Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on August 12, 2025.
Matthew Christopher Pietras, one of the youngest managing directors on the board of the Metropolitan Opera, was found dead in his bed on May 30 at age 40. Two days earlier, a bank fraud alert had undermined his attempt to use embezzled funds to meet the first $10 million tranche of a $15 million pledge to the Met, and on the morning of May 29, according to the New York Times, a representative from the Soros family contacted the Met to let them know the money did not belong to Matthew Pietras, but rather, to a member of the Soros family. The Met sought an explanation from Matthew, who said he’d look into it. They didn’t hear from him again.
The Met has since been forced to use $5 million from its endowment — coupled with an emergency commitment of $5 million from its board members — to meet obligations it thought Matthew’s contributions would cover. It must now explain how and why it made Matthew a managing director on its board, and what safeguards it will embrace while trying to attract a new generation of affluent contributors so that nothing like this happens again.
It’s a cautionary tale. While the cause of death has yet to be disclosed, I was witness in the weeks preceding it to Matthew’s frenzied, omnipresent involvement with the Met and other New York cultural institutions. I first met Matthew in 2012, when we were both working as background actors, and he remained one of my closest friends. Over the course of our long friendship, we traveled together, met frequently for meals in New York and Los Angeles, and exchanged thousands of messages. Although I knew he was a fabulist, his discrepancies didn’t bother me because the stakes seemed low. Only I was mistaken. His commitments required an unsustainable manic energy. They also required cash he didn’t have.
On May 4, 2025, I was one of about 60 guests Matthew invited to attend the annual On Stage at the Met Gala, which honored Elizabeth (Betty) Eveillard and her husband Jean-Marie for their work as philanthropists and financiers. He served as gala chair, and together, we lowered the average age of the attendees and brought a boisterous energy to the dance floor when the band started to play pop covers. It didn’t take long before almost everyone joined us on the floor, getting down to Chappell Roan.
Two days later, I was at an event honoring Jane Austen at New York University’s Bobst Library, where Matthew was the chair of the NYU Libraries Dean’s Advisory Council. One week earlier, I had been among Matthew’s 30 guests at another Met opening, for “Salome.” And one month earlier, I had been one of Matthew’s 60 guests at The Frick Collection’s re-opening gala.
I’m a trustee at my alma mater, Kettering University, and my husband, Norman Pearlstine, serves on several nonprofit boards, so we’ve attended a gala or two. But Matthew’s events were so over the top that Norm began to refuse his invitations. Instead of relaxing and enjoying the evening, I would compulsively calculate the cost of the tables, making note when Matthew said he paid for the wine at the On Stage at the Met Gala, and that he’d chosen the party band.
While happy to indulge Matthew’s gala-going, I couldn’t figure out how he paid for his commitments. He variously gestured at inherited wealth, or work as a financial adviser to notable wealthy families. In truth, he did so, according to a piece in New York, by stealing millions from his employers — Courtney Sale Ross, widow of legendary Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, and the Soros family.
The stories he told his friends make me wonder what he was saying to the major gifts officers at the Metropolitan Opera, The Frick Collection and New York University, where he had earned his MBA. He was indiscreet about his work for Ross and the Soroses with his friends, even as these kinds of jobs typically involve NDAs, all the while using their prestige and secrecy to obfuscate the nature of his actual job. Even his closest friends didn’t understand that he was the personal assistant to the youngest and quietest of the Soros sons, Gregory, and not the chief of staff for George, Alex and Greg.
In the interest of reciprocity and because I enjoyed his company, I’d include Matthew in dinners that we were hosting, and then I’d seat him strategically. He loved going to the opera and galleries, and he always got along with accomplished older women, so I once put him next to a prominent lawyer; another time, a wealthy widow. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Although he had already found a wealthy widow whose trust he could exploit, I see now he was always looking for his next mark. The gifts officers were invariably thrilled to learn that our table included someone from Soros world. It was like bringing a beauty queen to the prom.
The last such cultivation dinner he attended — an intimate evening for 20 representatives of the media and finance — took place in late March. At the start, everyone introduced themselves. Matthew began, “I’ve been close friends with Jane and Norm for over a decade, and I work for a family office.” We had become part of his credibility infrastructure, and he used that connection as he networked the room like a politician, discreetly mentioning his work for the Soros family and his affiliation with the Met.
Matthew was proud of how he had rocketed through the various boards at the Met, starting as a young associate director in 2020 and becoming an advisory director in 2023. In early 2025, he disclosed he had been elected a managing director, and that he planned to build a speakeasy in the opera house’s Lincoln Center basement. This sounded like quintessential Matthew: It was decadent, over the top, and it involved booze.
Matthew’s desire for prominent affiliations with major New York arts institutions was baffling. My husband sometimes jokes, “What do I need to do to get off this board?” and yet Matthew was clamoring to get on them. But he was not stupid. Perhaps, by attending galas with a large tribe of young, ascendant professionals along with a smattering of mature women (sadly, I am in the latter group), he gave himself a heightened aura of importance. The beautiful youngsters were there to vouch for his prodigious wealth, while I spoke of a lengthy friendship that legitimized the backstory of a young MBA who had become a trusted advisor to prominent and extremely wealthy people. He used me that way during the “Salome” opening night on April 29, when he seated me for dinner next to the editor of New York; I explained that Matthew and I had met in 2012 when we were fellow background actors, and that he had become a long-time friend of the family.
