Beware the Serial Squatter of Malibu’s Point Dume

On a cool September evening in 2021, a 65-year-old artist named Alden Marin took a stroll down to the majestic beach at Point Dume to take in the sunset.

The beach itself is public property, but the easiest ways to access the best parts are through private land owned by the residents of this upscale stretch of Malibu. In practice, its miles of picturesque cliffs and pristine coves are among the most exclusive preserves in California. Owning a “beach key” to one of the accesses is a serious status symbol. It means you’re a local. You belong.

On this particular evening, Alden would later tell his sister, he encountered a quirky, energetic middle-aged woman. She had shoulder-length frizzy brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a British accent, and she introduced herself as Ellie Mae McNulty, an actor and screenwriter.

Alden, who had graduated from Stanford and attended the Sorbonne before running a successful wine business, had been battling stage IV melanoma for the past three years or so. The diagnosis and subsequent chemotherapy had left him struggling with major depression and distress, so their conversation was a welcome respite from the isolation of the pandemic.

He’d see McNulty a few more times over the next month, on the beach as well as at the supermarket and other shops in town. They became friendly, and McNulty suggested they attend an art exhibition together. Then, according to Alden, about a month after their first encounter on the beach, McNulty mentioned that she was looking for a place to stay for a few days while waiting for her next residence to be finished. By the end of their chat, Alden would later recall, he had invited her to stay at his two-bedroom condominium “for a few days until her new place was readied.”

What could go wrong? She must have a beach key or be close to someone who does, he thought. For Alden, a sensitive painter and poet, the excitement of having some companionship overcame whatever doubts he harbored.

“She saw in my brother a kind of perfect storm,” says Alden’s sister, Mindy Marin, a veteran casting director who has worked on such films as Clear and Present Danger and Thank You for Smoking. “She has this actressy English thing about her. Super flirty. She’s just got it down—especially the men—by being this English rose.”

Soon, though, the mask came off, Alden and his family say. In the months ahead, they claim, McNulty would unleash a campaign of psychological terror that helped land him in a medical facility while she changed the locks.

About a month after she moved in, McNulty’s demeanor changed dramatically, Alden would claim in a request for a restraining order. She began berating him and ridiculing his medical problems. Alden said she took videos on her cell phone, threatening to use them as leverage to stay longer. He found himself relegated to one room in the downstairs area of his own home, unable to access the kitchen or other areas without enduring McNulty’s verbal abuse, according to his declaration. “I felt alone and isolated when I was forced to retreat to my downstairs bedroom, and I felt that her comments and abuse were setting me back in my recovery,” he said.

In her response to the court regarding the allegations in Alden Marin’s submitted declaration, McNulty said it was Alden who had pursued her on the beach and invited her to dinner at his condo. “I am a single independent woman and Mr. Marin drove me home after I said no to going to dinner & no to going back to his condo,” she wrote to the court. And she said the Marins had changed the locks on her, while “all her home belongings” were still inside. She asked to be repaid the $468 she said it cost for a locksmith to let her back in.

The fateful decision to let McNulty stay, Alden later told his sister and other family members, was a life-altering miscalculation.

Mindy Marin wanted justice but soon found out that California’s tenancy laws weren’t in her favor, even in what seemed to her to be an open-and-shut case. And as she shared her story with friends in Hollywood, Mindy soon learned that her family wasn’t the first to succumb to McNulty’s charms.

McNulty, who, according to her LinkedIn page, had come to the United States in the 1990s to make it as an actor, was working from a playbook she’d honed over more than two decades.

Mindy didn’t know it yet, but she and her brother were dealing with someone with an apparently deep understanding of how to exploit California’s liberal tenancy laws.

A picturesque promontory jutting out into the Pacific, Point Dume isn’t an obvious target for those looking to take advantage of tenancy laws.

Its seclusion, breathtaking views, and proximity to studios and networks in Los Angeles have made it a magnet for Hollywood A-listers. Bob Dylan has an estate here, and Martin Sheen owns a mansion above the beach. Other celebrity residents include Julia Roberts, Sergey Brin, and Rick Rubin.

