Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Famous Actress Got SCAMMED // The Jenifer Lewis Scam

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

That’s disrespectful to Jurassic Park--Actress Jenifer Lewis was scammed out of $50,000 by her then-boyfriend Antonio Mariot Wilson, a serial con artist who orchestrated a multi-year romance scam targeting several women.

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One less thing on your plate. Actually, a lot less. Visit staples.ca slash preferred. That was easy. So this well-known Hollywood actress got scammed pretty badly. Now, the story starts with this guy, his name's Antonio. And Antonio is 42 when all this begins, and he's living in Pleasanton, California. And Antonio, he's a standard con man.

He meets people, he scams him out of their finances, and then he does it all over again with a new person. And over the years, this makes him quite a bit of money. And one day, in 2005, Antonio creates a brand new identity for himself. He starts calling himself Bryce. And he starts telling people he's a well-known Hollywood sound designer who created sound effects for really famous movies like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, King Kong, Jurassic Park, like the iconic T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park. He says he invented that. Anyway, not only that, but he tells people that he's been awarded more than one Oscar. He even goes to a local jeweler and gets three replicas made of three Oscar statues, and he puts them on display in his house, so that whenever people visit, they see the awards sitting there, and this will be proof that everything he's saying is real.

And this works. People actually believe that he's this big shot Hollywood sound designer. So now that people believe it, Antonio moves on to the next phase of his scam. He tells people that he loves sound design that he wants to branch out on his own, and that he's building a software mixing board that'll take all the sound effects he supposedly created for those movies and make them available online for other sound designers to download. Which sounds super basic, but I guess in 2005 having sound effects online to download is a novel idea. Anyway, now all he needs is a few suckers willing to invest in this bogus idea. And of course, he finds a few gullible people and they start giving him money to build this software.

Now, as you could already guess, Antonio isn't building any software. He's actually taking all that money and spending it on himself. He buys himself a huge house and nice clothes and nice cars, including a Lamborghini and a Hummer. And this upscale lifestyle makes him appear like a rich, successful guy, which helps him pull in even more investors to Khan. In fact, at one point, he scammed around 13 investors out of nearly $4.5 million. And so, a few years pass, and it's now 2009. And funny enough, with all this money coming in, Antonio's dumbass hasn't been paying his taxes.

So suddenly the IRS starts paying close attention to him, and they launch an investigation. And pretty quickly, they uncover his whole scheme, and bam, Antonio gets arrested. And ultimately he takes a plea deal and he gets sentenced to four years in prison. But three and a half years later, he gets out. He's a free man. Now you'd think sitting in prison for several years would set Antonio straight, you know, maybe make him turn his life around. But that's not what happens at all. The second he gets out, he starts building another fake identity. This time, he tells people he's a religious scholar and Oxford, you know, he's a religious scholar, and Oxford, you know,

university graduate and a theology professor at UCLA. He even manages to self-publish a book on Amazon called Behind the Faith Why Christians Believe What They Believe. That way, if anyone looks him up, they'll think, of course he's a theology professor. He published a book. Now, I'm not sure if the fake Professor Khan isn't working or what, but he also ends up getting a job at a local LA fitness as a club manager and personal trainer. And one day in 2015, he notices this woman at the gym. Her name's Jennifer. Jennifer is actually the well-known actress, Jennifer Lewis.

And Jennifer, she's been in a million different things. You've seen her. She was the voice of Mama Odie and the Princess and the Frog. She's also Ruby in the show Blackish. Anyway, so Antonio sees her and immediately he knows he's hit the jackpot. He's already imagining how much he would be able to get from her. So one day at the gym, boom, he pretends to bump into her. And they start talking, and Antonio acts like, yeah, it's no idea who she is.

Like, oh, wow, you're on TV? And soon they hit it off, and pretty quickly they start dating. And of course, he starts bullshitting her the same way he does everyone else. He says he's a successful sound designer and that he worked on major Hollywood movies and that he's also a deeply religious theology professor who graduated from Oxford and has published a book about Christianity. He also tells her he's a retired Navy SEAL. Which I don't get how he's a successful sound designer, college professor, and a Navy SEAL,

yet he also has to work as a personal trainer at LA Fitness? What? Anyway, I guess Jennifer has no reason to think he's trying to con her. She even checks Amazon and sees his book posted there. So to her, he seemed legit. And so, after they've been dating a while, Antonio decides to make his move. He starts pitching his business to her, which is slightly different from his last con. He tells Jennifer that he runs a sound effects company, which already has clients like ABC and EA Sports,

and that the company is about to blow up. But the only thing he needs are more investors. So he asks her to become an investor. And she's like, all right, anything for you. And she gives him around $50,000. Of course, he doesn't have a special effects business. So he just takes that money and he spends it on himself like you would expect. But over time, his relationship with Jennifer keeps getting more and more serious.

In fact, by this point, they're talking about marriage. And Jennifer, bless her heart, is even considering investing more money into his bogus company. But then one day, she happens to be chilling with a friend of hers, and she mentions that she's been seeing this sound designer professor Navy SEAL personal trainer guy, Antonio, who invented the iconic T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park. And this friend immediately gets skeptical. Something about this guy doesn't add up to her. So she goes online and she starts looking him up and boom, that's where she finds it.

The old fraud case, including his previous prison sentence and how his name on that case was Bryce, not Antonio. So she goes and she tells Jennifer everything. And poor Jennifer, she's shocked and she's hurt. But she does the right thing and she cuts off the relationship and she goes straight to the police. But by this time, Antonio, he started another scam over in Santa Monica. This time, he's telling people that he's a businessman looking for investors for his tech company startup called Second Life. And to find new victims, Antonio starts meeting women on a dating app and he cons then. into investing. And over about two years, he pulls in roughly $300,000 by conning multiple women.

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After all this time, Jennifer is still pissed off about everything this guy did to her, and she wants him exposed. So she goes public, and she starts giving interviews, telling her story, and she warns other women, she even sues Antonio for defrauding her, and she sues the gym, L.A. Fitness, for hiring him. And this story of her starts to get a bit of traction. And by 2018, the FBI gets involved, and they launch an investigation. And they interview several of the women Antonio had scammed over the years, and they began piecing together everything. And eventually, they gather enough evidence to build a case against him, and so, bam, the feds arrest him. Here's a picture of him. And ultimately, he takes a plea deal, and he gets sentenced to eight years in prison, and

LA Fitness settles with Jennifer out of court and pays her $13,000.