It seems the Metropolitan Opera was tricked regarding a donation of $15 million.

In an exposé by the New York Magazine, it was revealed that Matthew Christopher Pietras had fraudulently attempted to donate money to the Metropolitan Opera.

According to the report, on March 31, Met Opera General Manager Peter Gelb announced a major gift of $15 million by Pietras. However, when the company attempted to make a $10 million transfer on May 28, 2025, from an LLC connected to a Greg Soros property, the bank realized that something was wrong and flagged it as fraudulent.

As the magazine states, “it was flagged as fraudulent and didn’t go through. That night, back in New York, Pietras attended the American Ballet Theatre’s spring gala at Cipriani, where he wore a cold expression for photographers on the step-and-repeat. He looked pale and jet-lagged. Meanwhile, Met employees waited to hear from him — surely the whole thing was just a mistake.”

Two days later, a housekeeper found Pietras dead in his apartment.

According to the report, Pietras used his access to his employers’ accounts to cover his tracks, including fabricating documents, intercepting fraud alerts, and even impersonating Greg Soros.

In the report by the New York Magazine, Gelb was reportedly forced to call an emergency meeting. The magazine said, “At an emergency meeting after Pietras’s death, Gelb and the Met’s top board members discussed what had become suddenly, alarmingly clear: Not only was the promised gift not coming but they had accepted millions in fraudulent funds. The Met scrambled to develop a communications strategy, a plan of action for when reporters inevitably called. But the problem went beyond bad press.”

It added, “Critics say he let costs run wild while doing a poor job of fundraising, forcing him to look further afield for new donors. Now, to make matters worse, he’d counted on one of those new donors for a massive pledge that wouldn’t be arriving. Over the past two years, the board had allowed Gelb to dip into its endowment multiple times to cover basic costs like payroll. After Pietras’s death, he once again got the board’s permission to reach into the endowment. Lately, in interviews, Gelb has teased a “transformative” gift some say is almost certainly a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia.”

According to the New York report, this was not the first time Pietras donated to the Met. His name appears in the Met Opera’s annual report for the first time in 2018-19, under gifts between $5,500 and $6,499. The following season, he gave between $50,000 and $99,999 and repeated it in 2020-21. He was also elected “Young Associate Director” by the board. The magazine also reported that in September 2022, Pietras paid for 20 friends to go to the opera’s opening night, as one of the gala “benefactors,” and also did the same in 2023.