“Basketball Wives” alum Brittish Williams claims a series of issues — including a “horrible” gambling addiction, plus her father’s death — led to fraudulent criminal behavior that has landed her a four-year prison sentence.
“That [gambling] addiction had a lot of domino effects to things that would occur,” Williams, 33, tells esteemed reality TV producer Carlos King in Page Six’s exclusive preview of Tuesday’s “Reality with the King” podcast episode.
When her dad died in July 2017 after a grueling battle with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the reality star had suppressed her gambling habits.
She explains to host King, 44, that she received insurance money from his passing and wanted to “do right” with the influx of cash, given her history of spending it irresponsibly.
Williams says she intended to build her credit up and sought help from a financial advisor, who sold her a credit privacy number (CPN). The nine-digit number — formatted just like a Social Security number (SSN) — is frequently used by scammers to mislead consumers into thinking it can replace one’s SSN.
It is illegal to create a false identity with a CPN, though Williams claims that she bought one with the sole intention of pulling herself out of a financial hole — especially after losing tens of thousands of dollars to her gambling addiction.
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“When people see this misuse of a social security number, they think I went and stole people’s social security numbers or something. That wasn’t the case,” she says in our sneak peek.
“I bought a CPN from a credit lady and I don’t know if it was somebody’s actual social security number or if it was something they created,” Williams elaborates. “I don’t know but that’s where that came from.”
In May, the former VH1 personality — who appeared on “Basketball Wives LA” in 2014’s Season 3 — pleaded guilty to five federal counts of misuse of a Social Security number, four counts of bank fraud, three counts of making false statements to the IRS and three counts of wire fraud.
The crimes took place over the course of nearly a decade and continued even after Williams was indicted, per Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane Klocke.
Wiliams illegally obtained PPP loans that were meant for businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal authorities also alleged.
Additionally, the mother of one — who shares daughter Dash with ex-fiancé Lorenzo Gordon — was accused of under-reporting her income on tax returns from 2017 to 2019, fraudulently using Social Security numbers that were not assigned to her to open accounts with credit card companies and banks and submitting fake medical bills to at least one insurance company.
Throughout that period in Williams’ life, she beat her gambling addiction — which she says drained her financially and emotionally.
“No one even knows this besides my family and friends: I used to have a very, very bad gambling problem, horrible,” she confesses. “Like when you think about people … being on drugs or people … being alcoholics, I don’t think there is anything worse than gambling.”
At the height of her issues, Williams lost $50,000 over Christmas, making the holiday particularly bleak.
“It was really an addiction that I literally had to wean myself from. And on top of having my lifestyle and, you know, just everything that I was used to doing and having this addiction was horrible,” she tells King.
“I remember being just at Christmas one year and losing almost $50,000, like, in two days. It was horrible.”
No matter the struggles she faced before committing fraud — in a number of ways, racking up 15 felonies in total — Williams will eventually have to take accountability for her actions. While she was sentenced in October, it remains unknown when she will report to prison.
In addition to the four-year sentence, Judge Henry E. Autrey ordered the Missouri resident to pay restitution of $565,000.
“Brittish Williams was getting paid to portray her celebrity lifestyle on ‘Basketball Wives’ when in fact she was a typical fraudster,” said Special Agent in Charge Jay Greenberg, per a press release.
“After today’s sentencing, her reality is now a life of a felon.”
At the time, Williams admitted that she “knew better” and “did wrong anyway,” per St. Louis-based newspaper the River Front Times.
The “Marriage Boot Camp” alum’s legal counsel, however, asserted that she was harshly punished because of her notoriety in the reality TV space.
“Brittish Williams was punished today, not for fraud, but for her celebrity,” Williams’ attorney, Beau Brindley, told People in a statement, adding that they plan to “challenge this sentence through every legal means” available.
“The Court chose to treat her more harshly due to her status as a public figure rather than treating similarly situated defendants equally.”
For more from Williams, tune into “Reality with the King.” New episodes drop Tuesdays on all major podcasting platforms and YouTube.