After a glance at her perfectly curated Hinge profile—and a quick Google search—Adam thought that Kelly DuFord Williams was exactly what he needed after his divorce. The designer-clad 35-year-old seemed like a catch. Williams owned her own boutique law firm and had won accolades in local media.
But the relationship would soon become a nightmare, he claims.
“I was so excited at first. I met this woman and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s 35 and she owns her own firm. And she has all these awards,’” Adam, who wished to only use his first name out of fear of professional retaliation, told The Daily Beast.
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A few months into the relationship Adam says he discovered Williams’ dark secret: she was allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from her clients, and falsifying checks.
When he tried to end the relationship, Adam says, Williams turned on him and refused to leave his house. Little did he know, Williams was already the subject of a criminal investigation by local prosecutors.
Earlier this month, a San Diego warrant was issued for Williams’ arrest on nine counts of felony theft and one count of forging checks. According to a criminal complaint obtained by The Daily Beast, Williams is facing several felony charges after allegedly stealing upwards of $400,000 from former clients of her law firm, Slate Law Group. So far it appears that she has evaded arrest, and is still not in police custody.
Williams is alleged to have swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars from settlements she secured for her clients. She then “spent the money without giving the clients their full share,” according to court documents filed in the Superior Court of San Diego. She is also accused of “forg[ing] client signatures on settlement checks prior to depositing them,” according to the court records.
“At one point I called her out on it. I called her a fraud who probably did not have pennies to rub together,” Adam says. “But I had no idea how bad it was going to get. She made my life hell.”
The latest criminal charges against Williams come just weeks after the California State Bar Court recommended she be disbarred after finding evidence she misappropriated money from clients and made at least two false 911 calls in Utah, where she allegedly posed as a district attorney concerned about the welfare of a child because she was angry at a different former paramour.
As previously reported by The Daily Beast, Williams is also facing at least two lawsuits in civil court from former clients who claim she overcharged them for legal services, billed their credit cards without their knowledge, and mishandled their cases.
Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Adam says that he was completely unaware of any of Williams’ alleged wrongdoing when the pair met online in June 2022.
On their first date at a waterfront restaurant, Adam says Williams “led with her accomplishments.” Williams told Adam about her law firm, Slate Law Group, which she opened in 2020 after separating from her husband, Craig DuFord, with whom she had three children. Adam says that Williams claimed that she was a millionaire, with several luxury cars, and had a house in one of the more affluent areas in San Diego. Later, he says, he “realized that she didn’t own the house” at all. (DuFord did not immediately respond to a request for comment)
“All I had to do was look up the address to figure out it wasn’t hers,” he adds. (It is not immediately clear if Williams owned the house, but there are currently no property records listed under the lawyer’s name in San Diego.)
The relationship, however, escalated fairly quickly after Adam’s ex-wife went into the hospital and he had to take care of their two children for weeks. During that time, Adam says, he and Williams would have their kids play together often, a fact he initially was thankful for because “she was helping me out.”
Soon, however, he claims he saw some red flags, including Williams’ drinking and constant lies.
“She would also tells lies with expiration dates, so I would know quickly she was lying. She would say that a car was coming in 15 minutes to pick her up, and the car never came. Or that she knew someone she did not know,” Adam explained.
Then, he says, he had a call with his divorce attorney while he was walking through the Tampa airport where he briefly mentioned that he had been seeing Williams.
“I could hear the audible gasp,” he says. “Her exact words were, ‘That woman is a svengali.’”
The attorney then revealed to Adam that Williams was being investigated by the state bar for stealing clients’ funds. He decided it was time to end the relationship, a conversation he said Williams seemed to receive well. She said that she was planning to move to Long Beach.
“She said she was moving, but had moved out of her house already and needed a place to stay for a little bit,” Adam says, adding that Williams and the kids soon moved in. “She never left.”
The next few months, Adam says, was nothing short of hell.
He says that Williams refused to leave his house, forcing him to vacate the master bedroom of his multi-million dollar home and hide out in the downstairs room to evade her constant “berating.” The problem, he says, was that Williams had legally established residency in his house because she had been there longer than two weeks.
“Everything she is saying is full of shit. She has no intention to leave my house,” Adam says. “I was going to have to evict her.”
“This woman was spiraling and was trying to take me with her,” Adam says.
After weeks of constantly asking her to leave, Adam says that he saw his first opportunity to get Williams out of his house on Sept. 30—when she went to visit a friend in Long Beach for the weekend.
