MY SA
A Texas influencer was sentenced to a decade in prison for a murder-for-hire plot against a Mississippi woman who “operated an online business similar” to her internet-based business, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Officials said in a news release that Ashley Grayson, from Dallas, tried to hire someone to murder three different people.
The 35-year-old woman’s 120-month prison sentence was handed down by a federal judge in Tennessee on October 31. She will have three years of supervised release after serving her sentence, according to a news release issued on November 18.
It is the maximum sentence for the charge of use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire, prosecutors said.
The woman Grayson was convicted of attempting to have killed was not identified in the news release, but was identified by the Atlanta Black Star as D. H. from the sealed indictment. The article also noted Derricka Harwell was a woman that Grayson sued for defamation in 2023.
Grayson, known online as a content creator around finance who reportedly was accused of “stealing from her clients,” had “a falling out” with a woman that had a similar online business as Grayson. The Texas influencer suspected D. H. had created “fake online profiles that criticized Grayson and her business. ” The two women had never met in person.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said that Grayson asked a Memphis woman and her husband to fly to Dallas to discuss a “business opportunity” in September 2022, where the 35-year-old asked them to kill three different people for $20,000 each: D. H., a former boyfriend of Grayson’s, and a Texas woman who had recently made negative social media posts about Grayson.
The Memphis woman video-recorded a call to Grayson where the influencer said she would pay an extra $5,000 for D. H. to be killed the next week, the news release states. Officials said the couple hired to carry out the plot faked an unsuccessful attempt to carry out the murder and demanded $10,000, half of the promised price, after sending Grayson a photo of police lights from an unrelated incident.
The couple flew to Dallas to pick up the sum from Grayson and her husband Joshua. Joshua was also charged in the case and was acquitted by a jury in March 2024, the same day Ashley was found guilty.
