Did Brittany Murphy marry a 'con man'? His ex says she barely escaped a similar fate

Riding the Paris Métro home from her office in 2007, Elizabeth Ragsdale began flipping through an issue of Us Weekly given to her by the receptionist at the law firm where she worked as a paralegal. But just as she was about to sink into the magazine's tales of Lindsay Lohan and Brangelina, Ragsdale noticed a cover line that alarmed her:

"Brittany Murphy: Married to a Con Man?"

There, next to the "Clueless" and "8 Mile" actor, was Simon Monjack, the man Ragsdale had once loved. The guy who proposed to her with a diamond ring from Tiffany's just two weeks after they met. The father of her son.

"The first feeling I had wasn't jealousy. It wasn't: 'How could he do this?'" she recalled. "It was: 'That poor woman.'"

Almost immediately, Ragsdale said she began writing a letter to Murphy. She wanted to tell the 29-year-old newlywed that she felt Us Weekly was right: Monjack was a con man. She wanted to tell the star how he'd lied to, cheated on and ghosted her when she was four months pregnant with their child.

But by then, Ragsdale had not been romantically involved with Monjack for nearly a decade. And he'd never met Elijah, the boy she claimed was his son. "I thought the letter