That’s one of the reasons why we’re so susceptible.” They figure out how we’re conning ourselves. In a recent interview, she said, “One of the things you realize when you study con artists is that we’re conning ourselves all the time about who we are, about our stories. in psychology, is the author of a book about con artists entitled The Confidence Game. Maria Konnikova, a writer for The New Yorker and a professional poker player with a Ph.D. These grifter stories are about white femininity: Integral to the storytelling is that white, cisgender women are central to the narrative, and a key part of the grift is convincing us all that these women would never do something so bad as conning people-what, with their blonde hair, poreless skin, and designer clothes (all-black Issey Miyake turtlenecks in Holmes’s case). That just doesn’t happen to Black people,” explains Nkonde, who calls this the “racial rules of access.” “It’s that line of credit that enables her to scam another bank. The bank was so scared of losing her business, they immediately give her a line of credit for $200,000. Consider the scene in Inventing Anna during which Delvey is unable to secure the $40 million loan. This genre of grifters and grifted-upon tells us a lot about white ladyhood. Together, Sturgis and Melngailis ripped off investors, employees, and family for over $6 million. Around this time, she met and married Anthony Sturgis, who held himself out to be a multi-millionaire who could “take care of” her, her adorable pitbull mix, Leon, and the $2 million debt if she would go along with a series of increasingly outrageous shenanigans to prove her loyalty. In order to buy out her partner, Melngailis went into (perfectly legal) debt of around $2 million. In 2004, Melngailis was head chef at Pure Food & Wine and its takeout offshoot, One Lucky Duck. In Bad Vegan, we learn of chef Sarma Melngailis’s descent from covergirl for the raw-food crowd in New York City to fugitive. Holmes was heralded for her entrepreneurial success, and Theranos was valued at $10 billion before the house of cards collapsed and Holmes was charged with fraud. secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schulz, to invest in her company without ever having seen the underlying technology demonstrated. She persuaded wealthy, mostly older men, notably former U.S. Apparently, we’re not alone, judging from the bouquet of offerings in this emerging genre that I call “White Lady Grift.” The genre includes The Dropout, both a podcast and drama series about Elizabeth Holmes’s fall from the height of girl-boss success in Silicon Valley, with the supposedly innovative medical testing company Theranos. Nkonde and I are both riveted by these stories. Nkonde was referring to the title character in Inventing Anna, a nine-episode Netflix series about a faux heiress who girl-bossed her way through expensive dinners, gallons of Dom Perignon Champagne, and extended luxury hotel stays in New York and Morocco, without ever paying for any of it, even as she thoroughly documented her adventures on Instagram. “Anna Delvey scammed her way into places that I’d never be allowed into,” said my friend Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People, a non-profit dedicated to bridging knowledge gaps about artificial intelligence between civil society and technical experts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |