Was My Friend a Fraud?

To those of us who knew him, Matthew Christopher Pietras seemed larger than life, and well on his way to a place atop the pillars of New York society.

He was an aide-de-camp to Courtney Ross, the multi-millionaire widow of the legendary Time Warner C.E.O., Steve Ross. He played a similar role with the family of George Soros, the billionaire investor, and he also claimed a connection to the Qatari royal family.

He was listed as a producer of the Broadway shows Cabaret and Buena Vista Social Club, among many others. His name was etched on the wall of the recently reopened Frick Collection, and following a multi-million-dollar pledge to the Metropolitan Opera, he was in discussions to have a speakeasy bar named after him in the august institution’s basement.

But, following his sudden death, on May 30 at the shockingly young age of 40, rumors began to fly of lies, theft, and fraud.

I considered Matthew one of my closest friends for more than a dozen years. However, since his death, I realize I had shrugged off inconsistencies in his stories since the very first day we met. Talking to mutual friends in recent days has raised many more questions about the validity of his personal relationships with all of us. Were we really his friends? Or were we just adornments to him, brought out to shine at his parties like the brooches he loved to wear?

So this is my story, about my involvement with a man who acted like he ruled the world, but whose dazzling lifestyle and absurd generosity couldn’t bear too much scrutiny.

A Little Bit Extra

I first met Matthew when we were both working as non-union background actors—the lowest of the lows on set—on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in April 2012. I was playing an upscale party-goer, and he played a cater-waiter. He dropped his tray during the shoot because—as he explained—unlike most young actors, he’d never actually worked in a restaurant.

It was a surprise to find myself engaging with such a personable young man. I was 44, he was 27, so we were an improbable pair. But we chatted all day after he squeezed in next to me. He had an M.B.A. from New York University and spoke easily about his time working as an intern for the United Nations in Afghanistan. He casually mentioned that he lived on Fifth Avenue, at the Pierre. When I asked how that was possible, he said the apartment belonged to his well-to-do grandparents, who’d taken him in when his parents threw him out for being gay. I assumed he was just another trust-fund kid killing time on a TV set.

However, Matthew was tiring of life as a background actor on shows such as Law & Order and Gossip Girl. He had started writing screenplays, and my husband—who was then Time Inc.’s chief content officer—and I often invited him to join us at screenings and parties. He was a great conversationalist who mixed well as he networked through our social circles. In particular, he paid close attention to accomplished “women of a certain age,” who helped form an infrastructure of credibility around their young friend.

His way with middle-aged women extended to a friend’s wife, who thought he would make a good mentor for her teenage son. Matthew was willing, but instead of being a role model for the young man, he became his lover. I was appalled when I learned of the affair months later. Even if the kid was above the age of consent, he was still in high school. However, when Matthew asked me not to interfere, I reluctantly bit my tongue. To my surprise, the relationship continued, on and off, for several years.

Matthew was a generous partner. Once, during a lunch, he announced he was taking his boyfriend to the Diamond District to buy a watch, and he invited me to tag along. He was chasing a hard-to-source Patek Philippe, and we all crowded into a cluttered watch shop. Matthew’s young friend tried on several watches, they settled on a handsome timepiece costing about $40,000, and the deal was made. Both Matthew and his friend were flushed with excitement over the acquisition.

In 2015, ahead of my 10th wedding anniversary, I sought his mailing address to send him an invitation to the party. Instead of the Pierre, he gave me a P.O.-box address almost two miles to the north. Such discrepancies didn’t bother me as I enjoyed his company, and the stakes were very low. I wrote to a mutual friend at the time that Matthew’s “capacity to perform and to lead a life that’s a mix of fact and fantasy is probably very useful to a would-be actor.” However, when he decided to leave acting and took the job working for Courtney Ross, I was thrilled.

The Soros Connection

I moved to Los Angeles in early 2018 after my husband joined the Los Angeles Times as its executive editor. While there, Matthew was a frequent visitor who joined us for dinners at hot spots like the Tower Bar and Pasjoli. He was traveling with Ross at the time, organizing her affairs and involving himself in the sale of her blue-chip art collection. Matthew said she called him “the son she never had.” He was also dating a handsome, and age-appropriate, piano tuner he had met at the Metropolitan Opera.

However, Matthew chafed at working for Ross—he said he found her needy and had grown tired of mediating her problems with her daughter—and I was delighted when he said that he had scored a significant upgrade: working for the Soros family. I thought he’d finally figured out how to live the life he’d once pretended to have. (Courtney Ross did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)

Matthew was vague about what his job entailed. He said he “ran” George Soros and his sons Alex and Gregory, traveling with them when they went abroad to evaluate investments in Luxembourg and Ireland, and arranging the complicated logistics behind Soros family gatherings.

