Accused Vegas Conwoman’s Assistant Tells All: ‘It’s a Mindf*ck’

Maire Casillas Berger was working at a California beauty store when she was befriended by Sara King, a fashion-loving Newport Beach lawyer and repeat customer who paid in stacks of cash. “I want to talk to you about something,” King told Berger one day in late 2020, before inviting her to the exclusive Balboa Bay Club.

The makeup artist met King that afternoon. “I’ve been watching you for the last six months, testing you,” King allegedly told her over appetizers and drinks on the patio of the waterfront retreat, “and doing all of these things to see if you are the person that I want to join me.”

King then asked Berger to become her new executive assistant.

She would soon be thrust into a wild ride that included private planes to Vegas, trips to warehouses with luxury cars, and one lunch at fancy Newport Beach restaurant Gulfstream with a man King claimed was an adviser to Trump.

“I just thought I was working for a crazy rich lawyer,” Berger recalls.

But eventually, Berger, 32, noticed that business partners were hounding King, 39, for returns on their investments in her short-term loan company, King Family Lending. And she began receiving texts on her work phone asking for King’s whereabouts.

Berger, who lived with King for two and a half months, claims the lawyer would sometimes go days without sleeping or leave in the middle of the night. On other occasions, she turned off her phone so no one could contact her for hours, or sometimes days. In September 2021, Berger says she was present when King’s Rolls-Royce was impounded.

“I started getting really uneasy, like there was something really wrong,” she said.

This month, King made national headlines after a company sued her for allegedly misspending its $10 million investment on Vegas casinos and her high-roller lifestyle. Multiple former friends told The Daily Beast that she conned them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, too, and depleted one family's entire life savings.

Now Berger is coming forward with a horror story of her own: She claims King siphoned $5,000 from her during a November 2021 work trip to Vegas, abandoned her at a casino hotel, and ultimately ghosted her upon return to California.

Berger says King also used her credit card information to buy $3,000 worth of first-class plane tickets to Hawaii but never repaid her. According to Berger, King routinely asked her to charge company expenses to her personal card.

“I personally think that when it came down to it, she saw something she could take advantage of and that was my heart and my soul,” Berger said.

“She has no empathy for anybody,” Berger added. “She doesn’t care who she hurts or what happens in the process, as long as she has her Saint Laurent clothing and her money to gamble.”

The betrayal was a punch in the gut for Berger, who grew close enough to King that they met each other’s families and who even lived with King and her now-estranged husband Kamran Pahlavi, grandson of an Iranian princess, for months in King’s Newport Beach condo.

Caviar and Chanel: The Luxe Vegas Life of an Accused Scammer

As The Daily Beast reported, Pahlavi says he introduced King to LDR International Limited—which is now suing her—and filed for divorce after discovering her alleged con. “When I realized what she had done, I left and never looked back,” Pahlavi said.

LDR’s lawsuit claims that from January to October 2022, it began funding King Family Lending, which purported to be a lender of short-term loans for third-party borrowers. King claimed these debts were backed by collateral including luxury cars, yachts, watches, jewelry, designer handbags, and professional sports contracts. In reality, the complaint alleges, King spent the lion’s share of LDR’s investment on her “extravagant” lifestyle and “moved into the Wynn Las Vegas resort and hotel, lived there for six months, and gambled 24/7.”

Ronald Richards, an attorney for LDR, told The Daily Beast that he’s putting together a dossier on King’s accusers that he plans to present to prosecutors in Orange County or other law enforcement agencies. He said he also filed complaints against King with the State Bar of California and the District of Columbia Bar.

As recently as last week, he says, King was still gambling on the Las Vegas Strip; Resorts World found her using facial recognition technology and informed her she was trespassing. “If she comes back, she’ll be arrested,” Richards said. “We had six different casinos do that already.”

The life of luxury described in the lawsuit was witnessed by Berger firsthand.

Throughout 2021, Berger accompanied King on visits to garages with Bentleys and Rolls-Royces she claimed to own, shopping sprees at Saint Laurent, and weekly chartered flights to a private airport in Vegas, where King claimed to have business meetings about launching a Sin City version of the venue L.A. Live.

In Vegas, King would live like a celebrity at Aria or the Wynn in high-end suites decked in marble and crystal chandeliers. According to Berger, King was also such a regular at Saint Laurent that the luxury brand made plans to send her to Paris fashion week—a trip King supposedly declined due to COVID restrictions—and treated her and Berger to a trip to a California winery.

Much of the extravagance, Berger claims, involved payments in cash.

As King’s assistant, Berger says she was tasked not only with pet care, personal styling, and household chores, but also with picking up as much as $20,000 from a Wells Fargo. “I don’t know where it would go,” she said. “Everything just had to be in cash.”

