Ex-husband of Russian Delta stowaway Svetlana Dali reveals she used him to secure a Green Card

The ex-husband of accused Delta transatlantic stowaway Svetlana Dali has branded her 'a fantasist' who allegedly used him to get a Green Card in the US, in an exclusive DailyMail.com interview.

Mahdi Dali, 62, from Philadelphia, claimed he was duped into marrying the 'calculating but delusional' Russian so she could secure legal residency after the pair hooked up on an internet dating site while she was living in Moscow.

'I was a good target for her. I was scammed. All she wanted was to live in America and I was naïve enough to fall for it,' the hospital IT specialist said from his home he now shares with his new wife.

'She was setting things up. We split after three years and then she tried to bury me and take everything. It was one long nightmare.'

Dali hadn't seen his ex for years until he was confronted with grainy images of her in news reports last week saying she had evaded TSA security and airline checks at New York's JFK airport to sneak on a Delta flight to Paris two days before Thanksgiving.

French authorities refused her mysterious plea for asylum there and the 57-year-old Moscow native arrived back in the United States on Wednesday following a protracted and at times histrionic battle.

She was immediately arrested upon landing and taken into federal custody, and is scheduled to appear in US District Court in Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday afternoon. 

The maximum penalty for being a stowaway is five years in prison.

An attempt to keep her in the country on Saturday ended in chaos when she boarded a flight at Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, but then started screaming: 'I do not want to go back to the USA. Only a judge can make me go back to the USA.'

Svetlana, who did gain permanent residency in the US through her marriage, was taken off the aircraft. 

She finally arrived in the US four days later accompanied by two French security officials and US Customs and Border Protection officers.

'When I suddenly saw her on TV accused of being a stowaway I thought, I'm not surprised. She's actually very smart, but lives in her own fantasy world,' Dali said.

'I have no idea why she apparently tried to claim asylum in France or why she said only a judge could bring her back to the US. It's as if she's trying to punish the country that opened its doors to her.'

After days of international speculation about the background to the alleged stowaway, DailyMail.com can reveal exclusive details on the woman who could also face civil lawsuits from Delta and the TSA.

She has lived in Philadelphia since her 2014 Moscow wedding to her now ex-husband Mahdi. 

She has a daughter and grandchild in Moscow. She claims to have been a real estate attorney in the Russian capital.

DailyMail.com can also reveal an astonishing legal action she has filed in the City of Brotherly Love in which she claims she was 'sold.. for $20,000' by a Russian Federation minister to be a 'slave' to her now ex-husband in America. It was filed just six days before her attempt to flee to France.

That claim aside, what can be confirmed is that the twice-wed Russian, who avoided initial discovery on her Paris-bound flight by hiding in lavatories, was at first given a two-year provisional Green Card under the normal procedure for marriage. 

She applied for full permanent residency a year before the couple's volatile split in 2017.

Biology graduate Dali, who grew up in Algeria and became a US citizen in 2000, sat calmly nestling a cup of coffee in his neat new marital home as he described the beginning of his 'horror story'.

'We met online in 2013 and she said she was a real estate lawyer. So I thought she had a good education, a solid background, and we would be a good couple,' he said. 

'I could not have been more wrong.

'We communicated on Skype a lot and managed to understand each other somehow despite her terrible English. And I went to Moscow, where we married in the city hall.

'But when she got to the United States she had an aggressive attitude towards me from the beginning. 

'I kept hoping she would get better, but she got worse. She would try to humiliate me in front of strangers.

'I lost count of how many times. But that was only the start of much worse to come.'

The first signs of 'weirdness' came less than 48 hours after Mahdi brought his new bride to the Philadelphia apartment he had proudly prepared for them.

'I had a device to enhance the TV signal. When I got back from work, she accused me of spying on her, saying it was a secret camera so I could check on her when I was out,' he said.

'Days later we had a cable company at the apartment. She believed they were the FBI and CIA checking up on her. It was paranoia.