In particular, he seems to have worked closely with Gregory Soros, the youngest son, a recluse who is rarely seen in public. Matthew could be found attending zoning meetings on Shelter Island, where Greg is one of the biggest landowners, and I once overheard him spend literally hours on the phone dealing with Greg’s personal-chef situation—Greg didn’t want to have a chef on retainer but wanted one ready at a moment’s notice no matter where he was—which took on an earth-shattering importance. As much as I thought the assignment was absurd, I was struck by Matthew’s competence in addressing it. He was very good at making himself indispensable.

“The Matthew Show”

The coronavirus kept us from seeing each other for almost two years, and when we finally got together again, in New York in May of 2021, I was shocked by Matthew’s physical transformation. He had undergone significant plastic surgery—hair implants, multiple nose jobs, and cheek filler.

He had a new tribe of gorgeous friends, and a core group who joined him on trips—on his dime—to Egypt, Bhutan, and other exotic destinations. He also hosted elaborate, expensive dinners for my husband and me at places like Four Twenty Five, by Jean-Georges. When he came to our apartment it wasn’t enough to bring a bottle of Dom Perignon. It had to be a limited-edition bottle, with label artwork by Iris van Herpen or Michael Riedel. I figured it was his over-the-top way of reciprocating for all those events and dinners where he’d been our guest.

Matthew’s personal style had become more pronounced, too. He’d commissioned a brooch from the Irish jeweler Nigel O’Reilly, which featured a pear-shaped, 3.26-carat Colombian emerald. He had a diamond-encrusted Tiffany Lock Bangle and multiple vintage diamond brooches, including a substantial Cartier. His brooch habit was so extreme that he loaned them out to friends, and he even had his custom Hermès tuxedo made with a special protective overlay for the lapel, so that the brooch pins wouldn’t mar the satin.

For a man who worked in an environment where even the gardeners sign NDAs, he sure liked to gossip. Last summer, when I learned that Alex Soros was marrying the Clinton political operative Huma Abedin, I texted him to see if he was involved in the wedding planning. He replied, “Obviously. I negotiated the pre-nup.” (The Soros family did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)

He liked playing wedding planner. In the last year, he committed to paying for two different lavish weddings—one for a friend, at a castle in Ireland, and one for his dentist, in Spain—in addition to springing for a baby shower, a baby gender-reveal party, and many other expensive parties for his friends.

It was what I called “The Matthew Show,” in which he turned the rest of us into secondary characters in his opulent dramas. The dermatologists and plastic surgeons who worked on Matthew’s face appeared at his galas. His travel agent, his laser facialist, and his trainer were often part of his entourage. And Matthew adopted many people from the Soroses’ circle into his own.

In September 2023 I was Matthew’s guest at a performance of the opera Dead Man Walking at the Met. There were 30 of us in multiple boxes and spread over multiple tables at the gala afterward. He was on the gala program as one of three “Principal Benefactors.” I loved the access and the glamour and the excuse to wear a cocktail dress or gown. But the evenings kept getting bigger, involving more people, and became almost manic in their intensity and frequency.

When his dentist converted to Judaism, Matthew decided to do the same. It gave him a wonderful excuse to host a Passover Seder for dozens of his friends at Le Bernardin. When I looked around at the crowd, I saw only a handful of us who’d known him from before his pandemic makeover.

“A Great Scandale”

In January of this year, Matthew invited me to join him at a private chalet he had taken at Les Airelles in Courchevel. I flew there unsure of what to expect, but the reality was astonishing. We skied with personal guides and lunched at oligarch-heavy spots such as Bagatelle. I wished that I liked caviar, because it was everywhere.

The week in Courchevel was heady. Because he’d already been there for two weeks, the staff at Les Airelles viewed Matthew as a very important client. And whether paid for by the Soros family or by Matthew himself, the amounts of money on display were startling. At the end of the stay, Matthew boasted that he had tipped the two concierges $30,000 each.

But there was a moment when Matthew shifted gears and a darker side emerged. He went from delighting in our praise to making us squirm. He said he was now a Republican and had interviewed for a job at the White House. When I asked him why, he said, “Because it would be such a great scandale.” I tried to make sense of Matthew. When Trump had first been elected, in 2016, Matthew and I had exchanged a volley of messages, both aghast at the outcome. What’s more, he now worked for the Republican Party’s bogeyman.

On our final night in Courchevel he aggressively pursued two straight men in our party, both of whom were reliant on his hospitality. One of the men was visibly uncomfortable, while the other was receptive and spent the night with him. The next day, Matthew had chartered a helicopter to fly us back to Geneva, but the weather was bad so we ended up in a van. During the ride, Matthew revealed that his young friend had asked him afterward if he was now going to get AIDS. Matthew rolled his eyes, indifferent to those worries. There was an undercurrent of contempt that seeped into our time in France.