By being a managing director at the Met, or by having his name etched on the wall of the newly opened Frick on the same tier as Bloomberg Philanthropies, I now believe Matthew was whale hunting. These organizations are among the most respected in New York. They are also incestuous — Betty Eveillard is also the Frick’s Chair — and they can hew stodgy. By presenting himself as a wealthy, young doer, he could hopscotch to a better placement. His background in the arts would make him familiar, and his status as a major donor would allay concerns about his trustworthiness where other people’s money was concerned. As recently as this spring, at the same time as he was telling his friends he was starting a new job with the Qatari royal family (a position I now believe to be nonexistent), he was interviewing for a position with an American family office whose principals are passionate supporters of the arts and who found Matthew’s commitment to the Met a positive.
This is nothing new. Alberto Vilar ran a Ponzi scheme in the early aughts while laundering his reputation as a major donor to arts organizations like the Metropolitan Opera. Jeffrey Epstein employed a similar approach when he was elected to the board of Rockefeller University in 2000, which was laden with wealthy society types like Nancy Kissinger, Brooke Astor and Robert Bass. Epstein used his philanthropy tactically, as a way to seduce the wealthy and not-for-profit organizations alike. He routinely trumpeted his philanthropy (though not all his claims were legit). And in the same way Matthew’s friends spoke of his excessive generosity, Epstein’s friends spoke adoringly of his largesse. The two men bear another similarity: No one was quite sure how either earned their “fortunes.”
For a guy who purported to love the Metropolitan Opera, Matthew left it in worse shape financially. Last year, the opera’s debt was downgraded from stable to negative by Moody’s. Its endowment, which was $276 million as of July 31, 2024 (down from $340M in 2022), needed to be hit for the third time since 2023 in the wake of Matthew’s fraud. All this while, the Met’s operating expenses are higher than they were before the pandemic and program revenues have declined, forcing a heightened reliance on other funding sources. Moreover, ticket sales are lagging due to a decline in tourism, low ticket sales of contemporary vs. classic works, a reduction in the number of productions offered in the season (2024-2025 represented the lowest number since 1980-1981), and the use of discounting. The opera’s burn rate, as it stands now, is unsustainable absent a large infusion of outside support. The New York City Opera wound up in bankruptcy in 2013 after facing similar, sustained deficits in its funding. The Met needed Matthew’s $15 million pledge to fund its operating expenses, and it evaporated.
The Frick seems to have fared better, at least financially. In its 2024 Annual Report, Matthew is listed in a group of donors who’d given $1-5 million, but on the wall of the newly re-opened Frick, he is listed in the topmost of three tiers for that donor grouping, suggesting that he gave closer to $5 million than $1 million.
In an ArtNet article about Matthew, the Frick stated it “had no reason to believe that any of the contributions were made with misappropriated funds.” The New York Times reported the Frick saying, “This issue will not cause any significant financial disruption to the Frick.” However, the Times also reports that the Ross and Soros families are now working together to identify the extent of his theft and that “the families expect that any stolen funds would be returned to their rightful owners.” This has happened previously, as cultural institutions returned funds on behalf of the victims of Alberto Vilar. My husband was the president of the American Academy in Berlin when the decision was made to return Vilar’s contribution of $177,000, which represented a very painful hit to the Academy.
On April 25, in the wake of multiple galas and events on his dime, I emailed Matthew. “Is there a fund at the Met for, say, your speakeasy? I’d like to donate as I’ve been enjoying so much of their programming (through you!) but I’d like it to be for a cause that is especially important to you. Please advise, as I prefer to earmark these things.”
He replied immediately. “How wonderful and so sweet of you to ask! Any donation is welcomed. I just looked online and it would be great if you could give to the Rush Tickets program. I am a sponsor of it, and it would make a difference to expanding our audiences. The new speakeasy will definitely have supporting opportunities, but not for the next year or two as it gets built out. :) Excited to see you on the 29th.” In response, we made a donation to the Met’s Rush Tickets program in a way that acknowledged Matthew’s involvement. We had done something similar in 2024, for NYU’s Bobst Library, another organization where Matthew had hosted cultivation events.
While unsavory characters gain prominence infrequently in the more rarified spheres of New York cultural life, they do a lot of damage to the organizations they use as tools for access and status. I feel foolish for having shrugged off Matthew’s dishonesty, thinking it was just a rococo imagination and not a sign of something deeper and darker. But I don’t have a research department, nor do I have access to wealth screens and other tools used by development officers. It is baffling to me that someone who lived in an unexceptional rental in the Flatiron District, and whose personal net worth was apparently only a couple of million dollars, could pass for someone with the capacity to give tens of millions. His employers didn’t need a front man for their donations, either. Both Ross and the Soros family have a long established — and public — commitment to philanthropy.
I know the warning signs I missed, but does the Met? Did the Frick blow off internal questions about where Matthew’s money came from, as alleged in a since-deleted comment from someone claiming to be a former employee on Reddit? Are we seeing a lessening of standards in the hunt for new donors thanks to the crisis in cultural funding, especially as the federal government slashes its contributions? Is this a sign that desperation now trumps diligence in vetting board members and donors?
When I learned of Matthew’s fraud, I sent my AirMail.news piece along with a letter of apology to everyone who’d been at that cultivation dinner in March, where I’d introduced Matthew as a friend and tacitly vouched for his character. It probably wasn’t enough, but it seemed like the least I could do.
