Monica Sementilli, Who Plotted Her Celebrity Hairstylist Husband’s Death with Her Porn Star Lover, Sentenced to Life Without Parole

Monica Sementilli has been sentenced to life in prison in her late husband, Fabio Sementilli’s murder, according to a news release from Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman.

Monica, 53, was sentenced without the possibility of parole on Monday, June 23, two months after she was convicted of one count of murder with special circumstance allegations involving financial gain – and one count of murder while lying in wait in the January 2017 death of Fabio.

On Friday, April 11, Monica was found guilty after evidence showed that she conspired with her lover, Robert Louis Baker, to murder Fabio — the 49-year-old Canadian hair executive and father of three — to collect millions in life insurance benefits.

“The person responsible wasn’t a stranger but the woman we had welcomed into our family for over 20 years,” Fabio’s sister Loretta Picillo told the judge before the Monday, June 23 sentencing, according to Los Angeles Times. “We treated her like family and she betrayed all of us.”

“Monica Sementilli betrayed the person who loved and trusted her most,” DA Hochman said in the news release. 

“Her calculated scheme to profit from her husband’s death cost a kind and talented man his life and devastated a family,” Hochman continued.

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Prosecutors said Monica concocted the plan to kill Fabio with Baker, a convicted sex offender and ex-porn-actor-turned-racquetball instructor, to potentially collect Fabio’s $1.6 million life insurance money.

During the trial, prosecutors alleged that Baker and his accomplice Christopher Austin, both wearing hoodies, jogged up to the couple’s Woodland Hills home on Jan. 23, 2017, snuck onto the property and attacked Fabio while he was home alone in the backyard watching television.

Fabio was attacked from behind and suffered seven stab wounds to the neck, chest and thigh. His femoral and carotid arteries were cut.

After Fabio was murdered, Baker and Austin then ransacked the couple’s bedroom. At the time, they stole Fabio’s 2008 Porsche 911 and the DVR from the garage where the home security footage was stored. 

Austin, 39, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in January and was later sentenced to 16 years to life in prison in May, per CBS News. During his trial, he testified that Monica had purposefully left the door of their home unlocked the day of the murder and that Baker had told him she wanted Fabio “gone,” per the Times.

“Everything he did he did after he got a text message, which told me he was talking to her via text message,” Austin said, according to the Times. “I did not hear him talk to her on the phone … but everything happened in sequence.”

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Meanwhile, Baker, 63, entered a no-contest plea to killing Fabio in July 2023 and was sentenced to life without parole.

During Monica’s trial, he denied that she had anything to do with the murder. “I murdered him because I wanted her,” he testified, the Times reported. “She had nothing to do with it.”