How star TV journalist became a fantasist who lied to alma mater that she’d donate $2M, claimed she was friends with Prince Harry and had access to private jet… while she was sleeping in parking garage and stealing boxed wine

She was once an acclaimed TV journalist known for her PBS reports and documentaries about the Middle East.

But Josephine Franklin’s glittering career and cosseted life gave way to a Walter Mitty-esque fantasy existence that saw her lie to her alma mater – the University of Florida – that she’d donate $2 million in return for the creation of an archive in her name.

So impressed by Franklin’s credentials were university officials that they planned a lavish gala to honor her at the ritzy Four Seasons Hotel in Washington DC.

The night before the 2014 event, the check bounced. Franklin claimed she was unable to attend because of a broken foot. 

She was actually sleeping under the stairwell of a parking garage in Palm Beach Gardens at the time. 

And from there, an astonishing story of deceit and decline began to unravel, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Franklin, who was born to wealthy parents, forged a successful career as a TV journalist and married a surgeon – ended up homeless in South Florida and stealing boxes of wine from CVS. 

She claimed to have a direct line to Prince Harry while touting a movie script she claimed to be writing. 

When her daughter Ashley Trout was hospitalized after suffering a fall while rock climbing in Japan in 2004, Franklin even declared she’d commandeer her friend Colin Powell’s private jet to come and rescue her.

Powell was United States Secretary of State at the time. 

And while these claims were lies, Franklin had plenty of other things she could truthfully boast about, having spent decades in life as a highly-successful journalist who indeed lived a gilded existence. 

Franklin. known as Jo, was born in Chicago in 1946 to an upper middle class family. 

She graduated from the University of Florida in 1968. While there, she spent a semester in Lebanon and became fascinated with the Middle East. Afterwards, Franklin found work as a producer on PBS, making documentaries about Saudi Arabia and the Middle East for the network.

Franklin’s personal life was going well too. She married surgeon Hugh Trout and had two children – a daughter called Ashley born in 1981 and a son, Hugh Jr., who arrived in 1985.  

But things appeared to take a dramatic turn for the worse after Franklin’s career hit a bump in the mid 1990s and she got divorced from Hugh. 

In 1989, she presented a PBS documentary ‘Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians’. After it aired it drew criticism from those who believed the program to be pro-Palestinian. Franklin responded saying she wanted to depict a rarely seen perspective.

During the early 1990s, she spend some time writing a self-published novel about a love story set during the Persian Gulf War.

Franklin had hoped the book might even be turned into a movie but sales flopped and the New York Times blasted her prose concluding ‘what she cannot do is write.’ 

She was left owing the book’s marketer $25,000. The debt was never paid.

By 1996, she was divorced and had moved to the west coast. 

A divorce judge noted how she had little taxable income she had, yet was leasing a Jaguar XJ6 and was $150,000 in the red.

Custody of her two children went to Franklin’s ex-husband who lived in Washington D.C. 

Her family say that it was after the divorce she became lost in a whirlwind of fantasies of her own making. It was that steady stream of lies which caused her own children to cut off ties with their own mother.

Daughter, Ashley, who is now 42, would spend her summers with her mom in California and noted how she would frequently live beyond her means and appeared to be obsessed with her image rather than finding work.

The pair would often argue and it led to a confrontation between the two about her spending habits together with the mounting lies.  

Things came to a head over the 2004 Colin Powell incident.

‘I get my mom on the phone and I tell her, listen, here’s the deal, there’s no jet. You don’t have access to Colin Powell’s jet,’ Ashley said.

Much of the old charm remained, however – and she was able to eke out a living for more than a decade without any obvious source of income. 

Having ended up in South Florida after her home was foreclosed, Franklin so dazzled University of Florida officials that they agreed to set up the Josephine A. Franklin Chair in Islam and Politics in her honor in 2013.

The cost – a $2 million donation, which Franklin insisted was no problem. A no-expense party at the Four Seasons was to be held in her honor, but the deal collapsed at the last minute. College officials had to ring around to tell guests the party was canceled with just hours to go.

Afterwards, Franklin remained in Palm Beach Gardens, where she befriended regulars at a local Starbucks where she’d spend her days.

Claiming to be working for the government and on a Saudi watchlist, Franklin impressed her friends with her considerable knowledge of the Middle East and current affairs.

She would tell her fellow coffee fans that she had a personal driver, lived on nearby Jupiter Island, and was staying at a hotel in order to remain close to a story she was working on.

‘She was on point when it came to the political world, what’s going on in the world,’ said Stephen Sussman, one of her friends at the coffee shop.

But regulars were not fooled and noticed how Franklin would be seen with holes in her shoes and would often wear the same clothes day after day.  

She would only get glasses of hot water from Starbucks – and make drinks using her own tea bags or instant coffee.  Franklin stayed at the coffee shop to use its free WiFi on her damaged iPad, her friends suspected.

But they remained sympathetic – and would give her food and treat her to a second hand iPad to try and keep her going.  

There were other clues all was not well. Franklin did not appear to carry a cellphone. She claimed this was to stop her being tracked by the Saudis.

