To the outside world, Mary Carole McDonnell was an influential executive with a thriving entertainment empire.
She drove from her multimillion-dollar estate in La Cañada Flintridge to her Burbank office in a convertible Porsche, and had her 39-foot boat, Sea Mac, docked in Newport Beach.
Her company, Bellum Entertainment, specialized in true-crime shows, children’s educational programs and documentaries, churning out titles such as “It Takes a Killer,” “Unsealed: Alien Files” and “Animal Atlas.”
McDonnell told the world she was the heir to a portion of the McDonnell Douglas aerospace empire with access to $80 million in a trust fund. But over time, the veil on her true identity lifted, authorities say, revealing she was not a wealthy benefactor after all. In October, the 74-year-old was added to the FBI’s newly created Most Wanted Fraudsters list.
She’s been on the run since she was indicted by a grand jury in 2018 for bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to federal court records. Repeated attempts to reach McDonnell by phone and email were unsuccessful.
In 2017, Bellum Entertainment’s freelancers and staff claimed they weren’t getting paid and filed complaints with the California labor commissioner. Workers gathered in protest outside the company’s offices holding signs demanding payment. And process servers began showing up so frequently that McDonnell eventually moved the business to another building with more security.
“I don’t think even she imagined how far it would go and how deep she would get,” said Ted Eccles, an executive producer who shared office space and collaborated on projects with McDonnell. “She had all the trappings of a super successful entertainment executive.”
Federal investigators believe she’s been living in Dubai and the FBI is offering a $150,000 reward for information leading to her arrest and conviction.
“The FBI has historically had tremendous success with our most wanted list, which is what’s most well known to the public. In early 2026, we created this other list because we think fraudsters are an underappreciated and increasingly global and problematic part of our work,” FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Kent told The Times in an interview.
“We would welcome her to walk into any U.S. embassy or consulate anywhere in the world and face justice,” Kent said.
In 2017, as civil lawsuits filed by other companies and unpaid workers began to pile up against McDonnell and her business to the tune of over $1 million, she went to Banc of California to secure a $15-million loan. She allegedly told the bank it was a bridge loan to cover personal expenses until she received distributions from the family trust, according to a lawsuit the bank later filed against McDonnell.
According to a document filed in the civil lawsuit, McDonnell listed among her assets as collateral for the loan: her company, Bellum Entertainment, which she valued at $125 million, property investments valued at more than $1 million, and jewelry, artwork and antiques that added up to another $1 million.
What bankers didn’t know at the time, the civil lawsuit alleged, was that McDonnell wasn’t of the McDonnell Douglas aerospace empire. Her family owned a market in St. Louis, but the trust fund too was a fabrication, according to authorities and the lawsuit.
Federal investigators allege McDonnell forged bank statements from Northern Trust Corp. and a letter that was allegedly signed by one of the company’s employees as proof that she had the funds that could be used as collateral for the loan. McDonnell even convinced someone to notarize the forged bank control agreement without the signatory actually being present, according to a federal indictment.
Within six weeks of the bank approving the loan, McDonnell had drained nearly all of the money from the account, according to the civil lawsuit. That’s when, as the bank’s attorneys describe in civil court filings, they realized the bank was the victim of a “sophisticated fraud.”
When they reached out to Northern Trust about McDonnell’s account, the bank said she didn’t have one and they believed their employee’s signature had been forged, according to emails reviewed by The Times that were filed in court.
The indictment alleges that McDonnell spent some of the funds paying creditors and Bellum Entertainment’s payroll.
Banc of California won a $17-million judgment against McDonnell in 2021, but it’s not clear whether they have seen any money from her.
Another banking institution, the Credit Junction Holdings, also sued McDonnell in November 2018, claiming she duped them with the same backstory to secure a loan for $10 million. That case was later dismissed.
At the same time, vendors hired by Bellum Entertainment started showing up at its headquarters saying they hadn’t been paid. Some were given checks that bounced, others received partial payment and some were ignored completely, according to lawsuits filed against McDonnell in Los Angeles County Superior Court and interviews with past employees.
