I was conned out of £300,000 by my own mother. This is how I survived

Chef Graham Hornigold’s reunion with his mother Dionne Marie Hanna was meant to be his dream come true – but it turned into a living nightmare that has been retold in the hit Netflix documentary ‘Con Mum’. This week, Dionne was charged with five counts of fraud and here he tells his extraordinary story of recovery…

Perhaps one of the most haunting things about the year my life came spectacularly crumbling down was the cot, propped up in the hallway, sealed up in its box. It belonged to my newborn son and became a symbol of how different things were just one year earlier, when we were happy. When we weren’t in financial ruin. It had been the happiest time in our relationship, but it was all taken away by one woman: my own mother.

I had never known my mum prior to receiving her email in late 2020. She said that her name was Dionne, formerly known as Theresa; that I was her son, and that I’d been born in Germany before being taken away from her to England. It was true – I was brought up in St Albans – and, more than that, it was not common knowledge. I wrote back, “Is this for real? No jokes, scams, etc??” The irony of that first exchange, now, is not lost on me.

I was right to be sceptical but, for a good time, Dionne seemed to be the real deal. I’d never known anything about her. She was never mentioned by my father, a violent man who beat me as a child. As soon as I could, I threw myself into my career, working my way up to the top of the food industry as head pastry chef at Michelin-starred restaurants like Hakkasan, in Fitzrovia, London. I earned respect for my work and integrity. Life was good. Often I wonder where I might be now if I’d never clicked “reply” to that email.

Still, I was curious of course. I tested her knowledge, asking her, for instance, what my middle name is. She replied with all the right answers. I started to trust her and, later, a DNA test did confirm she was my mother. The opportunity to meet a birth parent is, I suppose, an opportunity to know parts of yourself that were previously not only out of reach, but invisible. After 45 years, I was going to know who I was.

The feeling I had when we first met at a hotel in Liverpool, shortly after our initial exchange, was of being a child again. She was so welcoming, there was an instant connection between us. My partner, Heather, was heavily pregnant at the time and Mum, who seemed younger than her 85 years, was over the moon. Later, she would take me to one side to talk privately, where she confessed what had driven her to contact me: she had just six months to live. She had a brain tumour and marrow bone cancer.

Naturally, I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible, to find out about her as much as I could. She’d lived in Singapore, she said, and she had businesses all over the world: in farming, fruit, palm oil. There was no doubt in my mind that she was impressive: she spoke 18 languages, constantly took calls from her “business associates” around the world, showed me videos of her generosity and philanthropy, giving money to villages to help provide them with sustainable food sources. It turned out she was rich, too.

Dionne told me that she was the illegitimate daughter of the former Sultan of Brunei. Hard to believe? Yes. But then, when we visited The Dorchester hotel on Park Lane – owned by the Brunei royal family – everybody knew her enough that we got special treatment. At Rolls Royce, the head of sales told me that she’d previously bought two Phantoms from them. She bought me gifts – expensive clothes, suits. A Land Rover, straight off the forecourt. For Heather, a brand new BMW.

“Son, I’m going to buy you a present,” she told me, “and take away 45 years of pain.” After a violent childhood with my father, I felt something unusual – a sense of being cared for by a parent.

Yet, she is still dying. And, by the time my son was born two months later, I became acutely aware that I was being pulled in two different directions. I moved Mum in – it was my attempt to do right by everyone.

‘All I can do is keep speaking out and, ultimately, break Dionne’s vicious cycle – one that almost broke me’ (Netflix)

Things moved fast from there. Her wealth seemed infinite yet, the pandemic, she said, had made it difficult for her to move money around. She wanted to give my best friend millions, too. Things started to creep in that, at first, I thought little of: she asked me to pick up a £25,000 bill at one of her hotel stays in London. She was writing these “loans” down – 95 per cent of the time she paid for everything and, besides, I believed her that it was all coming back to us and much, much more.

Shortly after my son was born, Mum and I went to Zurich, Switzerland, for a few days where she told me she was was entrusting me with her multi-million fortune. A few days there turned into a week, then weeks, then two months, the first of my son’s life. The lawyers were delayed. The bank managers were delayed. When I insisted I needed to leave, she turned up the manipulative tactics: the illnesses, the guilt of “abandoning” her. My mind was warped by her; emotionally I was all over the place. I finally got home to the UK on Christmas Eve, to a home that was slowly but surely breaking, and scores of text messages from Mum, detailing her heartbreak that I left her.