It’s a community of high-powered people who, you’d think, wouldn’t be easy to take advantage of. And there are few families whose Point Dume roots go deeper than the Marins.

Originally inhabited by the Chumash Native Americans, Point Dume was named after Francisco Dumetz, a Franciscan missionary who came ashore in the late 18th century. For the next two centuries, the land at Point Dume, windblown and treeless, covered with scrub, was mostly used for cattle ranching.

By the 1930s, stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age like Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor had begun building homes in the area. The Marins’ ancestors, who were in show business, settled in Malibu. As Hollywood’s influence grew, so did Point Dume’s reputation as a haven for the rich and famous.

The area’s modern-day residents are no less insular than their forebears. They prefer to keep the beauty of its coastline to themselves via the system of locked gates. Only the owners of houses on certain streets have keys to the gates, which can add millions to a property’s value.

Seeing McNulty on the beach put Alden at ease. Tourists couldn’t get there easily. And McNulty, then 46, seemed at first like a perfect guest. She was solicitous with Alden, making tea and sharing her passion for yoga and meditation.

A couple of days of idyllic novelty turned into a week, and then two weeks. The excuses for why her new rental wasn’t yet available started to pile up. Checking in on her brother, Mindy felt something was off right away.

“Oh, she’s okay,” Alden told Mindy, she recalls. “She helps around here. She makes breakfast, she makes sure I’m okay.”

But something didn’t sit right with Mindy about this new person in her brother’s life. She started to dig. A brief search of “Ellie Mae McNulty” on the internet seemed to confirm she was a filmmaker of some kind—or at least identified as one.

McNulty’s social media was peppered with photos of her with well-known Hollywood players: David Lynch, Al Pacino, Jim Carrey. Amid the customary feel-good aphorisms (“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men”), she posted about her work-in-progress screenplay—a romantic comedy—and her membership in the Screen Actors Guild.

On July 3, 2021, just months before she ran into Alden on the beach, she had Instagrammed a screenshot of a New York Times review that noted her “exceptional acting” in an off-Broadway play, along with a photo of McNulty and others onstage. What she didn’t mention was that the play in question had been staged in New York in 1998, almost a quarter of a century earlier.

It all seemed a bit phony to Mindy, who is on a first-name basis with many of Hollywood’s top actors, agents, and executives. She’d seen plenty of pretenders in her long career. But she was busy casting Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, so she put her worries aside, though not before telling her brother they could hire live-in help if he needed it rather than rely on this discomfiting stranger. “I don’t like the sound of this,” she said.

On day 31 of her stay with Alden, Mindy says, McNulty’s behavior abruptly changed.

Suddenly she started telling him what to do in his own home. A sensitive individual who avoids conflict, he started to fetch her things. She even got access to his credit cards after he left them out, according to Mindy, and apparently used them for household expenses and food for the house.

“He was scared,” Mindy says.

Since the arrangement had originated as a favor, McNulty never paid any rent, according to Mindy. Later, when they pressured her to leave, McNulty claimed she was waiting for an inheritance from her grandmother before she could pay for a new apartment rental, Mindy says.

At one point, Mindy called her brother to advise him on how to extricate himself from the situation. She says McNulty forced him to turn on the speakerphone, then said to Mindy, “How dare you talk to me about that?”

The problem, the Marins soon discovered, was that the law was on McNulty’s side.

California has long been a tenant-friendly state. State law mandates that guests who occupy a room in a house, even if they are not paying and have no contract, can be considered “tenants at will.” While there are no hard-and-fast rules governing how long it takes to establish informal tenancy, McNulty’s behavior in Alden’s home suggests she considered 30 days to be sufficient.

While her host was staying in the hospital, McNulty allegedly changed the locks—another right afford tenants in California.

Landlords in California seeking to evict unwanted guests like McNulty must go through a formal court process, which can take months. The state’s laws were designed to prevent landlords from unfairly evicting renters.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice noted that not paying rent, being a “nuisance,” and “engaging in criminal activity on the premises” are all considered “just cause for eviction” under state law.

But some tenants are exploiting California’s laws for personal gain.