‘She is very ill and we need to have her put into a medical treatment facility of some type before she harms other people and herself,’ her brother George Franklin wrote to the family in 2014, days after finding out about the failed gala, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

George said his sister ‘wasn’t ever going to admit she had a problem.’

‘I have struggled with the question if you yourself believe what you say or you are knowingly being untruthful,’ her son wrote to her while urging her to get professional help.

Her family say they tried several times to get her into treatment, but she refused.

Instead, she would have brushes with law – including an arrest for stealing two boxes of wine totaling $11.98.  

It led her to issue an ultimatum and that if she was unable to drop the fantasist claims, they would never talk again. Yet, Franklin continued to insist it was true.

‘I don’t think she had the ability to stop lying,’ she told WSJ.com. ‘She would just monologue for 30 minutes. Just a torrent, a firehose.’

‘When anyone started to tamper with that fantasyland, it would get very, very dark,’  Franklin’s son, Hugh added.

‘My hope is just there was a way, even if she didn’t want it, to be forced to sit down with a mental health professional and figure out, ‘What is there to do here?” he asked.

A year later, in 2005, Franklin donated her films to UCLA’s archive but refused to pay for them to be digitized, at which point they were promptly returned to her.

Later that same year, in a bizarre claim, a press release from the Saudi Embassy in Washington claimed Ambassador Prince Turki al-Faisal had valued her personal archive, containing 120 hours of footage, at $45 million. 

It is unclear how that valuation was reached – and the archive is not believed to have been sold.  

The children last saw Jo in 2009 at her father’s funeral. She inherited about $400,000 following her dad’s death – and was lucky to do so. He’d believed her lies about being rich and wanted to disinherit her, believing she had no need of his money.

Ultimately Franklin was evicted from her Santa Ynez, California rental home in 2013 and headed across the country to live in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

Shortly after the university donation fiasco, Franklin started showing up at South Florida Starbucks making friends and impressing people with her knowledge of global affairs. 

She would use an iPad to keep in touch with people, watch movies and keep up with the news. 

But all was not what it seemed. 

Franklin would frequently display eccentricities. She was spotted picking up cigarette butts out of the trash. 

At Starbucks she would only ever order hot water in order to use her own tea bags or instant coffee. 

‘She was a remarkable woman,’ a friend, Jeff Miller said. ‘It probably took months, even a year, before you finally pieced it all together.’ 

Franklin was later arrested several times for stealing from stores and for marijuana possession. 

Her first arrest came in 2017 after she was found sleeping by a dumpster by the bank. In 2018, she was found under a staircase at a hotel car park.

She told police that she had epilepsy problems and was taken to hospital.

By March of 2020 Franklin was telling friends how she was working on a military adventure screenplay which insisted she would be able to get into the hands of Prince Harry.

The story was that shared by Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Dick Brauer who told The Journal: ‘I would mail her chapters, and she would look at them and make excellent suggestions.’

She told him that her film company, SeaCastle Films, would eventually turn his story into a movie.

In 2022, Franklin was arrested once again – this time for shoplifting at a CVS Pharmacy.

A police report describes a witness having seen her place two ‘Black Box Cabernet Sauvignons’ into her bag.

When cops finally tracked her down to a nearby hotel she denied stealing. 

The officers asked if she was homeless. She claimed that she was still living in California.

The lies never stopped: ‘We’re working on a project that has me back and forth to California,’ she said. 

Occasionally, Franklin would book a room at a Doubletree hotel for as long as two weeks using a mix of credit cards, cash and hotel reward points to pay for her stays.

When not occupying a room, she would still hang around the hotel where she was caught stealing candy from the snack shop several times.

One staff member said she need only ask for help – but Franklin never did and she was ultimately banned from being on the property.

In 2022 Franklin’s siblings came up with a ruse of their own that would involve her friends at Starbucks, who never let on that they knew the real truth.

Her brother, George, came over to Florida to see the situation his sister was living in. 

He wore a baseball cap and sunglasses as he made sure to keep out of sight, knowing that she did not wish to speak to him.

George rented an apartment at a cost of $2,100 a month and enlisted the help of the Starbucks friends to pretend they needed a house sitter – and ultimately convince Franklin to move in.

Friends even donated furniture, clothes and kitchenware. The fridge was fully stocked before Franklin moved in. 

It finally would give her a roof over her head without her having to acknowledge having any problems.

After an almost 13 year estrangement, Franklin’s children emailed their mom.  

‘Ashley and I are reaching out to see if you would be willing to meet with us with a therapist to rebuild our relationship with you,’ the email began. 

‘Our troubled past has led us to keep our distance over the years, but perhaps a professional can help us get to a better place. If working with a mutual therapist isn’t something you are willing to do we’ll keep the status quo, but we wanted to extend the offer.’

There was no response to Hugh’s email, so his sister Ashley resent it adding ‘Wondering your thoughts’ – but the message was left unanswered.

Just over a year later, at the age of 76 she passed away from heart failure, still living in the home, believing she was housesitting.

‘She hurt so many people,’ son, Hugh, said. ‘Nobody was more of a victim of whatever this illness was than herself.’

Weeks after her death, Ashley went to meet the Florida Starbucks friends for herself.

‘It was cathartic for me to thank them,’ she said.