An American woman who posed as an heiress to the fictional Irish royal family while claiming to have intimate connections to Hollywood A-listers is behind bars in Maine and awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom.
Marianne ‘Mair’ Smyth will answer to new charges stemming from a 2009 scam that authorities say she was orchestrating while living and working for a mortgage company in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
After learning of her imminent arrest, Smyth absconded to the US to begin a litany of new swindles between 2013 and 2018.
The most infamous of those involved TV producer Johnathan Walton who befriended Smyth in 2013 when they lived in same building. In his hugely popular podcast, Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress, Walton details the long con which saw him part with $100,000.
Walton admits that he fell for Smyth’s fantasist tales that she stood to inherit nearly $40 million from her regal family, who she said helped to draft the Irish constitution, but that it was all being held up because of an unspecified issue she had with a relation.
In turn, Walton ‘lent’ Smyth thousands of dollars, including on one occasion more than $50,000, because he thought it would all easily be paid back when her inheritance came through.
Johnathan Walton described how Marianne Smyth, pictured together, charmed him into making him her best friend with her dazzling tales of Hollywood friendship and her straight-talking personality
Walton discovered she had many aliases and appearances that she used to dupe people
Law enforcement in Belfast learned of Walton’s story and made contact to say they had been searching for Smyth. The host was able to supply them with an address in Maine which led to her being arrested in February.
As a result of her scheme involving Walton, Smyth was originally arrested in 2018 on charges of grand theft by false pretense, after dozens of other victims came forward.
In 2019, she was sentenced to five years behind bars but was quickly released in 2020 due to the Covid-19 where she subsequently decamped to Maine, where she was born.
Authorities believe that she lived in a series of short term accommodations in her home state in order to prevent her past from catching up to her.
While living in Northern Ireland, Smyth is accused of soliciting more than $170,000 from customers of the mortgage company where she worked, promising them to invest it in a ‘high-interest bearing bank account.’ In reality, she kept the money for herself, officials said.
Prior to leaving Northern Ireland, Smyth’s daughter, Chelsea Fowler, said that her mother had their more than a dozen dogs put down because they were in such a rush there was no time to rehouse them.
Smyth convinced Walton that she was friendly with Hollywood A-listers including Jennifer Aniston and Ashley Judd.
Walton and Smyth met in 2013 at a meeting at his L.A. apartment complex to discuss residents having their access to the pool revoked.
She persuaded TV producer Walton to loan her nearly $10,000 so she could cover her rent after claiming her bank accounts had been frozen. She said at the time that she was in a dispute with her cousin’s over her inheritance, which had caused the freeze.
Eventually, Smyth’s lies caught up with her. She is shown entering court after being arrested for grand larceny in 2018
Walton eventually realized he had been conned by checking court documents after Smyth’s arrest. In January 2019, she was eventually convicted of grand larceny and she has now been sentenced to five years behind bars
She also had him charge $50,000 to his credit cards when she was eventually arrested, and said she needed money to take a plea deal.
At the time, she managed to convince him that the arrest was a set-up orchestrated by the same cousins who she claimed wanted to squeeze her out of her great-uncle’s will.
Walton eventually realized he had been conned by checking court documents after Smyth’s arrest.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Walton described how Smyth charmed him into making him her best friend with her dazzling tales of Hollywood friendship and her straight-talking personality.
‘Back then, I was a different person and I took everything at face value. That’s how they get in your life, they try to help you,’ he said, explaining that he fell for her offer of help in fighting their building about the pool restrictions.
Walton and his husband became friends with Smyth, and he and she became particularly close. As their friendship blossomed, she gradually revealed tidbits from her privileged background.
During a visit to her apartment, she pointed out to him a signed document that was framed on the wall which she claimed was the Constitution of Ireland. She pointed to a signature that she said was her great uncle’s.
She said she was due to inherit some of his fortune soon but that there were issues with his children.
To keep up the façade of a Hollywood power player, she said she did not have to work but wanted to and claimed to have friendships with Judd and Aniston.
She even showed Walton texts and emails which she said were from the pair.
‘She seemed wealthy, she seemed educated, she fit the part that she was playing to a T,’ he said.
Smyth promised to introduce him to them but, every time they were due to meet, the ‘stars’ suddenly backed out.
He soon became ‘enthralled’ in her family drama.
‘It was like a soap opera plot, but it was happening in real life,’ he said, adding that he thought nothing of when she got liposuction and plastic surgery because ‘that’s what wealthy women do’.
As they became closer, she confided in him that there was a clause to her inheritance that if she had been convicted of a felony, she would lose it all.
He warned her that her cousins may set her up for a crime to try to squeeze her out of her share.
So when she was arrested for allegedly stealing $200,000 from PacificIslands.com – a luxury travel company she worked for to ‘pass time’ – he immediately suspected the cousins.
Walton paid her $4,200 bond money. One of her boyfriend’s paid him back.
She then asked him for rent money, claiming her accounts had been frozen.
He got her a $5,800 cashier’s check. Then, when she moved into a cheaper apartment, gave her another one for $3,800.
Over the course of the next year, the case dragged.
Eventually, she told him she would be able to resolve it by paying a $50,000 plea deal fee. He charged it to his credit cards.
Then, she was hit with a 31-day jail sentence. She asked for another $4,000 to pay an expert witness to come to testify on her behalf. Walton then gave her another $2,000 to help her pay her lawyer’s fees.
He had believed her story until February 2017 when, while logging on to the jail website to schedule a visit, he found discrepancies between what it said online and what she had told her.
At her January 2019 trial, her daughter was among those who testified. She told how she was a ‘troubled person who has used her intelligence malevolently
Rather than being accused of ‘money laundering’, as she said, she had pleaded guilty to a different charge and agreed to pay $40,000 in restitution – not $50,000 – to settle it with PacificIslands.com.
The company said she had operated a Ponzi scheme with their accounts.
Walton picked her up from jail but only to confront her about her lies.
He then spent the next two years trying to bring her down, pumping his own money into hiring private investigators and lawyers.
It emerged through his research that she had also been accused of fraud in Ireland.
At her January 2019 trial, her daughter was among those who testified. She told how she was a ‘troubled person who has used her intelligence malevolently.’
The daughter added: ‘The things that she has been accused of I’m absolutely disgusted by.’
Walton learned through his research that she had targeted others. Many did not want to speak out because they were so embarrassed.
‘I think she moved here for the same reason we all moved here: to ply her craft.
‘Her craft was to scam people,’ he said.