One Airbnb guest in Los Angeles refused to vacate the premises for 570 days without paying rent, and the company now advises hosts to limit stays in California to 28 days. Hotels sometimes reregister long-staying guests to prevent them from establishing tenancy. To protect landlords from “at-will tenants,” rental agreements in California stipulate that guests should not stay at a property for more than 14 days in a six-month period, or for more than seven consecutive days.

But Alden had no formal contract with McNulty, and no awareness that she had become a tenant.

“Successful, smart people get fleeced because they have no idea these laws exist,” Mindy says.

As Mindy learned the details of the laws, she realized she was in for a fight. Her brother’s fragile state, and what the family saw as McNulty’s increasingly aggressive behavior, emboldened her.

Mindy says McNulty then began to trash the place, flushing cloth napkins down the toilet, blocking the pipes, and leaving feces in the toilet bowl, in what appeared to be a show of spiteful defeat.

Others have used such strategies to make landlords appear negligent.

In the case of the overstaying Airbnb guest, the fight began over water damage in the bathroom that the landlord said was not there when he rented the unit, according to the Los Angeles Times. The tenant stopped paying rent and contacted the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, which found two code violations, including failure to obtain a permit to install a shower. A judge later ruled that the tenant could not be evicted as the unit had been improperly listed. She requested $100,000 in relocation fees from the landlord but finally moved out after he refused, the Times reported.

At the time, the Marins were not aware of how difficult—and costly—rental laws can be to navigate.

The combination of Alden’s recent battle with cancer and the turmoil at home took a toll on his health. On January 11, 2022, according to a court filing, Alden was taken by ambulance to Sherman Oaks Hospital’s psychiatric unit. He was diagnosed with major depression and a possible psychotic break, which he attributed to “the threatening presence and worsening conditions and abuse imposed by the Respondent, causing extreme pressure on me as I merely attempted to live in my own house.”

While her host was gone, McNulty allegedly changed the locks—another right afforded tenants in California. According to Mindy, McNulty ignored requests to leave the house and hand over the keys. In his court declaration Alden said she texted his family, saying she didn’t want him to return to his home and insisting she could “heal” him through Transcendental Meditation taught by her friends. She even requested $12,000 from the family (as a “loan”) to vacate the premises.

“She stole the place out from under him,” Mindy says.

In a rage, Mindy started to dig deeper.

Searching online, Mindy pieced together a rough outline of McNulty’s life history.

She was born in 1975 and grew up in Oxhey Hall, an area near London where Henry VIII once had a hunting lodge.

Her father, a communications consultant named John McNulty, had been a director of Mensa, the British-based organization for people with high IQs, but he reportedly resigned in the mid-1990s amid a scandal over expenses. He denied wrongdoing and no charges were filed. McNulty attended private school, where she fell in love with the theater after a trip to see The Taming of the Shrew.

“Found my real home,” she later wrote of the experience. “Spent the rest of my life doing my best to get back there.”

After high school McNulty moved to London to pursue her dream of becoming an actor while taking a series of jobs in related fields to pay the bills. According to her LinkedIn profile, she built props and painted sets for the BBC, worked for Ridley Scott’s commercial production company, and became a projectionist at a movie theater.

Then, like many aspiring British actors, she tried her luck in the US. In 1995 she enrolled as a painting and sculpture student at the Art Students League of New York, according to her LinkedIn page, then got a foot in the door on Broadway as a production assistant with Wait Until Dark, a play remembered, if at all, for Quentin Tarantino’s wooden performance.

Outgoing and vivacious, McNulty got to know the right people, or so she claimed. Tarantino taught her New York slang during rehearsals, according to her LinkedIn, and a top Broadway producer hired her as a script reader, providing feedback on new plays. She also began to hone her acting skills.

In 1998 she auditioned for the New Group theater’s off-Broadway production of a British play called The Fastest Clock in the Universe and landed a leading role as a streetwise 17-year-old Londoner. According to one person involved in the production, McNulty struggled during rehearsals and clashed with the female director. She spent several hundred dollars on a pair of shoes to wear onstage, according to the person involved in the production, then burst into tears when she was told that the company didn’t have the money to pay for such expenses.

But she was “cute” and “sexy,” the person said, and with coaching was able to pull off the role.

