According to the plaintiff's affidavit and motion for summary judgment, the relationship's financial dimension began in August 2017, when Sokona Diallo proposed a business partnership: exporting iron ore from Mali, her family's home country, to buyers in the United States and China. The plaintiff says he began wiring money to support the venture.
The payments
Court filings itemize a series of specific transfers, each tied to a claimed business need:
- Diallo told him a shipment of iron ore had been sold for $34,500 and that a check was "on its way," according to the plaintiff's affidavit.
- On March 29, 2018, she received $10,000 after claiming the funds were needed to amend the LLC's paperwork.
- On April 20, 2018, she received $6,700 after claiming it was needed to amend the iron ore sale contract.
- On March 10, 2019, she received $2,653 after claiming it was needed to pay tax on the sale.
- She separately claimed ownership of an iron ore mine — a claim the plaintiff's filings dispute using screenshots from the Mali Ministry of Mines website and photographs he says he took at the mine site during a visit in May 2018.
Believing the partnership to be real, the plaintiff says he reported the money he had given Diallo for the iron ore business as a loss on Schedule C of his federal tax returns.
The storage lease
A related pitch followed a similar structure. According to the filings, Diallo told the plaintiff she needed money for a storage lease near the Port of Houston — $10,000 as a down payment, and later another $3,500, described as necessary to amend the storage contract.
What the record shows
In her deposition, according to the plaintiff's filings, Diallo admitted she had never sold any iron ore and that no sales contract for it existed. She was, according to the same filings, evasive throughout the deposition on this and other topics — a pattern described in more detail on The Hidden Marriage and the Deposition.
Diallo's early defense
It's worth noting that, before her legal representation in the case fell away, Diallo did dispute this narrative. In opposing an earlier motion for summary judgment, she argued through counsel that she had, in fact, attempted a real test shipment of iron ore, and that it failed commercially because the ore proved unmarketable due to silica contamination — not because the venture was invented. A federal judge found in October 2020 that this dispute was genuine enough to require a trial. The claims above were ultimately entered as uncontested only after Diallo stopped participating in her own defense in 2021 — a procedural history covered in full on the main article.