Zachary Horwitz, the actor who works as Zach Avery, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors out of over $200 million.
News broke that the B-movie actor had been arrested in April, 2021 when details of the $690 million in loans he had obtained through lying to movie investors by pretending to have connections at HBO and Netflix began to be revealed.
In the many articles written about the case, only a few lines were written about Horwitz’s wife, Mallory Horwitz (née Hagedorn).
Who Is Zach Avery’s Wife?
Lionsgate
Hagedorn is a hairstylist who Avery met in college. At the time of his arrest, the pair had been married for seven years, having had their son, Jaxon, in 2017, according to William D. Cohan writing for Air Mail.
Unlike her husband, Hagedorn did not work in the film industry—though she does get a “very special thanks” credit on her husband’s 2018 movie Trespassers.
Avery used, in hindsight, a very unfortunate turn of phrase to talk about his wife in a 2019 article on online publishing platform Medium, referring to her as: “my rock, my sounding board, and my partner in crime throughout my entire journey.” (It should be noted for clarity’s sake that Mallory Horwitz had no known involvement with her husband’s scheme).
Links to both her Twitter and LinkedIn pages were included in a nickiswift.com piece about Zach Avery’s wife published in early February, but at the time of writing both pages had been deleted. Prior to the deletion of the former, however, she listed her job as a hair stylist and colorist at a Los Angeles salon.
How Did Mallory Horwitz React to Her Husband’s Arrest?
In pretty strong terms. Avery was arrested on April 6, 2021, according to the L.A. Times. On that very day, his wife petitioned for divorce at the Los Angeles County Superior Courts. At the same time, she filed for custody of Jaxon.
During the court hearing for her divorce, Mallory said that her husband was, “deceiving and manipulating me and everyone around him, and he is not the person that I believed he was.” She also denied any knowledge of the crime. Court transcripts reveal that she said of her husband’s arrest: “The banging of the doors literally caused our walls to tremble and being woken up to a troop of FBI agents swarming our house was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced.”
The family home Mallory and Zach shared in the Beverlywood area of Los Angeles was sold in May, 2021 for $5.9 million, according to real estate website Zillow. The house was sold at a profit reported Vanity Fair.