Reviewing the show for The New York Times, critic Peter Marks “”called McNulty a real find and said she possessed a “wild cackle that pitches upward into the range of dog-hearing and the kind of pluck that helps explain why the British triumphed in two world wars.” Her career, he wrote, is “no doubt in ascendance.”

“My dream came true,” she later wrote. “Working NYC actor.”

After the Times review, Sam Cohn, one of the city’s top talent agents, took McNulty to Michael’s, the Midtown power-lunch spot, and signed her up, said the person involved in the performance. “He said I was going to be a great artist,” McNulty wrote on Instagram in January 2024.

McNulty said Cohn set her up with an audition for the female lead opposite Nicolas Cage in Martin Scorsese’s next film, Bringing Out the Dead.

At the audition, Ellen Lewis, Scorsese’s longtime casting director, asked how, with so little experience, she’d managed to secure Cohn as her agent, McNulty wrote in the Instagram post. “Before she even let me read/do my work I was intimidated and simply said quietly ‘He came to see me in my first lead role in a play with the New Group.’”

In the end, the role in Bringing Out the Dead went to Patricia Arquette.

Today, McNulty regularly tags on social media people involved in that theater performance from more than 20 years ago—a reminder, perhaps, of the path her life could have taken.

Instead, Cohn soon dropped her, says the person involved in the performance. McNulty got a job reviewing screenplays for Ben Barenholtz, a Hollywood producer, according to her résumé, and continued to audition for acting parts. In 2003 she landed a minor role in The Sweet Life, a low-budget film about a bartender who falls in love with two brothers.

From there, things seemed to unravel. She married a British fashion designer based in New York but soon divorced him. She held down jobs for only a year at a time, according to her LinkedIn page. The film failed to propel her acting career.

“I realized that she had started doing it when she first landed in New York City 20 years ago,” Natasha Honan says. “She’s been doing this her whole life.”

And so, in 2004, she headed to Los Angeles, still hoping to break into show business. Now on the cusp of her 30s, her new dream apparently was to make it not as an actor but as a screenwriter.

It’s unclear when McNulty began actively trying to exploit California’s tenancy laws for her own benefit.

Shortly after arriving in LA, she answered an ad for a room to rent. Two young women living in an old house in Mid-City were looking to sublet a spare bedroom. “It was a bit of a last-minute thing,” says one of the women, Pauli Orchon, a film and television producer then in her 20s.

According to Orchon, McNulty spent a lot of time in her room. When she did socialize with her housemates, she had a habit of bringing up her divorce. “She made it out like she was this poor victim,” Orchon says. “Helpless me. Feeble, silly, fragile me.”

“She always used the British thing because Americans are quite stupid when they hear a British accent,” she adds. “I’m like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t work with me, sweetie. I lived there.’”

From day one, according to Orchon, McNulty complained that the room didn’t live up to what had been advertised. She asked them to reduce the already-below-market rent, Orchon says.

On Halloween night, Orchon heard the door click and a taxi pull away. McNulty had cleared out, leaving her housemates on the hook for two months’ rent, according to Orchon. “She actually was exceedingly calculating,” she says.

It was only a matter of a few hundred dollars. They tried to get the money from McNulty by filing a small-claims lawsuit, but records show that the case was dismissed by court order.

Still hoping to break into Hollywood, McNulty sought to cultivate relationships with powerful figures. She met the director David Lynch at a museum event and began practicing Transcendental Meditation through his foundation, according to her Instagram.

But McNulty has, on occasion, oversold her career as a screenwriter and overstated her relationships with celebrities, which mostly amounted to passing encounters and photo opportunities. She claimed in one email to a landlord that Mike Medavoy, the legendary producer involved with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Terminator, was paying her for a script she was writing. That was a mirage. Michael Lee Peterson, vice president of development at Medavoy’s company, Phoenix Pictures, recalls taking one call from McNulty years ago, but says they had no plans to work with her.

In reality, McNulty appeared to be struggling. A few years after her Halloween-night disappearance, McNulty rented an extra bedroom from a writer and filmmaker named Jason Gurvitz and another roommate.

At first McNulty was sweet and seemingly innocent, Gurvitz recalls. She failed to pay the security deposit or any rent but said a relative would be sending her the money soon. So she moved in without paying anything upfront, Gurvitz says.

