Kimora Lee’s estranged husband has admitted to a form of catfishing to deceive the former model into dating him. Tim Leissner testified in court that he pretended to be his ex-wife for years online to convince Lee that he was a single man.
According to TMZ, Leissner admitted to hatching up a plan to impersonate his then-wife Judy Chan, a Chinese heiress, and sent fake emails to the Baby Phat co-founder.
His plan went over without a snag. So convinced that she was communicating with Chan, Lee invited her and her children to hang out with her and her extended family on several lavish family vacations.
Each time, Leissner, acting like Chan, declined.
Vacationing with exes and their blended families is not abnormal for Lee. Paparazzi captured one moment in 2013 that Lee and Leissner hung out with her former husband and oldest daughter’s father, hip-hop mogul, Russell Simmons, for a $350,000-a-week family holiday getaway in St. Bart’s on the luxurious super motor yacht the Solema.
This may have been one of the invitations Lee thought she was extending to Chan.
Simmons would eventually sue Leissner for some shady business dealings. The Def Jam founder filed a lawsuit against the banker for allegedly transferring and using his shares from Celsius’s energy drink company as collateral for Leissner’s bond for one of his court cases.
Leissner revealed this news on Tuesday, March 8, during his testimony in the ongoing embezzlement trial of his former Goldman Sachs associate, Roger Ng. He is the key witness for the prosecution, maintaining that he, his ex-business associate Ng and Joh Low, another Asian financier, embezzled $4.5 billion in funds from the Malaysian government.
He said under oath that Lee was not the only person he duped while pretending to be Chan online. He also admitted to acting like his ex while talking to Malaysian financier Jho Low. Low is accused in a billion-dollar money laundering trial.
The Daily Mail reports that Marc Agnifilo, Ng’s lawyer, addressed Leissner’s manipulation of people by acting like Chan, “It was an entire life you completely falsified because you made the whole thing up?”
Leissner said, “’The correspondence, yes. But an entire life may be too far.”
Leissner reportedly has been deceitful in love for years and is considered “a double-bigamist.”
He falsified divorce papers from his first wife when he was courting Chan for marriage. He repeated this same tactic to marry Lee, wedding her while he was still betrothed to the two women.
Lee and Leissner were married in 2014, and it is unclear if Lee knew that she wasn’t talking to Chan before this testimony.
