The pair then flew to Switzerland to prepare documents for Graham’s inheritance with a banker and a lawyer. But all is not as it seems. Graham’s partner at the time discovered sums of money being transferred to Dionne, with the promise of repayment, totalling to hundreds of thousands of pounds. He ended up being there for months, and when he tried to leave to rejoin his family he was guilted by Dionne about leaving her alone. He didn’t see his newborn son for months, as a result. He continued to fund Dionne’s lifestyle, racking up debts of around £300,000.
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Graham met a friend in Zurich named Juan, who was suspicious that Dionne was a scam artist and not, in fact, dying. We see Graham do his own research into other people who had given Dionne money and not seen returns. But, it’s not easy for him to define her as a scammer.
“Before you realise it was a scam or [that] she was pulling the wool over [your] eyes, [or] whatever you thought, the bottom line is, she’s still my mum,” he told the Radio Times.
“So to have that trauma bond but to have that realisation that you’ve just met her after 45 years, and she told you that she’s going to be gone within six months already, you’re like, ‘I just want to spend as much time as [I can],’ so that’s really what your focus is.
“And it’s just, let’s try and have the best time that we can and get to know each other, and that was essentially the overriding thought in my head, up until the point where externals had tried to tell me things that happened on the sideline, and then you had that realisation that, ‘You really did do that to your son.'”