Add The New York Post on Google A grieving widow sitting on a “Roblox” fortune recently shelled out nearly $16 million on one of Manhattan’s grandest mansions to build a life with the male escort she claims later fleeced her for millions, property records reviewed by The Post show.
Marianne Flippo, 49, closed on the landmarked house in Kips Bay on April 30, plunking down $15.9 million for the Gilded Age Beaux-Arts showpiece mere months before accusing her companion Gregg Starr, 38, of draining her bank accounts.
The 1903 mansion, built for banker James F.D. Lanier and his socialite wife Harriet, spans six stories and 11,638 square feet with 12 bedrooms and nine-plus bathrooms, a wine cellar, an oak-paneled elevator, and a wellness floor complete with a cold plunge pool and a cedar sauna.
The property initially hit the market in 2023 for a whopping $29.2 million. It last listed for $16.5 million before closing at a slight discount, property records show.
Flippo’s attorney Larry Hutcher confirmed to The Post that the purchase was a couple’s decision, not a solo indulgence.
“She bought that house because she thought it was a beautiful property,” Hutcher said. “She thought it would be a nice home for them to live in.”
The mansion buy landed squarely inside the same window Flippo now says Starr and an escort agency handler were pressuring her to fork over millions more under a bogus “buyout” scheme, according to her Manhattan Supreme Court filing.
Hutcher added that despite splurging on the Murray Hill trophy home, Flippo — whose husband, Chad, died by suicide in 2024 — hadn’t fully relocated her life to the city.
“She still does live in New Hampshire as well,” he said.
Property records paint a portrait of a woman who restructured her entire geography around a man she’d met barely a year earlier. Flippo had spent decades in New England, with a documented address in Walpole, New Hampshire dating back to the late 1990s, before Starr moved into her New York apartment last December, according to the lawsuit.
The relationship began innocently enough in December 2024, when Flippo — who suffers from a rare genetic condition — needed an Italian-speaking companion for a trip to Italy. She was steered toward Cowboys 4 Angels — an agency she says she believed offered personal assistants, not paid companionship. She didn’t realize the outfit was actually a male escort service until well into their entanglement, the suit claims.
By this spring, prosecutors’ version of events and Flippo’s lawsuit allege, Starr and the agency were pressuring the medically fragile widow, plied with alcohol and recovering from surgery, into signing a $10 million “Exit Agreement” so he could supposedly buy his way out of his contract with the agency.
She wired $5.95 million into a joint Charles Schwab account before Starr allegedly moved most of it into an account under his sole control and threatened to disappear with the cash. According to her own court filings, it ended with her bank balance reduced to just $12.61.
The Lanier House itself is no ordinary address. Designed by architects Hoppin and Koen, the same firm behind the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, the mansion was commissioned for a couple who ranked among the exclusive 400 guests said to fit inside the Astor family’s Fifth Avenue ballroom.
It is both a New York City landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with only two owners in its 120-plus year history before this sale.
Other features of the home include a fitness room, and an oak-paneled library.
Monthly carrying costs on the property run north of six figures, with property taxes alone estimated at roughly $14,000 a month, according to listing data.
