I had it all. Then I fell for a conman — and lost everything
It’s the ultimate cautionary tale for every divorcee: how a middle-class mother living in a Cotswolds idyll was seduced by a fraud who claimed he was a Rothschild — then tricked her out of £500,000...
WITH THE SON THEY HAD TOGETHER
FIFTEEN years ago, Christine Handy’s life was fizzing with opportunity and new beginnings. At 40, she was financially secure and living mortgage-free in a handsome five-bedroom townhouse.
A part-time job provided a balance to caring for three young children, and, divorced from her wealthy Cotswold landowning husband, she was happy in a new relationship. Today, her life looks very different. Instead of a large house in leafy Cheltenham, home is a humble semi-detached housing association property close to the North Wales border, where she lives with her fourth child and partner. It is the closest to a secure home she has known for years. Unable to work because of an arthritic condition, she relies on Universal Credit to support herself.
Christine’s reduced circumstances are not the result of financial mismanagement or leading an extravagant lifestyle. Rather, they poignantly illustrate the devastating legacy of conmen — a toll that lingers long after the headlines they attract have faded.
Because the new partner she was so excited about all those years ago was the impressively named Alexander Marc d’Ariken de Rothschild-Hatton — an apparently debonair financier who told her he was the illegitimate son of multi-millionaire banker Edmond de Rothschild.
He swept her off her feet and they had a son, Marcus, together.
He also defrauded her of more than half a million pounds and destroyed her life.
As the lies of plain Marc Hatton unravelled one by one, Christine, now 55, also learnt that he had raped and sexually assaulted a teenage girl at the time when she was pregnant.
While Hatton did his best to evade justice by fleeing to the U.S., he was extradited to the UK in 2008 and, in March 2010, was jailed for 18 years for rape, sexual assault and fraud.
Christine says of his conviction: ‘I thought justice had been served and it was time to move on. You think the worst is over.’
If only that were true. While Hatton’s jail sentence has now ended, Christine’s sentence continues. In the years since his conviction she has faced ever more hardship: bankruptcy, homelessness, endless temporary accommodation, many changes of school for Marcus, now 15 — and an exhausting, and ultimately largely unsuccessful, fight for reparation from her banks. At times she was so hard up she had to use food banks.
While devoid of self-pity, she breaks down several times as she relives her harrowing ordeal. ‘It has been a downward spiral and at times I was financially hanging on by my fingertips,’ she says. ‘It has been a fight to survive.’
Then there is the guilt Christine battles as she raises a much-loved son who was forced, as he grew older, to confront the ugly truth about the father of whom he is the spitting image. He has had no contact with Hatton since the latter fled, and refuses to call him ‘father’.
‘Life has been tough for Marcus. He’s had to put up with such a lot,’ Christine says quietly. ‘He has faced endless upheaval. And, of course, he has had to accept some really difficult things.
‘I remember being in the car with him a few years ago when he asked why his dad got such a huge sentence for fraud. I had to tell him there was another court case, and over the years he has learnt the full truth. One thing I have consistently said to him is that you can’t choose your family.’
Whether Hatton deliberately targeted her she will never know — but her life would turn on a single meeting in a coffee shop.
In March 2003 she was enjoying a few quiet moments in a cafe between school drop-offs for her children — who are now aged between 21 and 25 — and starting her part-time job in a boutique, when a fortysomething man asked if he could join her.
‘I assumed the other tables were full and, without looking up, said: “Go ahead,” ’ she recalls. ‘But then, when I glanced around, I realised the tables were empty. I thought it was a bit odd, but we chatted for ten minutes.’
She found her new friend charming, interesting and attentive.
More coffee-shop encounters followed, after which the man who had introduced himself as Alexander Ariken asked her out for dinner — then whipped out his passport to reveal the name Alexander Marc d’Ariken de Rothschild-Hatton.
‘I joked: “Don’t they make cigarettes?” — meaning Rothmans. But he then started on this convoluted explanation of his heritage, saying he needed me to know who he was,’ Christine says.
Her new friend ‘Alexander’ told Christine he was the illegitimate Singaporean-born son of banking heir Edmond de Rothschild and his — entirely fabricated — Chinese lover. ‘Alexander’ said he had subsequently been raised by a man called Peter D’Ariken and his wife Philomena. He said Philomena had gone on to marry a Fred Hatton in England after Peter’s death.
THE truth was that he been born in Singapore — to Philomena (who has the Chinese name Tan Leng Giok) and a man called Peter Ariken. And Philomena had gone on to marry a Fred Hatton.
Christine can only assume that his impressive passport was a fake.
That wasn’t all. Hatton told her he was Eton and Oxford-educated and had a career in international finance, none of which turned out to be true.
What he did have was a criminal history: an 18-month prison stint in 2000 for defrauding two Bournemouth businessmen and a 21-month prison sentence in Helsinki, Finland, for unpaid business debts and fraud.
Blithely unaware of this, Christine was quickly seduced by the charming stranger, meeting members of Hatton’s extended family.
By the end of 2003 the couple were already talking of marriage. ‘It sounds like a cliché but he honestly swept me off my feet,’ she says. It was then Hatton asked Christine for money for the first time, specifically £75,000 to cover fees for his MBA at a London business school.