Following Courchevel, I attended more galas and events as Matthew’s guest. Each evening I’d go home, my mind spinning from the extravagance of the celebrations. At a March gala, to celebrate the reopening of the Frick, Matthew’s tribe—now comprising more than 60 guests—filled an entire room decorated with the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. We all applauded as he gave a toast, and we admired his name carved in stone on the wall. I sat beside the husband of one of Matthew’s dermatologists, who cheered me on as I cracked open my chocolate dessert with a small metal hammer engraved in honor of the occasion.

Matthew’s generosity was delirious. He just loved giving toasts and basking in the gratitude of his associates—and they shared it all on Instagram. He suggested that his work running the Soros family justified a huge salary—although some of his friends thought he was merely Greg’s personal assistant. Whatever he was doing with the family, he acted as if he was a member of it. I reasoned that if they seemed comfortable with his extravagance—after all, he was on the board of the Metropolitan Opera with George’s sister-in-law, Daisy Soros—why should I question it, even if the math was making my head hurt.

“The New Adventure”

Matthew once told me he had a racehorse named Sancho that he kept and rode in Riverdale in the Bronx, but he never mentioned it again. How many horse owners only mention their horse once? He said that the fashion designer Tory Burch was his neighbor at the Pierre, and that he had hired Peter Marino to decorate his apartment, but for all our closeness, he never invited me to see it. Somehow it was always being renovated. (Peter Marino did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.) While in Courchevel, he boasted of being on his high school’s ski team, but he’s not present in any team pictures from his four years at Minnechaug Regional High School, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, back when he was still “Matt,” the son of an assistant district attorney and the manager of a small factory. What was real and what was make-believe?

In the year leading up to his death, he’d told all of us that he was taking a new job with the Qatari royal family. It would involve alternating weeks in London and New York, and quarterly trips to Doha. In the rarefied world of family offices, this was as big as it gets. He told me that part of his compensation included a clothing allowance and an apartment at No. 1 Grosvenor Square, where the most modest apartment sells for around $13 million. A photo of the building was his final post on Instagram, with the caption “Time for the new adventure to begin.” (The Qatari royal family did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)

But when he was in London in mid-May, he stayed in a one-bedroom suite at the Connaught hotel at a cost of 3,000 pounds a night. He said the Grosvenor Square apartment was not ready. (When a mutual friend visited the building, the front desk said they had no knowledge of Matthew or of any apartments undergoing renovation.) Matthew went to see Ewan McGregor in My Master Builder, got a facial, and took a private Pilates class. He also went shopping for wedding gowns with one of his friends. They picked out a dress by Galia Lahav, and Matthew put down a deposit for it. The dress was intended to be his wedding gift to her.

Matthew was supposed to return to New York the weekend of May 31, and we were scheduled to have dinner on June 3, but he came back earlier than anticipated. He skipped out on the wedding-dress fittings he’d committed to attending in London and instead went to the American Ballet Theatre Spring Gala on May 28 in New York. He had an appointment with one of his dermatologists on May 29. That night, he went to sleep and never woke up.

Until the toxicology reports are released, it’s impossible to know exactly how he died. Was it suicide? He’d joked about killing himself in his 40s, when he thought he would be at his peak. Was it stress? I heard a rumor after his death that he had recently received a call from one of the arts organizations to which he’d pledged millions saying there had been a problem with the first tranche of his commitments. Whispers of outright theft were bubbling up among his friends. Was he fearing the prospect of an investigation, a tawdry trial, and the low-thread-count existence of years in prison? I keep looking at the photo of him from the A.B.T. gala. He looks haunted. Was he just getting up his nerve?

According to sources, his will said he wanted no reception or wake, and he was cremated almost immediately. His executor even asked the keepers of an online memorial to take it down, in deference to Matthew’s wishes. But what he wrote in his will is at odds with the life he lived. If there was a microphone, he grabbed it. If there was a chair, he stood on it to command the room. He was desperate to be the center of attention. (The executor of Matthew’s estate did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)

Looking at Matthew’s recent travel and philanthropic activities, a-back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests he’d spent more than $25 million since the pandemic ended and that he’d made pledges for even more. It’s impossible to know exactly how Matthew got all the money he spent and gave away, especially since the likely sources—the Soros family and Ross—are unlikely to make their complaints public. The Metropolitan Opera, which dealt with fraudster Alberto Vilar more than 20 years ago, has already removed Matthew’s name from the list of its managing directors on their Web site but has otherwise said nothing.

What was the real truth behind Matthew? Was he an embezzler? A fraud? A fabulist? Or was he living the life that his reclusive billionaire employer couldn’t live for himself? Perhaps his undoubted charm and charisma had gained him total access to the pocketbooks of some of the wealthiest and most secretive people in the world. In turn, he traded off their mystique and mystery.

Looking back to when I first met him as a TV extra, I realize that when he appeared on a show like Gossip Girl, he was using it as his future source material. He was getting used to living in a world of absurd riches and excess. He was creating Matthew Christopher Pietras. It was his masterwork.

Jane Boon has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering. Her second novel, Bold Strokes, was published in 2024, and she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, and McSweeney’s