Madame Giselle Yazji, who became popular in Ghana during President John Agyekum Kufuor’s tenure in office as President of Ghana has popped up in international news with questions on her credibility.
Describing herself as a one-time Economic Adviser to President John Agyekum Kufuor, she became popular in 2005 when she said she was President Kufuor’s mistress and that she has given birth to twins for her.
This week, she popped up in international news following an article published by the Washington Post titled “The Mysterious Madame Giselle.”
The Washington Post article questioned why people should believe her?
Describing her as “mysterious Madame Giselle”, the Washington Post quoted her as having allegedly being married to two world leaders and an adviser to the White House.
“Giselle Yazji boasted to her neighbors about her luxurious life and that she was the secret wife of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a mentor to Ivanka Trump and the ex-wife of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. When she told her neighbors in Chevy Chase, Md., that she could make them rich, they believed that too.
Below is a copy of the Washington Post’s article on her
The irresistibly charming woman in Apartment 713 can hold forth for hours with tales of her luxe life among the intercontinental elite, neighbors say.
Madame Giselle, as some call her, is forever boasting of being the secret wife of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, even saying she facilitated the first phone call between the Middle Eastern leader and President Trump, according to two of her neighbors in an upscale high-rise building just beyond the D.C. border in Chevy Chase, Md. Over homemade Turkish coffee in her lavishly appointed apartment or across the table at pricey restaurants, the neighbors say, she has shared in a confiding tone that she occupies a prime White House office next to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump.
“I’m kind of a mom figure to her,” Madame Giselle says, according to those who live in her building.
In this gilded age of Washington excess, Madame Giselle’s casual references to her private jet and to her collection of glitzy residences in the tony D.C. neighborhood of Foxhall, as well as in Spain and Manhattan, seemed entirely plausible to some of the friends she accumulated in the hallways and elevators of a building occupied by a sophisticated array of capital insiders. For a time, the elegant woman in Apartment 713 appeared to be just another fascinating curio in a city thick with the creme de la creme of foreign dignitaries and financiers, an only-in-Washington sort of apparition.
Then she started promising to make her neighbors a lot of money.
That’s when things got messy.
On one level, the saga of Madame Giselle is a story about, in no particular order, allegations by two neighbors who say they were swindled in an elaborate scheme to sell T-shirts to the Venezuelan army, a cash-stuffed envelope slipped under a doorway, a legendary bygone scandal involving the Colombian military and a woman known as “The Blonde,” an ongoing multimillion-dollar Colombian fraud case, and a supposed helicopter ride into Syria. But on another level, as illustrated in interviews and in hundreds of text messages obtained by The Washington Post, it’s a story about friendship and trust, about what we can make ourselves believe and how we can sometimes suspend disbelief when dreams are in sight.
At the edges of the story there is a little girl who adores stuffed animals, a father on the horns of a rough divorce, a former ambassador with a TV star son, and an out-of-towner who longed to get a PhD. But the central figure is the woman in Apartment 713, an enigmatic presence who calls herself Giselle Yazji.
In the weeks since The Post began examining the many lives of Madame Giselle, her activities have drawn the attention of investigators in the Montgomery County district attorney’s office, according to several people who have been interviewed by authorities. (The office declined to comment.)
Reached by phone recently, Yazji — who said she was in Colombia but planned to return to Maryland soon — issued a string of denials before abruptly hanging up. She denied boasting of a secret marriage to Sissi and arranging a call between the Egyptian leader and President Trump, and she brushed aside the allegations of the two neighbors in Maryland who say they were swindled by her. She did not respond when asked if she’d claimed to have a White House office. One of those neighbors has sued her, and she has responded in court documents by denying all allegations of wrongdoing.
Giselle offered to make herself available for a sit-down interview upon her return to the United States, but later did not respond to requests to schedule the interview. She also did not respond to follow-up questions sent via email, saying instead in a typo-filled email that “if you want to publish fake information given to you as a gossip from somebody ir neighbors and try to damage my name ease feel free to do it. I really don’t think that a responsible person would do that knowing that I will sue you and sue the newwspaper.”
