Paul Manafort’s daughter has officially filed to lose her family name. According to the New York Post, 36-year-old Jessica Manafort has filed paperwork in Manhattan Supreme Court this weekend to change her name to Jessica Anne Bond.
“I am a passionate liberal and a registered Democrat and this has been difficult for me,” she told the Los Angeles Times back in July.
“Although I am ‘the daughter of,’ I am very much my own person and hopefully people can realize that.”
The independent filmmaker chose to go with the surname “Bond” instead, which belongs to her mother Kathleen. She wrote in court papers that her mother’s maiden name “more closely suits [her] profession.”
Jessica also made the decision in order to “separate myself and my work from a public perception that has nothing to do with the person that I am.”
She debuted the new name earlier this summer for the director of her new film, “Rosy,” which credited Jess Bond. Other film credits — although under the name Jessica Manafort — include “Remember the Daze” and “A Shore Thing.”
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Jessica graduated from NYU’s Tisch Film School in 2004. She was married to real estate developer Jeffrey Yohai, who has also found himself in legal trouble recently but never adopted his last name. Yohai pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his real estate dealings and is expected to cooperate with investigators into their investigation with Manafort. Jessica filed for divorce from Yohai in March 2017.
Manafort was arrested earlier this year on 32 charges for allegedly laundering more than $30 million in overseas income and evading taxes. Among the charges Manafort faced were money laundering, violating a federal lobbying disclosure law and obstruction of justice.
Manafort was convicted on five counts of tax fraud, one of the four counts of failing to disclose his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud by the Eastern District of Virginia on Aug. 21, 2018. His trial for charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, making false statements to investigators, and witness tampering is set to begin in September 2018.