'I said, that's ridiculous, you are here perfectly legally. Yet that was her behavior.

'Svetlana lives in a very delusional world. I never had any real idea what was going on in her mind.'

Mahdi had ambitions to buy a house and said his new bride revealed she had brought $9,000 with her and pledged to put into their new home.

'But when I put my own money for the deposit and arranged the mortgage she suddenly said she didn't have it any more. I thought, that's a lie. Can I trust her?

'I had always tried to be very patient with her and give her the benefit of the doubt, realizing she was in a new country. But that was starting to get very difficult.'

More mysteriously, Svetlana went back to Moscow for six months in 2014, leaving her new husband bewildered. 

'What kind of newlywed wife does that?' he said. 'She claimed she had to sell a house, but I'm really not sure about that.

'Maybe it was something to do with her daughter. I know they had a big fight. It was a real mess there.'

On her return, Mahdi said, Svetlana refused to work. Yet she also became extravagant with money, adding to the couple's woes and causing fights.

Eventually Mahdi said he had had enough 'humiliation' and turbulence, and in 2017 left the three-bedroom marital home he had paid for in a quiet Philadelphia neighborhood.

However, that was the start of his biggest nightmare, he told DailyMail.com.

Svetlana filed domestic abuse allegations against him, which saw him locked up and having to beg a friend for money to bail him out.

He told us he was 'wrongly convicted' of the charges and then granted a retrial by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2020.

The case remained hanging over his head for four years before the district attorney's office offered no evidence and the case was finally dropped this year, he said.

'She made those false accusations to discredit me and try to get what she wanted, which was the house,' Dali told us. 

'She claimed domestic abuse but I was the one being abused. She put me through hell.

'It was all designed to try to grab what I had worked so hard to achieve, without working for it. She was very smart in that respect. She is very calculating amid all the delusional thinking.

'When Svetlana wants something she just goes for it, not caring who she upsets. She doesn't calculate the consequences. She just goes for it without thinking it through. It's like there is something missing in her makeup. She has no idea how normal society works.

'She's a liar. She lies all the time. But liars forget the lies they tell. Only the truth remains and she's often caught out by that.'

He warned: 'If Svetlana can hurt me and put me through what she put me through, she can still hurt others.

'The last time I saw her face to face was in 2017 when I went to my own house to pick up my belongings and was escorted by a cop. She'd wiped out all the information on my laptop. In the end I put the house into foreclosure and lost it.'

Dali, who remarried in 2022, is philosophical now about his experience. 'God gives something bad to you in order for you to get something good. And the good is my current marriage,' he said.

'During those years with her I used to think, I don't deserve this. Now every day is another day. Ironically, it has made me stronger. Although I hate that she is still using my name.

'Whatever happens to her, I have no sympathy. I'm not wasting a second of my time on that. She must accept what she deserves.'

However, the lives of the ex-partners could still be intertwined with Svetlana's lawsuit in the US District Court Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

In what appears to be a self-petitioned case without an attorney, she cites Mahdi as a defendant along with 'Jimmy Morgan FBI', the 'General Prosecutor of Philadelphia' and 'State Police'.

Handwritten in blue ink, she alleges: 'In January 2014 I was sold by Minister for Russian Federation Lavrov S. to my ex-husband Mahdi Dali and his friend Sofian Dumsalem for 20,000 $US. Money sent Mahdi, Sofian, his boss, US Ambassador in Moscow.

'Mahdi told me that they bought me for a game. Owner of the game Jimmy Morgan. I got a call in May 2014 in that a man told me I was sold and … this moment I am slave. I have not a civil right for any countries.'

In the rambling and disjointed narrative, she makes various other unconnected allegations including being 'attacked' by her ex in 2018, not physically receiving her Green Card, being 'poisoned after court' without referring to any court appearance and 'being poisoned by some military', again without any reference or context.

Asked about the allegations in the filing on seeing them for the first time, Mahdi denied the claims and added: 'Wow! This is crazy.'