While she was away, Adam says, he called a locksmith to change all the locks on Oct. 1 so Williams could not re-enter. The next day, he says he decided to hide out in his own master bedroom to make sure the house was secure when Williams came home.
“I thought, ‘I’ll have all the lights off, the blinds closed, like everywhere in the house. I’ll just be up there,’” he says. “I had a cooler pack of, like, drinks.”
But Williams did not take the Oct. 2 forced eviction well, he says. After learning that she could not enter the house, he says that she tried to break a window and eventually climbed a fence into the backyard to set up camp with her kids. He says at one point, Williams even “started the barbecue and started to cook frozen pancakes for her kids.”
The saga was also detailed in a Domestic Violence Restraining Order that Williams’ ex-husband filed against her on Oct.11, 2021.
In the order, which Craig DuFord filed in an attempt to gain custody of the pair’s three children and obtained by The Daily Beast, he said Williams’ mental health had been deteriorating and alleged that she “abuses alcohol and prescription medications” and she has expressed “suicidal” thoughts.
“Upon finding out that she could not access the home, Ms. DuFord went into a rage. She refused to leave the property and began drinking heavily,” DuFord wrote in the order about the Oct. 2 incident, adding that at the time her kids were aged 7, 6 and 4.
The children were “without basic necessities, including food, blankets or bedding” overnight, according to the order.
After dropping the children at school the next morning, Williams returned to the backyard and kept drinking, DuFord wrote. Eventually Adam called the police, who unsuccessfully tried to get her to leave, the restraining order notes.
“She was there all night,” Adam says, adding that his backyard was littered with alcohol cans. He adds that the whole experience was traumatizing.
The order also stressed that Williams “is a pathological liar” who also allegedly told Adam, “she was pregnant with his child just before she said she was going to commit suicide” after she was locked out of his home.
In her response to the domestic violence order, William vehemently denied the allegations of abuse.
“All the statements of abuse or neglect of my children are false,” she wrote.
Williams also challenged DuFord’s version of events, claiming to be a victim of a complex conspiracy devised by DuFord and Adam.
“Mr DuFord works for Adam… my now ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife’s divorce attorney who also represents Mr. DuFord in this matter,” she wrote in her response, “Mr. DuFord found out I was dating Mr. [Adam] and was not happy. Mr. [Adam] and Mr. DuFord then created this matter together.” (Adam confirmed, however, that his former spouse’s divorce lawyer worked in the same office as DuFord.)
In response to Wiliams’ claims, Adam laughed—calling it the “most insane thing ever.”
“It doesn’t surprise me because she is a lunatic,” Adam says, denying Williams’ claims. “I think she is so deep in her lies.”
And Adam is not the only ex-paramour who has been burned by Williams.
Jesus Rogelio Huerta told The Daily Beast he began dating Williams in early 2021—but broke up with her just weeks later after the lawyer started telling “weird lies.” The break-up happened just before a planned trip to St. George, Utah, with some friends, he said.
According to text messages reviewed by The Daily Beast and included in the California State Bar Court’s decision, Williams was furious that she was not invited on the trip and eventually threatened to call the police on Huerta and promised to “come for you like you don’t even know.”
Williams eventually made two phone calls to the Hurricane City Police Department, the state bar court’s decision states. In one of the calls, she claimed to be a “deputy district attorney in San Diego,” who was concerned about the welfare of the 2-year-old child of one of Huerta’s friends.
The Hurricane City Police Department ultimately deemed the threat to be false, and even completed a criminal complaint request form for Williams. They could not arrest her, state bar court decision states, because she lived out of town. Williams is not yet facing criminal charges for the Utah calls, but prosecutors did mention 16 counts of misconduct that were established by the California State Bar, including “moral turpitude [and] providing false statements to law enforcement.”
For Adam, the idea that he became entangled in William’s “black widow web” is still “so incredibly painful and chaotic.” While that was the last time he saw Williams, he said, it was not the last time he heard from the lawyer. He says that while he has blocked Williams from most social media, she is still sending him emails. The emails, as reviewed by The Daily Beast, range from a simple request for a copy of her ID, to reminders that she is a “good girl” who has been focusing on “getting centered.”
“She is evil and she is smart,” Adam says. “I’ve never been in a relationship like that. If I had met her now, I would never give her the time of day.”