“But then it went on and on and she kept avoiding us, and it became pretty obvious, two months in, that this was a scam,” Gurvitz says. McNulty, he adds, would play dumb while attempting to gaslight him and his roommate.

This time, there would be no sudden departure in the middle of the night. Instead, Gurvitz says, she told him to his face that she wasn’t going to pay or leave.

“I’ve been here, and this is where I live now,” Gurvitz recalls her saying.

By this time, according to LA court records, McNulty had been involved in at least four tenancy lawsuits. Some of the lawsuits are sealed, but at least one eviction case was dismissed by the judge. The law, it seemed, was in her favor.

Gurvitz contacted everyone he could find on her Facebook page and began collecting stories. In one, McNulty had allegedly stayed at her yoga teacher’s house without paying rent. She didn’t pay for classes either, it was claimed, but continued to show up for them all the same.

When confronted, her bubbly persona would evaporate, Gurvitz says.

Although an eviction can take months in California, there are ways to speed up the process. One is to get a judge to issue a civil harassment restraining order, which allows the police to intervene. Even then, Gurvitz was told, the LAPD is not permitted to forcibly remove a resident. Instead, they have to persuade the tenant to leave the home, at which point the landlord can lock the person out.

That’s what happened to McNulty. According to Gurvitz, the police asked her to step outside to discuss the civil disobedience ruling he had secured. “And once she came outside of her own volition, and she was basically with the officer, he wouldn’t let her go back inside,” Gurvitz says.

Enterprising adversaries like Gurvitz are a headache. McNulty moved on to a widow in her 80s who was looking to rent out a room in her Santa Monica bungalow. It was a cute house, with a small garden surrounded by trees and flowers.

The details of the lawsuit the widow brought against McNulty in 2016 are sealed. According to a source with knowledge of the situation, the widow was so emotionally distraught by the ongoing legal fight that she agreed to pay McNulty tens of thousands of dollars to leave her house.

By then, it’s possible Los Angeles, the scene of so many legal battles, was losing its luster for McNulty. Or maybe she wanted to move to even nicer surroundings.

Whatever her motivations, McNulty—like many wealthy Angelenos who tire of the city—set a course for Point Dume.

After her brother’s breakdown, Mindy Marin began to search legal records involving McNulty. She says she was surprised to find more than 10 cases stretching back almost two decades. The most recent were all in the Point Dume area.

One of them involved Roger and Natasha Honan, who decided to rent a room attached to their garage in late 2019, after Roger lost his job. The Honans found McNulty on a Facebook group that connects would-be tenants and landlords in the area. Natasha says McNulty identified herself as an English actor and said her house had burned down in the fires earlier that year.

“Slowly, the penny dropped in about two days that something’s not quite right with this girl,” Natasha says. McNulty, she adds, made elaborate excuses for not making rent and sulked when Natasha refused to lend her a family car.

Some of McNulty’s behavior was just plain weird, according to Natasha. One day, she looked in on the apartment and saw a three-foot-high pile of torn paper in the center of the room.

Her behavior inside the main house was even more unnerving. “She’d come into the kitchen while I was cooking and…creep up right behind me,” Natasha says. Sometimes, late at night, they’d hear McNulty tiptoeing onto their floor to do laundry. To protect themselves, they placed an old cowbell on the door from her apartment to the house, but she soon figured out how to enter without making a sound.

One night, McNulty slammed a door and ran away after Natasha demanded the rent, she says. That’s when Natasha began digging online, and found evidence that McNulty had been wrangling in court with landlords since before she moved to LA.

“I realized that she had started doing it when she first landed in New York City 20 years ago,” Natasha says. “She’s been doing this her whole life.”

Ironically, it was the pandemic that gave the Honans the opening they needed to successfully evict McNulty. Their daughter had health problems, and McNulty’s refusal to get vaccinated was putting her at risk.

Meanwhile, employees at Point Dume Village began to take note of McNulty. Staff at Le Cafe de la Plage and the town’s high-end shops came to know her as an eccentric who walked her cats on leashes on the private beaches. She would order coffees and then ask others to pay—or simply make no attempt to pay at all.