Meanwhile, other former friends told The Daily Beast that King presented herself as a successful attorney and businesswoman and coaxed her way into the Gen Next Foundation, a conservative-leaning Newport Beach-based non-profit whose membership included high net worth entrepreneurs.

Manna Kadar told The Daily Beast that she met King at a Gen Next women’s conference in New York, where King allegedly claimed to employ a personal shopper and rent an apartment in a building where Justin Bieber lived. The pals also traveled to the city together for a ball benefiting the Navy SEAL Foundation.

“She was definitely using Gen Next as a means of gaining access and influence,” said Kadar, the founder of an eponymous cosmetics brand, adding that King tried to solicit funding from other women in the foundation.

She remembers King initially seemed “down to earth” and said she owned a business with her first ex-husband, was dabbling in the cannabis industry, and lived in the gated community Big Canyon. At the time, Kadar says, King had a driver take her to Rodeo Drive and would sometimes stay for extended periods in an ocean-view villa at the Pelican Hill luxury resort. “She did seem like she was working on a number of deals at any one point in time,” Kadar recalled.

And although soliciting money was frowned upon at Gen Next, King confided that she “was doing some hard money lending and sharing how lucrative it was,” Kadar said. In April 2020, King allegedly asked Kadar for a personal loan as a bridge between deals and offered her engagement ring from Pahlavi as collateral.

Kadar says she conducted a background check on King; there weren’t any lawsuits against her and her business dealings appeared normal.

In a now-settled lawsuit, Kadar claimed King used her role as an attorney to gain her “trust and confidence” before “fraudulently inducing” her to provide a total of $62,000 in loans, using counterfeit collateral.

“What really tipped me off that this was an unusual situation is she couldn’t pay the loan when it was supposed to be repaid and said she needed her engagement ring back and was gonna replace it with an Audemars Piguet watch,” Kadar told The Daily Beast. About a week later, Kadar says she took the watch to her jeweler to verify its authenticity, and he told her it was a fake.

Kadar says she was forced to file a lawsuit to recoup her funds, and that she withdrew it after King repaid her. “She was saying that something big was going to be revealed and people had taken millions from her, which in retrospect is pretty funny,” Kadar said.

The makeup CEO’s suit alleges that in 2020, King requested a short-term loan backed by the watch and even asked for a second loan months later, claiming it would be secured by a Lamborghini. When Kadar asked for repayment, the complaint says, King “continued to provide [her with] erratic excuses and changing stories, including blaming her nonpayment on others.”

Kadar cut King off and reported her to Gen Next. As a result, Kadar says, King then began to text Kadar’s husband and other people, attempting to disparage her and shift blame.

“I have never come across someone like this,” she added. “And I am just shocked that it’s got to this level. Who knows how many more victims are out there.”

Accused Vegas Swindler’s Hubby Says Sara King ‘Needs to Be Stopped’

In an email to a few women in the group, King tried to defend herself. “I know how optics on me look right now—but things are not as they seem to be,” King wrote, adding, “I have never done anyone wrong, intentionally, and I’m horrified at what people think about me and what has been said and/or construed.”

Another Gen Next member and ex-pal said there was “a lot of vagueness” around what kind of law King practiced and where she got her money. She told The Daily Beast that after one lunch at Pelican Hill, King asked her, “Do you want to see my new Bentley?”

“I don’t know who says that,” the former friend said. “Unless you’re very nouveau riche, people don’t say, ‘Come look at my brand new convertible Bentley sitting here with the top down.’ That was one of the things that made me raise my eyebrows. Like, is this woman legit?”

One entrepreneur who was affiliated with Gen Next told The Daily Beast of King: “She’s scary as fuck.” He says King approached him after he spoke at an event and shared that she was interested in running for Congress and asked for his advice. “That was six or seven years ago, and since then, I have just watched her,” said the businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I watched her kind of go after any wealthy older guy or person she could get close to.”

King apparently never launched a political campaign. But she did snap a photo with former Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and donate thousands to Republican political action committees. Campaign finance records show that in 2017 alone, King donated $29,600 to groups backing McCarthy and the GOP.

In June 2018, she also traveled with Gen Next to Washington, D.C., where she posed for a photograph with GOP Sen. Ted Cruz at the Capital Grille. (A spokesperson for Cruz told The Daily Beast, “Sen. Cruz takes thousands of pictures a year with people who ask for photos at various events.” Representatives for McCarthy and Pence didn’t return messages seeking comment.)

