Dangerous paintings (part 1)

My friend who lives in Niagara Falls sent me an email with an article written in Russian by Pauline Larina.

She says in the article that recently well-known actor Bradley Cooper during audit could not explain for what he paid $300,000 to artist XYZ (I can’t give the real name in the article because I found on internet several artists with this name).

Later under pressure from the media Bradley Cooper said that he paid money to the artist for the promise not to paint his portrait.

it was found that several other celebrities paid large sums of money to the same artist to prevent his painting of their portraits.

Why did they do it?

Almost 30 years ago XYZ painted a portrait of a couple. His customers praised the portrait and hanged it in their living room. And six months later they died in a car accident.

Later journalists discovered that about 60% of people whose portraits XYZ painted did not die a natural death.

The story became public and XYZ  found himself on the verge of poverty.

He offered several rich people to paint their portraits. They politely refused. This did not stop XYZ. He created their portraits and sent to them. Portraits came back immediately together with checks and requests to destroy them and not to paint new portraits.

For many years XYZ enjoyed a very good lifestyle.

Is he still getting money from frightened rich people?

Pauline did not say anything about it.

Should we believe the story? What’s your opinion?