Anna Sorokin (better known as Anna Delvey) in court in New York City, April 11, 2019.Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Ms. Scheier is the author of “Never Simple: A Memoir,” a book about growing up in 1990s Manhattan with a brilliant, mendacious single mother.
A glamorous crew of hucksters and con artists is taking over our screens. The broke “heiress” Anna Sorokin (who is better known as Anna Delvey) flounces through New York City, swindling the wealthy in Netflix’s dramatization, “Inventing Anna.” The playboy Shimon Hayut (known as Simon Leviev) is accused of bilking vast sums from smitten women in Netflix’s true crime documentary “The Tinder Swindler.” A fiery-gazed Elizabeth Holmes hawks useless blood-testing technology in Hulu’s limited series “The Dropout.”
But for me, the scammers aren’t the real story. It’s not the beautiful people, the ruinously expensive clothes, the scandal and the cha-ching of money stolen or squandered. It’s the scammed. The stooges, the marks, the bamboozled.
That’s because I’ve been one of them since before I could talk. I grew up the only child of a brilliant, mendacious mother. She constructed a fairy-tale life for the two of us in Manhattan, one lie built upon the next: She refused to register my birth with the city, faked my Social Security number and kept her biggest secret — that she had been married to a man I’d never heard of — obscured. She had been a lawyer, but she told me she had retired from her law firm a few years before my birth, eliding the fact that most lawyers do not retire by choice in their 30s.
And she created a fictional man, Warren Steven Livingston, who she told me was my father. He had died in a car accident, she told me; his friends and family were gone, and almost all his possessions were buried or lost. At 7 or 8, I went through the phone book and called every Livingston in it, asking if anyone knew Warren Steven and might have a picture of him for me. Those must be some other Livingstons, she told me airily, knowing full well she had made the name up. I believed her carefully crafted false narrative, designed to keep me giving — time, attention, support and, eventually, money. And I wasn’t the only one. Almost everyone in her orbit believed her.
My mother, who died in 2019, had borderline personality disorder, which can present itself as an intense fear of abandonment, great personal charisma and a propensity for manipulation and lies. And those tendencies served her, up to a point: She supported us with no job and no reliable income in one of the most expensive cities in the world, not through outright theft or deception but by playing a role.
For most of my childhood, my mother was a chain-smoking, rage-filled hermit who rarely left her bedroom. But over the phone, she sounded like the woman she once was, an upstanding, highly educated lawyer. Her skill at playing that role kept the help rolling in. A principal let me stay enrolled in a school I wasn’t zoned for; friends took me on their family vacations; social workers, caseworkers and even a long line of building doormen and handymen came by on their days off with flowers and offers of assistance.
In retrospect, it’s strangely validating to me that they were taken in, too. I was a child; of course I believed my only parent, the only adult in my orbit. And of course those lies — which formed the basis of my reality — were hard to shake in adulthood. But all these grown-ups had believed her, too.
It took decades for me to understand the scale of my mother’s deceptions. Even once I learned my father’s real identity, even once I knew she had been married for years longer than she admitted, even after her death, when I went through boxes of her belongings and found the school forms she’d filled out with my fake Social Security number, the letters she’d sent friends and family with patently false stories. I still found it shocking to have been lied to with such a straight, charming face.
So for me, these shows about swindlers are one long, agonizing cringe. Some of the victims come across as ignorant, greedy or naïve — or all three. Others are more sympathetic. Near the end of “The Tinder Swindler,” Mr. Hayut is the subject of a tell-all in a Norwegian newspaper, and a series of gleeful internet reactions about […]
source The Victims of Scammers Aren’t Stupid. They’re Human.
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