During the trip to the Capitol, the California-based group also met with McCarthy and former congressman Paul Ryan and toured the U.S. Treasury Department. Five months earlier, social media posts show, King was photographed with actor Kelsey Grammer and Sen. Rand Paul.

The entrepreneur said he grew leery of King after members of his inner circle learned of accusations that King had forged documents in her first divorce proceeding. (King’s ex-husband filed a lawsuit making similar claims, arguing she forged his signature on a loan against their $3 million home; the case is pending.) “I saw she had a very scorched-earth-type personality,” the person said. “I got cold chills watching her operate.”

He said King would tell him, “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet” and invite him to lunch with a wealthy individual. “I very quickly saw that she was basically playing everyone off of each other and kind of using my credibility to help her raise money for her ‘lending business.’”

“It was almost like she was a wannabe banker, a hustler,” he said. “Just always kind of pitching deals and making introductions.”

Last March, IT consultant George Poulos filed a lawsuit against King, charging she failed to repay a $125,000 loan plus interest. In February, an Orange County judge entered a judgment against King for $214,507, but Poulos says he still hasn’t received a dime.

He told The Daily Beast that a friend introduced him to King, who presented him with a business opportunity. “It’ll be monstrous once they peel the onion back and they start to get the grip of the full scope,” Poulos said of the scandal surrounding King.

Before investing in King’s firm, Poulos believed he did his due diligence, embarking on an in-person tour to see her collateral: luxury watches and sports cars. He also trusted King because she was a licensed attorney and finance lender.

“She’s a total extrovert, very bubbly, and seems kind, but when you’re dealing with this kind of deception, nothing’s real,” Poulos said.

He said he last heard from King in November, offering to deal with his attorney to settle the case. “But that never materialized,” he said.

“I was trying to be nice for a few months to try to see if I could recover my money,” Poulos added. “She just basically disappeared.”

Berger says she was aware Poulos was attempting to recover his money.

One day in 2021, King instructed her to cancel a meeting with Poulos where they were supposed to discuss his repayment. “She told me to tell George that her grandma died in order to get out of something,” Berger said. “That’s when I realized there was something really sick going on in her head. Nobody does that. There’s no soul in that person.”

"She’s dangerous in the sense that she’s able to say whatever she wants, and people are, for the most part, going to believe it because of her charisma,” Berger added.

Throughout her time with King, the attorney would challenge Berger with what felt like “these little tests to see if I’m capable of making things happen when they’re hard.”

The ex-assistant claims King sent her to a high-end restaurant in Orange County that wouldn’t do takeout orders to collect a salad for lunch. Berger texted King that they wouldn’t place an order to-go. “I know, but make it happen,” King replied.

“I went up to one of the hostesses and said, ‘I work for a psychopath and I think she is honestly testing me right now. And I got her a salad and I’m really, really hoping that you could get me to-go box.’ And the girl did it for me.”

Berger says she’s left wondering how much of King’s well connected persona was real. According to the former assistant, King claimed to work in Washington D.C. (she is licensed to practice there, records show) and have friends in the Secret Service.

On their last trip to Vegas together in November 2021, purportedly for a business meeting, King stayed at the swanky Aria Resort & Casino.

Berger says she met King in the high-rollers room where she had $40,000 on the roulette table and lost it all in about 15 minutes.

King asked the assistant to fetch her $5,000 to keep playing. But because King claimed she wasn’t able to withdraw more money from her account, she asked Berger to cover her. Berger assumed her boss would repay her and left to stay at her girlfriend’s apartment.

Both King and Berger planned to fly back to California the next morning around 9 a.m.

But hours before their flight, King allegedly texted Berger and informed her, “I don’t want to be here anymore,” and asked her to bring her belongings from her room at the Aria, despite not having a room key.

“This is another test for you,” King allegedly told her. “I need to see if you can get into that room.”

“I had to figure out how to find a security guard that was going to like me enough and believe me enough to open up that room and get all of her stuff,” Berger said.

Berger says that when she got back to Newport Beach, King “acted like it was no big deal, like nothing was wrong” and told her to take some days off for Christmas.

King then became unreachable. “I just kept hitting her up like, ‘Hey, like, are you firing me? I don’t understand, you’re not saying anything to me.”

“She told me, ‘I’ve paid for a lot of dinners. I’ve done this, I've done that. I don’t owe you any money.’”

Berger never heard from King again.

“I really hope that everybody that she has put out, the ones that have lost a large amount of money, I just hope that it'll end up coming back to them in some way,” Berger said.

“Whether it's $10,000, $1 million, or somebody like me who had $5,000 in a savings account, it still hurts when it comes from somebody that said that they cared about you.

“It’s a mindfuck.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here

Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.

Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.