‘He’d already softened me up by saying he had money in Switzerland,’ she says. ‘I saw it as an investment in our joint future and helping out my partner. That’s what you do in relationships.’
She also handed over sums including £100,000 in instalments to fund another business course, £105,000 to put in a Swiss investment fund and £50,000 to cover a tax bill.
All in all, prosecutors calculated he had fleeced her of £565,000 — money she borrowed against her home.
Whenever Christine asked for documentary proof, Hatton would reply that the paperwork was in a safe deposit box in Switzerland.
‘I knew he was spending a lot of time in Geneva, so this made sense,’ says Christine. Did alarm bells never ring? Christine says no: ‘His sister was a barrister and there was always some plausible reason why things were as they were.’
By then, Christine had another compelling reason to believe her lover’s promises: she had given birth to his child.
She says: ‘When we first met, Hatton kept telling me he wanted us to have a family of our own. As a mother of three already I was reluctant, but he wore me down.
‘Once Marcus was born, I was exhausted by looking after a new baby and my older children, as he travelled such a lot for work. Or so I thought.’
Looking back, she thinks this was one of Hatton’s tactics. ‘He kept me in a state of confusion,’ she recalls.
Like all con artists, he also isolated her from her friends and persuaded her to move from the familiarity of Cheltenham to a rented home in the countryside, on the pretext that his mother could help with childcare.
Only after meeting Hatton’s sisterin-law for the first time in the summer of 2006 did the scales fall from Christine’s eyes.
‘I had been warned she had an axe to grind against him but I liked her.
‘Shortly afterwards she came to see me and said: “I hope you’re not financially involved with him.” Her exact words were: “If he’s a de Rothschild, I’m Mickey Mouse.” The panic was instant.’
Christine confronted Hatton later that day. ‘The mask slipped for the first time,’ she says. ‘He was swearing and shouting in my face.’
After storming off, Hatton returned the next day, having changed tactics. ‘He was contrite, begging me not to go to the police, saying he’d been scammed, which was why he couldn’t
give me the money back,’ she says. It was too late. Horrified, Christine contacted police and a lawyer.
‘I realised I had lost everything,’ she says. ‘I’d been a total fool. It was like living in a bizarre dream — all I could do was take every day as it came and try to keep life as normal as possible for the kids.’
Worse was to come. In February 2007, three months after he had last appeared on her doorstep, Hatton vanished.
Christine set up a website to try to track him down, only to be contacted by several other women from across the globe who said they were, or had recently been, involved with Hatton.
‘Overall, he was involved with around 20 other women throughout our time together,’ she says. ‘Everything we had was a sham.’ Even that did not compare to the discovery, in July 2008, that Hatton had been charged with the rape and assault of a teenage girl he had introduced to Christine on several occasions as the daughter of an old schoolfriend.
Four years earlier, he had paid for an abortion for the girl at the same time Christine was three months pregnant with Marcus.
‘That was when I realised I really never knew him at all,’ she says. ‘I had a young daughter of my own. It was sickening.’
Then there was the discovery of a lock-up containing some of the booty Hatton had bought with his ill-gotten gains: designer suits and shoes; silver cufflinks from Asprey; a £66,000 BMW.
‘Police now think he was using the money from me to present himself as an affluent individual to target other people for scams,’ she says.
CHrIsTInE, meanwhile, found herself on the breadline. Unable to pay her rent, she was twice evicted from accommodation, and by november 2014 she and Marcus were homeless.
‘I had to put all the furniture into storage and the kids had to move in with their dad,’ she says.
‘Marcus and I ended up living in short-term lets with a bag at the end of the bed. I’d pick up Marcus from school on the Friday and he wouldn’t know where we would be staying for the weekend. It was hand-to-mouth for a long time.’
Hers was a grim life of minimumwage jobs and tax credits, none of which were ever quite enough to meet her outgoings — a precarious financial position compounded by Christine’s efforts to gain reparation from the banks, which, she says, allowed Hatton to process the money she had given him through accounts on which they had done not even the most basic financial checks.
‘He had given fake names, fake addresses. There were no moneylaundering checks done, no duty of care. My debts were mounting as I was fighting on so many fronts. I always thought we were so close to success, but they did everything they could to rebuff me.’
By October 2016 she had hit rock bottom. ‘I remember sitting on the sofa and I just could not stop crying; it was uncontrollable,’ she says. ‘I remember Marcus looking at me in disbelief because he had never seen me like that before.
‘I was so scared. I couldn’t see a way out of the financial situation.’
Life has, at least, improved since. Moving in to care for her mother before she died gave her and Marcus a home — the one they still live in — and in March 2017 she met her current partner, a plumbing engineer whom she prefers not to name, while working in the kitchen of a local farm.
nonetheless, Christine can never shake her lingering sadness about the damage Hatton has inflicted, particularly on her children. Her three oldest, although they no longer live at home, visit regularly.
‘They are incredibly sympathetic but my greatest regret is that I didn’t give my kids the childhoods they deserved — Marcus especially,’ she says, her eyes filling with tears. ‘He has had to put up with so much and I only hope he has a better future.’
And what of Hatton? After spending 12 years in jail, including time spent on remand, he is being held in a detention centre, waiting to be deported to singapore.
He may appeal against the decision, but Christine tries not to dwell on it either way. As she says: ‘I have had to focus all my energy on surviving.’