, “Fixer Upper.” So when a young Texas couple, Chris and Raquelle Judge, began promising homebuyers a “Chip and Joanna Gaines’ type of vibe” for a reasonable price, the offer was difficult to resist.
However, what the Judges delivered was shoddy, dangerous renovation work.
“They really pitched themselves as this ‘Chip and Joanna Gaines’ type of vibe,” homeowner Lane Simmons told ABC 11. Simmons and his wife paid the couple $200,000 to renovate their home. “My house, everything they did was wrong. We had a family friend come over who’s also a contractor to look at everything, and he’s like ‘a lot of this is unsafe; it’s like the worst job I’ve probably ever seen.'”
“My house — everything that they did is wrong. Within weeks, my tile is cracking. My floors are cracking. My kitchen floor is sinking in. The exterior trim looks like a child did it. All the framing, we had to re-tear out and rebuild. My staircase had to be re-torn out and rebuilt. It was only held up by one piece of board on the inside. Just code violation after code violation,” he added.
The Northern District of Texas U.S. Attorney’s Office explained the scam in a public release, stating that the Judges signed 40 contracts worth $4.8 million from August 2020 to January 2023. The couple attracted clients with below-market bids for custom architecture, construction and interior design/décor services, and claimed that Chris was a licensed architect.
The Judges would request an initial payment to start the project and subsequent installments as the project progressed, but would never complete the service.
The couple blew through the funds, spending $865,000 on personal expenses, including $10,000 on plastic surgery and $82,000 on Amazon purchases, according to federal records.
“He just walked off,” homeowner Kristin Newman told WFAA in Dallas. “He just stopped talking to us. Never came back.”
“This isn’t just a bad business decision or ‘I don’t know how to build houses,’” Newman said, noting that she paid a total of $400,000 to $200,000 to the Judges and another $200,000 to fix their mistakes. “This was — he chose to lie. He chose to steal. And Raquelle chose to lie and to steal, along with him.”
Chris Judge pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in federal prison. Meanwhile, Raquelle Judge pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. They also face monetary penalties, restitution and terms of supervised release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
The couple will face sentencing within the next four months.
