George Santos accused of spending woman’s inheritance & stealing her jewelry

Embattled Congressman George Santos (R-NY) is denying accusations from a former family friend in Brazil that he left the woman penniless and in a homeless shelter after using her inheritance to pay for a New York apartment and stealing her jewelry.

The woman, Adriana Parizzi, 56, said she met Santos in Brazil through his mother, Fátima Devolder. The two reportedly got acquainted at Devolder’s regular bingo game, where Parizzi was known to be well-off after inheriting a substantial sum from her parents.

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“I am running to restore integrity to an office that’s been corroded by fraud,” said military veteran Greg Hach.

Around the same time that Brazilian police interviewed Santos about the bad checks he admitted to writing in 2011, the future congressman convinced Parizzi to relocate with him to New York. Parazzi said she paid for the trip and the apartment she and her young daughter Bruna shared with Santos in Queens, along with the furniture to decorate it.

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“I was bankrolling the apartment and food from my inheritance,” she told The Washington Post. “And money kept disappearing from my drawer.”  

Despite the high cost of the arrangement, Parizzi and her daughter said there were good times in Queens, with music and dancing. “He was like an uncle, or the father I never had,” Bruna recalled.   

But over time, a growing list of slights became outright abuse and larceny, Parizzi claimed.

Santos once threatened to “break my face,” she said. She claims he used her Brazilian tax information to buy jewelry on her line of credit and never paid her. He allegedly offered to arrange a green card marriage for an American friend who wanted to do business in Brazil, and promised Parizzi a Central Park apartment in the bargain.

With her inheritance gone and awaiting asylum in the U.S., Parizzi said she stayed with Santos and his then-boyfriend Pedro Vilarva in 2014. That’s when her jewelry went missing.

“They aren’t your things,” Parizzi wrote in a Facebook message to Santos in 2015 that she shared with the Post. “Why is this so complicated?”

Santos accused Parizzi of precipitating his breakup with Vilarva, and unleashed a string of venomous replies, even as Parizzi and Bruna were forced to move into a homeless shelter.

He called her “an ingrate filled with evil” and “a fat dump no one wants,” the Post reported. He advised her to “crawl back into the hole you came from, snake.”

Later that year, Parizzi returned to Brazil with her daughter, penniless.

Parizzi said she was also witness to Santos’ own green card marriage scheme in 2012, in which he’s accused of taking $20,000 to secure U.S. residency for a Brazilian woman.

That allegation was brought before the Office of Congressional Ethics and has been corroborated by three other former roommates.  

“This is not true,” Santos told the Post in repsonse to Parizzi’s account. She continues “to make up stories that are not true and unfounded,” he added.

“I was easy prey,” Parizzi said of Santos.

Other previous roommates of Santos accused him of stealing cash, an expensive dress shirt, and checks. A former boyfriend accused Santos of stealing his phone.

Santos has admitted to lying to voters about graduating from Baruch College (where he claimed he was a star volleyball player) and New York University, working directly for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and living at a fake address in his congressional district. He provided no additional proof to back up claims that he founded a charity called Friends of Pets, that he attended the Horace Mann prep school, that his grandparents escaped the Holocaust, that his mom died due to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and that he lost four employees in the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.

In May, Santos was charged in federal court with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives, and one count of theft of public funds. Prosecutors allege that he illegally used campaign funds to buy designer clothes and other personal items. He has tried to fundraise off of these criminal charges.

Since joining Congress, Santos has cosponsored a bill to roll back LGBTQ+ civil rights and one to ban LGBTQ+ books from schools. He has also made public statements against transgender people and the so-called “radical rainbow mafia.” He also said that LGBTQ+ families “create troubled individuals.”