If you actually have spent any time elsewhere on this site besides this area you might have seen the logos of the various companies that at some point have employed me to help them make better decisions about their content and in turn millions–sometimes billions–more than their own devices might otherwise have led them to. My resume lists many others I’ve been advised not to advertise too aggressively since they’re more a little outdated. They reflect a variety of shows across multiple studios and networks. And in many cases they involved working with some pretty–well, interesting— superiors and colleagues. Many were folks that would sell snow to an Eskimo–heck, that’s part of the game. Plenty were not above indulging in excess partying, drinking, gambling or infidelity. Some were a bit more famous and even notorious than others. My simple defense for most of them is that if the check ultimately cleared, they did right at least by me.
And that’s actually the bottom line of my brief and tumultuous association with one Mary Claire McDonnell and Bellum Entertainment–a logo I choose not to humble brag about a) because it’s not an immediately recognizable entity to most who might be considering me now and b) it’s more than a little tainted. I spent a little more than a year as a research and strategy consultant for her and her production and distribution company at a point when they were supposedly expanding and just after I was unceremoniously dismissed from my duties at Game Show Network. I was connected to the opportunity by a longtime friend and still prominent industry executive who, like me, knew her from her days as a fellow station programmer–she having eventually risen to a role comparable to mine with such groups as McGraw-Hill and what eventually became Hearst-Argyle. She had beaten me out for the latter job when she was chosen by an eccentric art-savvy top executive who reportedly bonded with her over their respective collections and her claim that she was an heir to the famed McDonnell Douglas Corporation that anyone who has ever boarded a plane knows about. It would typically be one of the first conversation starters out of her mouth especially when she had a cocktail or three, which was quite often.
But when opportunity knocks and one is staring down the barrel of a gun of pending unemployment and mounting bills one can’t be as selective as one might otherwise hope to be. So with that backdrop and a reasonably favorable meeting with “MC” and her bubbly traveling companion who had known me from previous NATPEs that I joined forces with Bellum on an non-exclusive basis to help them sell a first-run true crime series called CORRUPT CRIMES to a station community desperate for something to run as dozens of more prominent game and talk shows fell off the map–victims of an already fractionalizing and aging audience and station consolidation that was cannibalizing the once-robust syndication business. CRIMES had a baseline of support from McDonnell’s former employers at Raycom Television, which owned a handful of competitive stations in some smaller markets that received daily overnight ratings and thus could provide a regular firehose of positive datecdotes that sounded really impressive after we added a few layers of context and posturing. They eventually found their way onto a large enough national lineup to at least be measurable by Nielsen–a negotiation I spearheaded since aside from McDonnell herself no one in her company had ever dealt with the company. For all of this I was paid the princely sum of $1000 a month–a figure I had to arm-twist out of her after she initially proposed to pay me down the road with a portion of her allegedly pending $80 million payout from her family’s trust.
But as a story dropped yesterday from BUSINESS INSIDER’s
When McDonnell approached a bank for a lifeline, she leaned on a dramatic backstory, claiming she was related to the founders of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and was soon due $80 million from a family trust. Thanks to allegedly forged documents, she eventually obtained $14.6 million in loans.
Not long after, McDonnell vanished, leaving behind her California life — her mansion, her Porsche, her adult sons — and a string of lawsuits from a bank and unpaid employees in her wake.
The details of her past — the kidnapped sister, the bloodline, the inheritance — were revealed to be a fiction. She was, authorities said, a fraudster and a fugitive believed to have fled to Dubai. She was indicted on federal charges in 2018 and added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 2025, becoming one of only 32 people to land on the list for white-collar crimes.
It’s a storyline ripped straight from the scripts of shows she produced on the cheap, humble-bragging at the drop of a hat how she was taking advantage of tax credits and favors to outsource production to her old station in New Orleans to maximize “economies”. I would hear these stories over several monthly lunches–at Morton’s, natch–where four drinks in I’d hear a lot more of her gradiose plans to become the King World of true crime TV and how I was lucky enough to be on the cusp of something really special. When she opened that “mansion”, tucked high enough in the hills of the San Gabriel Valley to have put a strain on my aging car’s brakes, up to all of us to celebrate the start of our first fully national season she and her partner gushing told us we were “practically family”. 
But as the season wore on and the realities of how marginal those daily stories ultimately proved to be my experiences mirrored those that Guerrasio shared in a manner that shows like CORRUPT CRIMES only wished they had they had the capacity to craft:
For Ethan LeCuyer, who started working at Bellum as an associate producer in 2015, life at Bellum at that time was good. It was a small, family-run operation, with McDonnell’s nephew, Peter McDonnell, overseeing production on all the true-crime shows, and her twin sons, Sean and Mackenzie Carroll, working in post-production and sales and distribution, respectively.