One of those aggrieved workers was Aaron Cadieux, who was hired to be the director of photography for an episode of a show delving into the Bridgewater Triangle, a region of Massachusetts infamous for reports of paranormal activity, in the spring of 2017. The company gave him $500 upfront with a promise that an additional $2,000 would be paid when the work was completed, he said.
But by the fall, he still hadn’t received the money.
“I should have done my due diligence initially, but I started to look into Bellum at that point and found out that there were a ton of other vendors like myself and in-house employees that hadn’t been paid,” he said.
Some vendors had tried taking Bellum to small claims court, but “none of them were getting anywhere with it,” Cadieux said.
So he tried another approach. He purchased the domain MaryCaroleMcDonnell.com and built a spec of a website where people who were owed money could share their stories. It included McDonnell’s home address and a photo of her face on the body of a large pig.
He emailed a link to the site to McDonnell’s secretary with an ultimatum — pay vendors by his deadline, or the page goes live.
“That must have been what kind of struck a nerve with her because they wired me my money with like five minutes to go on the deadline,” he said.
Still, other vendors didn’t receive their checks, he said, so Cadieux flipped the site live. He then heard from McDonnell, who mentioned a lawyer, so the site came down.
“I know how hard it is to make a living in this industry and what she did to all those hardworking people makes me sick,” he said.
McDonnell told some vendors that she had suffered bank fraud and that’s why the checks weren’t clearing, Eccles said.
“There were all kinds of schemes and an endless string of stories about why the money was late and that new financing was about to come in and everything would be fine,” Eccles said. “It just went from bad to worse, and then suddenly, she was gone. She just disappeared.”
Eccles, who met McDonnell roughly 20 years ago while she was an executive at the broadcasting company Raycom Media, said she would also solicit funds from entertainment industry executives as part of a purported investment opportunity. She approached Eccles years ago to invest, but he declined, he said.
One couple, Ted and Carrie Kuhlman, spent years engaging with McDonnell’s alleged deception, court documents show. The pair invested $2.5 million with McDonnell in 2016 based on the promise they would receive their initial investment plus $750,000 in interest within eight months, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Ohio.
The money, McDonnell told the couple, would be “secured by the assets of the McDonnell Family Trust … and Bellum Entertainment,” according to the lawsuit. When Ted Kuhlman asked for additional information about her family trust, McDonnell forwarded him a letter from an attorney stating that she was the “beneficiary of an irrevocable trust established by her parents … the value of which is well in excess of $400 million.”
The letter also states that the trustees are prohibited from disclosing any documentation related to the trust because of a court order that followed the death of McDonnell’s 11-year-old sister in 1996. The letter states that the girl was kidnapped and killed, but a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from the time states the girl was fatally stabbed by a fellow student at her special-education school.
When the payment to the Kuhlmans came due in September 2016, McDonnell asked them for a 13-month extension in return for an additional $750,000. But the date came and went and they still didn’t see any money, according to the lawsuit.
Between October 2017 and February 2018, McDonnell repeatedly told them via email and text message that “payment was imminent.” In early February, McDonnell wired the couple $250,000 with a promise that they would be paid in full within a few weeks, according to the lawsuit.
But that didn’t happen. After a series of increasingly tense exchanges, a representative for the couple emailed McDonnell asking for her latest “story” about why the payment hadn’t been made.
“I apologize in advance if that sounds like sarcasm because it’s not. It’s simply my belief that there’s a whopper brewing,” the woman wrote to McDonnell.
In 2020, the couple filed a federal lawsuit against McDonnell and won a $4.4-million judgment. It is not clear whether the couple has recovered any money from McDonnell. They declined to comment through their attorney.
Eccles said McDonnell “perfected the art of deception” and had some habits that were disarming at the time, but now given the allegations against her, seem to be red flags.
“Whenever she wanted to get into business with someone, she would frequently invite them over to her home and present them with a homemade pie that she had placed in a wicker basket with a red and white gingham napkin around it,” he said. “I would later find out that she didn’t bake those pies … she had a service that did it.”
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