Last month, a familiar figure dressed in a dark suit and wearing a breathing tube was pushed into a courtroom in Utah in a wheelchair to face trial for raping a former girlfriend.

The victim and her parents took the stand to give evidence, and it was no doubt a great relief when the man known as Nicholas Rossi was found guilty after a three-day trial.

However, 5,000 miles away in Bristol, another woman is now counting the cost of her relationship with Rossi – his British wife, Miranda Knight.

Her family believe the pair met in Bristol in 2017, where he introduced himself as Arthur Brown and claimed to be a PR consultant and online marketing executive from Dublin.

In 2022, after a bizarre chain of events that saw him fake his own death – with the alleged assistance of Miranda – Rossi appeared in court in Scotland to fight attempts to extradite him to the US to face rape charges.

Who can forget the jaw-dropping TV performances the pair put on as they tried to fool the world into believing that the man in front of them was not wanted felon Rossi but Arthur Brown, an Irishman orphaned as a baby, who had never so much as set foot in the US?

Nodding away while plaid-suited Rossi spewed out his endless lies during interviews and court appearances, flame-haired Miranda kept a loving hand on the electric wheelchair (he didn’t need) and checked on his breathing tube (another mere prop).

During one risible moment, Rossi – attempting to speak in a British accent and pretending to be seriously ill as part of his desperate bid to evade the FBI – even theatrically collapsed into Miranda’s arms live on TV.

Alas, for them at least, no-one was convinced by the couple’s ham acting. In January last year Rossi was bundled onto a plane and flown from Scotland back to his native America to face justice.

He will stand trial again next month, accused of committing rape against another woman, but with Miranda notably absent from his first trial, it is unlikely she will be there to support him.

So where was Miranda in this, her charlatan husband’s hour of need?

Now the Mail can exclusively reveal that after years spent protesting ‘Arthur’s’ innocence – and railing against anyone who dared to say otherwise – 44-year-old Miranda is living back in her native Bristol having apparently turned her back on the violent and manipulative fraudster she married five years ago.

‘Miranda came quietly back to Bristol from Scotland and has been in Bristol ever since his extradition,’ one of her cousins told the Mail.

‘I feel really sorry for her and see her as a victim in all this. I think Nicholas Rossi targeted her and saw her as his “get out of jail free” card.’

Her relative believes that Rossi moved to the UK because his ‘double life’ was ‘catching up with him in the States’.

‘He needed somewhere to go and hide, pretending to be respectable, with someone who had a good job and who would be fooled by him. It makes me wonder how many other women have been taken for the same ride,’ the cousin said.

Another relative told the Mail: ‘Nicholas Rossi got into her head. He was very controlling and sadly she was easily led. She was madly in love with him and she would have done anything for him.

‘Miranda is a very meek and mild and sweet person. She was the perfect target for him to prey on.’

But is Miranda, as her family argue, really another of Rossi’s victims? Or – as others insist – was she knowingly complicit in her husband’s lies? Above all, how on earth did a former mosaic artist who once worked as a colour consultant in the paint section at her local branch of B&Q, get caught up in an international manhunt involving British police, Interpol and the FBI?

According to the account she gave to journalists in 2022, Miranda met ‘Arthur’ at London’s V&A museum in 2012 and ‘struck up a conversation in the museum, talking about art.’

Her family, however, insist Miranda met Rossi – whose birth name was Nicholas Alahverdian and who has used at least 16 aliases – via an online dating app. He turned up in Bristol in 2019, introduced himself as Arthur Brown and claimed to be a PR consultant and online marketing executive from Dublin.

‘He inveigled his way into all corners of her life,’ said the relative who spoke to the Mail. ‘For a while he even fooled her brother and parents.’

Rossi, says the relative, charmed Miranda’s father Michael, a committed Christian and a volunteer gardener at his local church, who died earlier this year.

‘The man we knew as Arthur used to take him to see Miranda’s mother in a care home before she died,’ said the relative. ‘He pulled the wool over all their eyes.’

So convincing was Rossi’s ‘Irish orphan’ act that, while claiming to have no birth certificate or passport, he managed to persuade Church of England authorities to issue him with a special marriage licence – signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury – after presenting lawyers at Lambeth Palace with what a source there described to the Mail as a ‘compelling narrative’.

He wore a top hat and tails for his wedding to Miranda in February 2020 wedding at 12th century St Nicholas Church in the Somerset village of Whitchurch. Because he had no relatives – or friends – Miranda’s older brother Kevin had to step in as best man.

While the ‘Knight-Browns’, as the married couple called themselves, were on honeymoon in the upmarket seaside Devon town of Salcombe, Miranda’s husband tried to bury his past in America by faking his own death via an online obituary.

Back in the US, friends and acquaintances also received calls informing them of his death from a woman named Louise with a West Country accent claiming to be his ‘British widow’.

According to a BBC podcast, Miranda herself made those calls to the US and therefore must have known Rossi was faking his identity. She also requested a funeral mass for her ‘late husband’, demanding music by Beethoven, Bach and Mozart.

The service was later cancelled on the advice of US detectives who, despite this elaborate pantomime of deception, were still on Rossi’s trail.

When ‘Louise’ was challenged by US journalists following the case, she emailed back: ‘Unless my husband was cloned and died in my arms and faked cancer diagnosis, treatment and heart disease/heart attacks for months before that, he passed away. In my arms.’

It’s impossible to know, of course, if Miranda, or Rossi pretending to be her, wrote those words. But a BBC podcast about Rossi, I Am Not Nicholas, features a voice expert who concludes recordings of ‘Louise’ – a woman with a strong West Country accent – is actually Miranda, whose middle name is Louisa. Miranda told podcast journalist Jane MacSorley that the idea she made the calls was ‘laughable’ but was silent when confronted with the recordings.

