Kyle Deschanel, the Rothschild Who Wasn’t

“They were looking to come in at a follow-on round for another $10 million in total,” Patrick said. “Kyle had said to me, that round was too small for him.”

Patrick said he left the December meeting optimistic, and they stayed in touch, communicating as recently as May of this year.

Then there was the Byju’s deck. The India-based ed-tech service had been on a tear since 2016 when Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan invested $3.4 million in the company. By June 2021, the company was valued at $16.5 billion.

Deschanel told people he was working directly with Anita Kishore, Byju’s 33-year-old chief strategy officer, on its next funding round. He was also getting, he said, help from his sister, Gabrielle de Rothschild Deschanel, an attorney at Citadel based in Chicago. In addition to an Oxshott colleague who was leading the Byju’s push, his sister was copied on several emails relating to the deal.

“Byju’s, I mean, it is a proper deck,” said Brian, the finance source who was looking into working with him to raise funds. “This is a real deck. I’ve seen decks before. This is a real deck.”

In September 2021, Oxshott reportedly clinched a deal to lead the fundraising round for Byju’s Series F, which would bring in a total of $297 million. Regulatory filings with the Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs showed that the investment was the equivalent of $160 million at the time. A leading Indian business outlet, Economic Times, mentioned Oxshott several times in a 2021 article about the deal. That December, Reuters reported that Churchill Capital founder Michael Klein—a longtime adviser to the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and Aramco—was exploring a deal with Byju’s to raise $4 billion to take the company public via a SPAC valuing it at $48 billion.

Those who knew him said that Deschanel exhibited outward signs of stress around this time. At the start of 2022, Donna described watching him take many phone calls with backers, often in Arabic. He took visits to Washington, DC, telling her he was meeting with ambassadors, she said.

“There were a few very large Middle Eastern investors that he introduced to Oxshott,” Stern said in his statement. “He represented that these investors stemmed from his Saudi connections.”

Deschanel told people he looped in his sister at Citadel, as legal counsel. He was working the phones nonstop. Brian, the source in finance, said that a number of investors turned him down citing, vaguely, red flags.

According to a New Delhi reporter for the Singapore-based financial blog the Morning Context, the Byju’s board introduced a resolution in March 2022, stating that the LLC providing the funds wouldn’t be Oxshott, but a related entity called DRD Holdings. (In emails Kyle would sign his full last name as De Rothschild Deschanel.) In July 2022, the outlet reported that the DRD Holdings/Oxshott funds never made it to Byju’s. The company told the Morning Context that Oxshott had never been the lead on the investment round but the allotted shares for the company were still outstanding. The same month, Indian member of Parliament Karti P. Chidambaram said that he was referring an investigation into Byju’s finances to the government’s fraud regulator, but Byju’s held firm and said that the funds would be delivered in August.

Donna said Deschanel seemed to be in constant conversation with his sister. At one point, Donna asked why he couldn’t just have his family, whom he had time and again represented as institutionally wealthy, help him out. She said Deschanel told her that his family didn’t like to use its own money on such deals when it could find outside investors.

Deschanel’s social acquaintances at the time said that he continued to party throughout this period. According to Donna, he turned up to her workplace after having been at an after-hours until dawn, residue in his nose. He would spend time at the new Tao Group–owned establishments at the recently opened Moxy Hotel on the Bowery, often hanging with Dylan Hales, who had been brought in to run the spaces. Little Ways was a particular favorite. In February, Hales cohosted Deschanel’s birthday party where the guest of honor secured more than half the tables and invited hundreds to celebrate. (According to the list on the invitation sheet, Leonardo DiCaprio RSVP’d no, saying, “Happy day my guy. All love 💙”. A representative for DiCaprio did not reply to a request for comment.)

By early 2023 Byju’s announced that Oxshott had withdrawn from the funding round. Around this time, friends say Deschanel started to hit them up for cash, asking a person for $250,000 and promising a return within a week. He put Seamless charges on a girlfriend’s card until she caught him and walked out of the house. He used Tini’s credit card to pay for Ubers and ran up tabs. She confronted him. He denied it. But, she said, “I knew it was him—you don’t steal a credit card and go to Little Ways for a $500 brunch, which is his favorite place next to his house.”

“And then I got the receipt and it’s his fucking drink order,” she said.

The tab included eight Aperol spritzes, oysters, steak and eggs, a burger, and two orders of Casamigos Blanco, with an extra charge to use the liquor to make an espresso martini.

Tini clarified later that “the tequila espresso martini was his sig drink.”

He sent conspiracy-tinged texts to friends about how he lost money, or money got stolen from him.

“So, I’m an idiot, I keep all my credit cards and password on a convenient page in the Notes app and then I made a questionable romantic choice for the evening last month—I have tens of thousand [sic] of dollars in charges,” he texted Evans. “I hate myself.”

Donna blocked all of Deschanel’s numbers. She said she threatened to take out a restraining order after Deschanel continued to reach her via his Venmo account. His purported sister, Gabrielle de Rothschild Deschanel, emailed to attempt a mediation. Donna googled the name and found nothing. (Reached for comment, a representative at Citadel said it had “No record of someone with her name or variations of it ever working here.”)

“Is this Kyle?” she responded. “I know this has to be Kyle.”