In hindsight, it was the beginning of the end. But it wasn’t until a few months later that I began to become suspicious. Those luxury cars? She’d given the hefty deposit, but the finance agreements – for upwards of £180,000 – were all in my name, despite her transferring the cash to me each month. Until she wasn’t.

Dionne Marie Hanna has been charged as a result of the Netflix documentary (Netflix)

There were credit cards, too, that she convinced me to take out. Heather and my best friend – who Dionne had started calling “grandson” – talked and eventually confronted me. I had been “trained”, they said, by my own mother. Brainwashed. In a trance. I was still convinced. In many ways, I had to be – Dionne had caused so many arguments, so much distance between Heather and I that she and my son were now with her family in New Zealand. My home life was falling apart. I had to show them I was doing the right thing.

But my confidence was waning. And then another one of her victims reached out to me – Peng, in China, who had been scammed out of €150,000. Via Dionne’s Ponzi scheme, it was Peng’s money that we had been using in London. I started recording her, trying to record evidence of her cruel deceit. When I confronted her, she disappeared from my life, and I lost her all over again.

In fact, I lost almost everything. When Heather and I eventually split up over Dionne’s malice, our home became just an empty house. I lost a lot of my dignity. When you’re scammed out of thousands online, there can be some sympathy – you’re seen as an innocent party. But when it’s your own mother, or anyone, playing with your vulnerabilities face to face, people think that you should have known it was “too good to be true” or see the “red flags” they can. It wasn’t that simple. Not at all.

Hornigold’s relationship with Heather, pictured, broke down as a result of his mother’s deceitful con (Netflix)

The years since have been some of the most difficult of my life. I had already suffered significant traumas: not only my difficult childhood but also losing two brothers in a car crash when I was 32. The thing is, men are brought up to “get on with it”. We’re told that “big boys don’t cry”, so we don’t talk about our dark thoughts. It’s easy to turn to drink when you feel you don’t have a voice – to block out or soften reality with a nightly bottle of wine, because showing vulnerability would be a weakness. It’s a vicious cycle. I now understand fully why these conditions contribute to the high levels of male suicide. I got to a point where I was thinking about ending my life: the thought of starting all over again, with £100,000 of credit card debt was too much to bear.

In the end, the successes in my career and colleagues kept me going – I co-founded Longboys, where I make and sell luxury long doughnuts, and plunged every ounce of energy I could into it. The disparity in how I was living before and after Dionne was enormous: one year you’re jetting around the globe eating world-class food and drinking champagne, the next sleeping in fields at festivals trying to get a new business off the ground, knowing that it’s your last hope.

Hornigold has thrown himself into his chef work to help him cope (Netflix)

Luckily it worked. I got some professional help and my work family, propped me up throughout all of it. The stress of Dionne’s deception was too much for my and Heather’s relationship to bear. I’ve remained single since then and now I concentrate on making sure I’m setting the best example I can for my son – of having integrity, being open with my emotions and encouraging others to speak up without shame.

Really, that is the point. There are so many others who have been ruined by Dionne – that’s why I wanted to make the documentary about my experience for Netflix. She has now been arrested in Singapore as a result of the film – after watching it, three more people came forward to say that they too had been duped by her.

Often I’ve wondered if it’s just me, that I attract this chaos; it seems to keep finding me. But I’ve done a lot of soul-searching. That’s why I’ve remained single since then – I needed to look inside and do some of that work. It’s not just the external world that can cause you problems, but sometimes the people you attract as a result of your personality traits and unresolved trauma. Some who used to be in my life retreated after everything came crashing down. They were never friends, I realised – now I know that word is thrown around way too liberally.

For every bad thing that happens, there’s always some good. For me, that means justice being served and being able to move forward a little wiser – I didn’t get the “dream come true” when my mother found me. Instead, it became a living nightmare. Now, all I can do is keep speaking out and, ultimately, break Dionne’s vicious cycle – one that almost broke me.

As told to Zoë Beaty