‘I now realize I was foolish’: Widow of early Roblox programmer allegedly defrauded out of $6 million trying to buy out a man from his escort contract

Marianne Flippo paid a male escort roughly $635,000 for eight months of exclusive companionship.

Then, according to a lawsuit filed this week in Manhattan Supreme Court, he and his agency allegedly told her the only way to make the arrangement permanent was to pay $10 million to buy him out of his contract.

“I now recognize that I was the victim of a horrendous scheme by Starr who is a sociopath who lacks any conscience,” Flippo said in a sworn affirmation filed with the court.

The suit names the escort as Gregg Starr, an employee of an agency called Cowboys 4 Angels, and describes Marianne as newly widowed, managing money alone for the first time, and living with a rare genetic disorder that heightened her vulnerability to drugs and alcohol.

Court documents allege Starr built her trust before defrauding her of nearly $6 million.

During a February 2026 trip to visit Starr’s mother, who suffered from dementia, two agency employees showed up unannounced and pressed Flippo to drink at lunch, despite knowing she was on medication for a recent surgery.

The two ordered shots for the table, and after roughly five drinks, they produced an “Exit Agreement” requiring her to pay $10 million to end Starr’s ties to the agency.

“While I was drunk and confused (all of which was exacerbated by my medications and medical condition), Starr and Collins began to press me to sign the Exit Agreement,” Flippo said in her affirmation.

She says she was taken to a hotel room and had never seen the document before that day.

The agreement states that “under no circumstances has physical companionship been purchased for consideration.” Flippo tried twice to wire the $10 million, but both attempts were independently flagged as suspected fraud, first by JPMorgan Chase and then through Westpac.

Starr then directed her to open a joint account at Charles Schwab , which she says let him access funds without triggering a bank’s fraud review.

She transferred $5.95 million into that account, and bank records filed with the court show Starr moved $5,719,010.37 of it into an account in his name alone within weeks, draining the balance to $12.61 by the end of June.

A circumstantial meeting Flippo suffers from vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome , a rare genetic disorder that makes her blood vessels and organs prone to tearing and leaves her unusually sensitive to alcohol and medication.

In December 2024, still grieving the loss of her husband, Chad, and needing to travel to Italy for a medication that had become unavailable in the U.S. because of the war in Ukraine, she asked a former colleague of Chad’s for help finding an Italian-speaking companion.