“There were only eight of us in total, including editors, so it was very tight-knit,” LeCuyer told Business Insider in an exclusive interview about his time at Bellum. Everyone called Mary Carole ‘MC,’ even her sons, he said. He can’t remember them ever calling her “mom.”
One aspect of the job concerned him: He said he rarely got paid on time, and when he did, the checks sometimes bounced. “The first time it happened, I was like, ‘That’s never happened to me before,’ but you almost became numb to it a little bit because everybody was in the same boat,” LeCuyer said. “It always cleared eventually.”
I sat next to LeCuyer and “Mack” when she generously took us all to see her beloved Colorado Rockies lose yet another game to the Dodgers and they shared their enthusiasm about having me on board. LeCuyer’s remark after his second beer proved to be especially telling: “It’s good to have someone around to make us all more accountable”.
Shortly after that, my own three-month drought of being paid on time began. At the company Christmas party a group of us took her payroll manager aside and received the same tap-dancing promises of future restitution and largesse she was apparently giving her.
Thankfully, around this time my consulting relationship with my other significant client, Sony Pictures Television, was evolving into a full-time staff position. Hence my need for something like Bellum no longer existed, so I e-mailed MC over the holidays and informed her that I wouldn’t be able to devote the sort of time and effort she deserved–or something to that effect. I’m still waiting for a reply, incidentally.
That meant I got to miss out on everything else that LeCuyer and others experienced, including this juicy tidbit from one particularly resourceful gun for hire:
Aaron Cadieux took a different approach. After months of waiting for the $2,000 he says he was owed for working two-and-a-half days on an episode of Bellum’s “Mysteries of the Unexplained,” the filmmaker bought the domain name MaryCaroleMcDonnell.com and designed a disparaging webpage with a picture of McDonnell’s head on a pig’s body.
Not to mention this:
Around this time, the government alleges, McDonnell was trying to get money from banks. In March 2017, Reliable Fast Cash, which specialized in offering capital and merchant cash advances to small and midsize businesses, began to loan Bellum over $2.5 million, according to court documents. After months of partial payments, Bellum defaulted by July and again in August. Because McDonnell and her sons had signed documents agreeing to be liable for the debt in advance, a judge awarded Reliable over $3.3 million in September of that year, and the company immediately began collecting the debt. Over $550,000 in money and assets were seized from Sean and Mack, though they said they were unaware their signatures were on the loan application, according to court documents.
The brothers filed a motion in 2019 to vacate the judgment, alleging that their mother forged their signatures on the loan. They settled with Reliable in 2020, with Reliable keeping the money it had already collected but agreeing not to withdraw any more. The family dynamic has been fraught ever since. People familiar with the family told Business Insider that Sean and Mack have not been in contact with their mother for years.
Yeah, I guess we all did get treated like family.
Guerrasio concluded his engaging work with this unsurprising but nonetheless shocking post-script:
In December 2025, the FBI added McDonnell to its Most Wanted list. Suddenly, what had been a local story about unpaid employees in Hollywood was now national and international news: “Fake aerospace empire heiress, 74, lands on FBI’s Most Wanted list for defrauding millions from banks,” the New York Post headline blared. “A prolific true crime producer was truly a criminal the whole time, the FBI says,” wrote The Guardian. A photo of McDonnell circulated by the FBI shows her blonde hair pulled back from her face, revealing pearl studs in her ears. She smiles broadly, appearing not to have a care in the world. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller told Business Insider that the case is ongoing. “She’s still a fugitive, and we believe she may be conducting fraud currently,” she said. Eimiller also said the FBI believes McDonnell is in Dubai.
I’m pretty much in the camp of the majority of Bellum survivors who have moved on with their lives, and since I got out of Dodge early enough I don’t have the same amount of receipts that these others have. But like any good true crime story, there’s still some unturned stones out there:
Before McDonnell landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list late last year, Tim Clemente, a retired FBI counterterrorism agent who worked for Bellum as one of its crime experts, started hatching a plan to track down McDonnell. Clemente, who says he’s still owed around $5,000, described himself as a unique victim. “I got a lot of friends in the Middle East, I got a lot of friends in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, all over that area — special operations guys, foreign nationals that are over there working with United Arab Emirates special operations. I’ve done a lot of training.” With the FBI now on the case, Clemente has stood down. Now, he can only wait for closure. “I want to do it as an unscripted series,” he said of the FBI’s manhunt for McDonnell. “She used us for an unscripted series, and she made a lot of money. We would like to return the favor.”
Consider me interested in helping you craft the pitch, Tim. And don’t worry about having to pay me all that much upfront, either. I know you’re at least good for that much.
Until next time…