Conwoman who duped US TV producer with tales of her ‘Irish royal family’ to be extradited

Scammer ‘heiress’ wanted by authorities in North

He admitted to falling for her fantasist tales

A WOMAN who posed as an heiress to a fictional Irish royal family while claiming to have intimate connections to Hollywood A-listers is behind bars in the US and awaiting extradition to Belfast.

Marianne ‘Mair’ Smyth will answer to new charges stemming from a 2009 scam that authorities say she was orchestrating in Belfast.

After learning of her imminent arrest, Smyth absconded to the US to begin a litany of new swindles.

According to court records, the PSNI said Smyth worked at several UK-based mortgage companies.

She is accused of convincing five people whom she met through that work to give her a total of about £135,570 (€159,000) that she promised to invest on their behalf in a non-existent, high interest-bearing bank account. However, she kept the money for herself.

The PSNI planned to arrest Smyth in 2009 but she was tipped off in advance and fled the North with her family.

Prior to leaving, Smyth’s daughter, Chelsea Fowler, said that her mother had more than a dozen of their dogs put down because they were in such a rush to get away.

The most infamous of her scams in the US involved TV producer Johnathan Walton, who befriended Smyth in 2013 when they lived in the same building.

In his hugely popular podcast Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress, Walton admits that he fell for Smyth’s fantasist tales that she stood to inherit nearly $40million from her regal family, whom 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.

Smyth was originally arrested in 2018 on charges of grand theft by false pretence, 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 Covid-19 and 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.

Smyth convinced Walton that she was friendly with Hollywood A-listers including Jennifer Aniston and Ashley Judd.

Walton and Smyth met in 2013 at his Los Angeles apartment complex. She persuaded the TV producer 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 cousins over her inheritance, which had caused the freeze.

Smyth 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 whom she claimed wanted to squeeze her out of her great-uncle’s will.

Walton eventually realised he had been conned when he carried out a check on court documents after Smyth’s arrest.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Walton described how Smyth charmed him 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,’ he said.

He added: ‘That’s how they get in your life, they try to help you.’

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 showed Walton texts and emails which she said were from Ms Judd and Ms Aniston.

‘She seemed wealthy, she seemed educated, she fit the part that she was playing to a T,’ he Taken in: Johnathan Walton and, left, Marianne Smyth, who spoke of her royal links said. At one point she asked him for rent money, claiming her accounts had been frozen.

He got her a $5,800 cashier’s cheque. Then, when she moved into a cheaper apartment, he 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.

Walton only found out the truth in 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 him.

At Smyth’s January 2019 trial, her daughter Chelsea told how her mother was a ‘troubled person who has used her intelligence malevolently’.

She added: ‘The things that she has been accused of, I’m absolutely disgusted by.’