He would offer to Venmo friends for meals and drinks, and never follow through. The house that cost $25,000 a month to rent fell into disarray. His relationship with Vitolo started to stray as well. Rumors circulated about him hitting up fellow patrons for cash, or even trying to take out a large loan by playing up his connection to the restaurant. Apparently, according to multiple sources, Deschanel hosted a dinner with several female companions, ran up a bill, and then he ditched, stiffing his fellow diners. Eventually, Vitolo figured out that Deschanel wasn’t in his high school class. There was another guy named Kyle.

After I reached out in June, Vitolo said, “I got better things to do with my life then [sic] talking about a fraud.” In August, when presented with accounts of Deschanel attempting to use Emilio’s Ballato to borrow funds, Vitolo texted “All false” but declined to elaborate.

And there were certain instances that pierced through the once impeccably maintained aura of wealth that Deschanel cultivated in himself. One nightlife friend faced such a moment when he asked Deschanel for a ride back to the city from Montauk after a weekend at the Surf Lodge.

“He was driving, for a guy like him, supposedly with his lifestyle and whatnot, he was driving a very, very crappy car that was filled—when I tell you it was filled, dude, I’m talking about, there would’ve been, on the floor and the front seat, 30 bottles of empty Diet Coke,” the friend said. “It was a junkyard. There was shit in the back seat. It was disgusting. And he told me that that was his assistant’s car. He told me that his assistant was an Orthodox, Hasidic. So throughout the car, there were various Hebrew books and all sorts of shit.”

For Tini such moments were small—at first. There was a $12,500 check that Deschanel asked her to cash for him. It was signed by someone named Saki Dodelson, of Lakewood, New Jersey. Tini and a friend we’ll call Andrea discovered online that Dodelson was the founder of an education company called Beable. LinkedIn revealed a woman in a white button-down shirt and blazer, with droopy red earrings and eye shadow. Deschanel said he was on the board of Beable and shrugged it off.

A few months later, Andrea was at 514 Broome Street, she said, drinking and smoking cigarettes, when she blurted out that she’d heard so much about Deschanel’s family, but had never met any of them. Why weren’t there any pictures on the walls? Deschanel tapped at his phone and showed her a picture of his mother. It was Saki Dodelson.

Then there was the Global Entry card.

“I happened to be over at his house looking for something,” Tini told me. “He’s like, ‘It’s upstairs somewhere.’ And so I’m upstairs and the pants on the floor, the belt, I’m not snooping through drawers. It’s literally his fucking pants on the floor that he just took off. I’m looking in the pocket and his real global ID and his Amex are in there, his matching Amex.”

There, on the US Customs & Border Protection–issued card, Tini said she saw Deschanel’s face.

The name next to it was Aryeh Dodelson.

Situated 68 miles from downtown Manhattan, Lakewood, New Jersey, is a city of about 135,000 people—roughly two thirds of whom are Orthodox Jews. It’s an inland area in Ocean County, and the air has the faintest hint of the beach in its aftertaste. One weekday this summer, I hitched a ride with two men—one a current Lakewood resident, another a former—as they offered a dose of local history and gossip. The town is home to, and in many ways driven by, the famed rabbinical school Beth Medrash Govoha, the largest yeshiva outside of Israel. According to locals and hometown news reports, BMG picks candidates for local office for the Haredim to support, controls hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate, and maintains a fundraising machine through its supporters.

“It’s a billion-dollar operation. It’s ‘Yeshiva Enterprise,’” said one of my hosts as we drove past the campus that has its own Kushner Pavilion, named for a certain prominent New Jersey Jewish family.

Like many such Orthodox enclaves, the town is by nature insular. Because no cars or electronics can be used on the Sabbath, everyone needs to live within walking distance from shul. Marriages are arranged—and meticulously so. The ambulances are staffed by volunteers—all married Orthodox men. But the Lakewood community also exhibits markers of upper-middle-class striving familiar to other New York–area suburbs. Over the last decade or so, new luxury gyms, with separate hours for men and women, have popped up—as have high-end kosher restaurants, and kosher liquor stores which stock Casa Azul tequila and copious Glenfiddich blends alongside Israeli wines. We strolled into a grocery store with the scale and minimalist approach of a Whole Foods, but stocked entirely with kosher goods. The checkout-line magazines were all about the Orthodox faith.

Until very recently, according to sources and public reporting, Aryeh Malkiel Dodelson, 36, was a practicing rabbi in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he lived in a home with his wife and child. He was the head of a local kollel, a group of married men who devoted their days to the study of the Talmud, making him a rosh kollel at the yeshiva. He was an adviser to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, in Jerusalem.

“Being a rosh kollel, it’s like the dream for everyone,” Henry, a high-profile Orthodox personality who spent years in Lakewood and was driving us around, told me. “It’s like wanting to play in the NBA.”

Dodelson was in-demand, accomplished, a serious scholar of the ancient laws. He was invited to serve as a visiting rabbi at places like the West Side Institutional Synagogue, on West 76th Street. He wrote several books, including a 201-page-long text about agunot, the Talmudic laws that surround a Jewish woman’s rights to leave a marriage.

“It was not something that’s off-the-cuff or something, he took on a very hard, complex subject, and did a very good job with it,” said Riley, another resident of Lakewood who lived down the street from the Dodelson family. “So he’s definitely very learned and definitely brilliant.”

Dodelson hailed from one of the town’s most important families. His mother, Saki, is a cousin of the Rosh Yeshiva Malkiel Kotler, the dean of the historic school’s 8,000 students. He is the great-grandson of Aaron Kotler, who founded the yeshiva in 1943, a seismic development in Orthodox Judaism’s rise in the United States.