It’s possible, of course, that she was taken in by Rossi’s outrageous lie that he needed to change his name – and kill off his real identity – because his life was in danger after criticising the children’s services department of Rhode Island State Government.

With the FBI still breathing down their necks, the couple left Bristol and relocated to Glasgow, where Rossi – unchecked by Miranda – told neighbours he was a university professor as part of a whole new masquerade.

His downfall was precipitated by a nasty bout of Covid-19. While being treated at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in December 2021, police were called when Rossi was aggressive towards a consultant and a nurse.

It didn’t take long for officers to realise that ‘Arthur Knight Brown’ wasn’t who he said he was or to notice that the distinctive tattoos on his arms matched those of Nicholas Rossi on an Interpol notice.

What followed was a farcical battle to avoid extradition during which he first insisted he had been surreptitiously tattooed while in a coma in hospital and then that his life was in danger.

Loyal Miranda stood by him throughout that time. During a 2022 joint interview with the Scottish channel STV, she lovingly rubbed Rossi’s arm and declared: ‘The electric wheelchair is not a prop. There is no faking of this illness. After so many years I know him inside out. I know my husband does not have tendencies as a rapist.’

While speaking to NBC news in the US, she repeatedly mispronounced the name Rossi as Rozy – exactly as Rossi himself did in other interviews – in what now appears like an attempt to give the impression she wasn’t familiar with the name.

‘What I read about this Nicholas Rozy, Rossi, whatever his name is, that he – from what I read – he’s done some pretty terrible things. He seems to have done them over a number of years over his life and he seems to have done it consistently so since my husband and I have been together he has been a gentleman.’

Describing the situation she was in as ‘pretty crazy’, she added: ‘We’re going to fight it together because Arthur’s my husband. I love him very much and he’s not this person.’

Among those unconvinced by the interviews the pair gave was a woman from Chelmsford in Essex who alleges that Rossi raped her in 2017 when he first arrived in the UK.

Recognising him straight away she contacted police to tell them of his true identity and also spoke to a journalist to rebut the lies he was telling them.

She told me this week of the letter she was sent in June 2022, purportedly from Miranda and bearing a handwritten signature, in which she threatened legal action ‘from my civil defamation solicitors in their London office’ if the woman dared to repeat her claims.

Claiming to have been in a relationship with ‘Arthur’ for over six years ‘after being friends for ten years’, the letter continued: ‘I know him inside and out. I know the gentleman he is to me and everyone he meets. He is not Nicholas Rossi and we are on a steady road to proving this in a court of law.’

The woman, who was told by the CPS last month that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Rossi for rape, said she initially believed he ‘had a heavy hand in the letter, if he didn’t write it himself’.

Having watched Miranda’s performances alongside him on TV, however, she noted her ‘fluttering her eyes at him while he lied.

‘I think she’s complicit,’ she added. ‘I mean, people see her as a victim, but the fact remains that she seems to have lied for him. I think that’s just dodgy. She should face justice as well.’

Another who believes that Miranda is not blameless is a Canadian TV host who was tricked into hiring the ‘Knight-Browns’ after advertising online for someone to produce a promotional campaign for her vegan lifestyle show.

Nafsika Antypas has previously told me: ‘I had a few conversations with her. She was quite lovely, quite sweet. She seemed like she was sincerely a nice person.’

When she challenged Rossi after being swindled out of $40,000 Canadian dollars (the equivalent of around £22,000) for work that was never done, she received emails threatening ‘PR hell’ – some of which purported to be from Miranda.

Nafsika gave Miranda the benefit of the doubt until she saw her TV appearances with Rossi.

‘I believed she was part of something she didn’t know. That he was basically fabricating everything and pretending and speak on her behalf. I thought she was being tricked. My theory changed when I saw her with him on TV. I think she’s complicit.’

Edinburgh Sheriff Court finally ruled that ‘Arthur Knight Brown’ was indeed Rossi in November 2022, calling his claims ‘scandalous’. An order to extradite him was signed in September 2023 and he was sent back to the US four months later.

He finally admitted to his real identity during a bail hearing in Salt Lake City last October. He said he had been forced to lie because there were threats against ‘my family’. When asked who was making those threats, he refused to say.

If he managed to convince Miranda that her life was also in the balance, then it wouldn’t be the first time that a ruthless fraudster has tricked a partner into believing in an alternative universe.

Her older brother Kevin, a 49-year-old builder from Bristol, told the Mail last week that neither he nor Miranda would ever talk about what happened. He has previously described Rossi as a ‘master manipulator’ who conned his ‘in denial’ sister.

Kevin also told a US newspaper two years ago that Miranda, who studied art at both the University of Portsmouth and Southampton Institute for Fashion Design, was ‘just another victim of this just absolutely crazy charade’.

This week Miranda herself did not answer the door of the red-brick semi where she now lives with her two dogs. Relatives say she is attempting to carry on with her life as if the past few years never happened and looked like a ‘lost soul’ at her father Michael’s funeral a few months ago.

According to her cousin: ’I do wonder what she thinks when she wakes up in the morning. If he coerced her to the point where she was too frightened not to go along with his lies, then maybe part of her still thinks he’s innocent.

‘Or did she go along with it because she had something like Stockholm Syndrome and was so controlled and damaged by him that she became as deluded as him?’

As her other relative added: ‘We don’t like to ask about her marriage to Nicholas or what has been going on with the investigation into him. I just can’t believe she got taken in by his mad stories. I even wonder if her marriage to him was legitimate because he gave a false name. It’s hard to imagine what the future holds for her now.’