McNulty often posted about how much she loved the land around Point Dume and how blessed she was to live in such surroundings. She dreamed of getting back to the success she’d enjoyed in 1990s New York.

Amarjit Singh Marwah, a 98-year-old retired dentist whose patients once included Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor, lives in a mansion in the hills behind Point Dume. He says McNulty turned up at his door one day and asked permission to set up an art fair on his lawn. He agreed, but the art didn’t sell. Eventually, Marwah says, he gave her a few thousand dollars—money he considered a charity donation.

Later, McNulty moved in with another family, who rented a bedroom in their house to her in 2021. She refused to pay and stayed there for months, a family member says, leaving only when the sheriff forcibly evicted her.

That’s when she encountered Alden Marin on the Point Dume beach.

After Alden was allegedly locked out of his apartment, Mindy vowed to fight McNulty in court. At one point, she says, McNulty offered through an intermediary to leave if she were paid $20,000.

“She figures out you hate her so much. You’re afraid of her. You want to get rid of her. You don’t want to go to court. You don’t want those months of your life—tormented, torture—and everything she knows she’s subjecting you to. So she’ll hope you’re going to pay to just get her out,” she says.

This time, though, McNulty’s gambit didn’t work.

“She knew that Alden had the backing of me, who was unrelenting, and his brother, and that she was going to see us in court. And she knew that we had a pretty good case,” Mindy says.

McNulty had also made a misstep. She’d asked for the $20,000 from the Marins as a way to pay a deposit on her next place, a property just east of Point Dume, near Barbra Streisand’s mansion, according to Mindy. She’d provided the banking details of the owner, a retired schoolteacher.

“And the agreement is, she’s got her next grift lined up, like the poor schoolteacher that we unearthed because she was stupid enough to give me the bank information because she was starting to panic,” Mindy says.

Instead of paying her to vacate Alden’s place, Mindy decided to pass a warning to the prospective landlord about McNulty. She never moved in.

In early 2022, the Marins went to court in Los Angeles. Alden was “shaking in his boots,” his sister says. At one point, according to Mindy, McNulty stepped into an elevator with them and proceeded to pursue the family around the courthouse.

“She tried to follow us through stairwells on different floors. We had to wait in a parking garage,” she says. “It was nuts.”

Eventually, a judge ordered McNulty to vacate the premises.

“They threw the book at her,” Mindy says. “But somehow she must be staying somewhere right now. For all we know, she’s got a new victim.”

By the end of last year, McNulty’s whereabouts were unknown. She’d been spotted a few times in Point Dume’s shopping center. A manager at Le Cafe de la Plage Malibu said she’d been banned for harassing customers for free coffee. A security guard for the shopping complex said he’d been told to keep an eye on her.

She was making fewer appearances at the café or the nearby Pavilions supermarket. And she wasn’t seen much on the beaches either.

And so we sent her a text: “Hi is this Ellie?”

“Hi yes this is Ellie!” came the reply. “Please could you remind me where/how we met? :))”

At first she was cordial, sensing, perhaps, that there was something to gain from the interaction. But after it became clear she was the subject of an investigative report about her disputes with landlords, McNulty obfuscated. She declined to meet or answer questions. Eventually she wrote:

“We don’t retaliate and we don’t denounce anyone so I’ll let the sweet truth triumph in the end. Thank you.”

Later, we sent a detailed list of questions. She never responded.

One day in November 2023, just as it was finally starting to turn cold in Point Dume, McNulty reappeared on the doorstep of Marwah, the retired dentist to the stars, asking for more money. Marwah says he declined and told her not to come back.

Lately, she’s been posting photographs from Escondido Beach just east of Point Dume.

As for Alden, he was discharged from the hospital and moved to a new place because he didn’t feel safe in the old condo.

“He was terrified of her after she left,” Mindy says. “He would see her all the time, and it was awful for him.”

After bumping into McNulty one too many times around town and on the beach, Alden finally moved out of Malibu and allowed his family to sell the condo. But life is not the same.

“He’s just not himself. And any of his friends would tell you that, ‘Like, oh my God, what happened to Alden?’”