BIG LITTLE LIES
A string of high-profile fraud cases involving young women has inspired a wave of best-selling books, podcasts and upcoming films.
A string of high-profile fraud cases involving young, attractive and well-dressed women who inveigled their way onto A-list parties, private jets and even billionaire status has inspired a wave of best-selling books, podcasts and upcoming films. Why were people so quick to believe them, and why can’t we look away? By Amelia Lester.
Anna Delvey always dressed the part. When she was first pretending to be a professional rich person – a species native to downtown Manhattan’s cobblestone streets – her wardrobe was mostly luxe sportswear. Alexander Wang leggings, Supreme hoodies, Céline sunglasses. It was 2016, after all. By mid-2017, Delvey’s outfits had become more ostentatious. New York’s social set had accepted her as a German heiress, even though she couldn’t speak the language that well, and was always borrowing money for cabs. She liked Yves Saint Laurent minis and Gucci sandals, and, when she organised a trip to Morocco to stay in an A$10,000-night riad at La Mamounia resort with a friend, she carried a set of Rimowa suitcases. Delvey’s companion on the trip to Morocco, Rachel DeLoache Williams, ended up footing the A$92,000 bill for the lavish holiday. Out of pocket more than her annual salary as a magazine assistant (Delvey had previously asked her to pick up several other tabs in New York totalling another A$13,000), Williams walked into a local courthouse to report the unpaid debt. Federal authorities subsequently discovered that Delvey was not a German heiress at all, but a Russian-born immigrant with outstanding bills adding up to more than A$400,000. She owed money to two hotels, a private jet company and three banks, all of whom had extended lines of credit based on moxie alone. An investment management firm had come close to loaning her A$33 million, ostensibly for a members-only club Delvey wanted to open, after examining financial statements she had created in Photoshop.
Facing criminal charges, it was time for another makeover. From her cell at New York’s infamous Rikers Island prison, Delvey hired a stylist who had previously worked with Courtney Love and T-Pain. Her court outfits skewed boardroom chic, including Miu Miu and Michael Kors dresses and Victoria Beckham trousers. This time, though, her look failed to impress. In April a jury convicted Delvey – whose actual name is Anna Sorokin – of running what the judge called a “big scam”. A month later she was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison.
The “magician of Manhattan”, as Vanity Fair described the 28-year-old, is one in a clutch of young, white-collar conwomen who’ve been recently unmasked. (That our go-to word is ‘conman’ shows how new this phenomenon is.) A few days before Delvey’s trial, Elizabeth Holmes appeared in a court across the country in California, facing multiple counts of wire fraud. Theranos, the health-tech company she had founded in 2003 as a 19-year-old, promised the end of blood tests as we know them.
Holmes spent her 20s stalking across stages in Aspen or Palo Alto, or wherever billionaires had migrated for the season, with a slick sales pitch promising no more “big, bad needles”. Wearing the headset-style microphone TED Talks turned into a cliche, she explained she’d always been scared of drawing blood. She claimed her company’s revolutionary technology used just a pinprick’s worth of blood to perform hundreds of pathology tests. There was even a touching back story, bringing home the importance of early diagnosis: Holmes had grown up spending summers at the beach with a beloved uncle who had later died of a skin cancer that rapidly spread to his brain and then his bones. “He didn’t live to see his son grow up, and I never got to say goodbye,” she’d add.
At its height, Theranos was valued at A$13 billion and Holmes was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. (This was before Kylie Jenner and her lip kits.) The only problem was that it was all a lie. Holmes wasn’t close with her uncle: he died years after she started Theranos. And the vaunted pinprick test was so inaccurate that it posed a threat to public safety. Theranos was eventually exposed in 2015 by dogged Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who did what none of the venture capitalists invested in the biomedical equivalent of a unicorn had bothered to do: ask scientists.
“Should’ve had hindsight”, as the US version of The Office’s Michael Scott once said. But what’s striking about both Delvey and Holmes is how flimsy their covers were – and how enthusiastically they were nonetheless embraced by people who really should have known better. Holmes appeared on the cover of Forbes and in the pages of The New Yorker, but neither publication’s reporters had actually seen her Edison machine, which analysed the tiny blood samples, do its work. Her board members, none of whom had clinical training, simply accepted that a university dropout with one chemistry class under her belt invented a technology that until then had confounded the finest minds in biomedical science.
Elder statesman Henry Kissinger, war hero James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, and David Boies, who is probably the most successful trial lawyer in America, took Holmes’s extraordinary claims at face value. So did the other old white men who at various times served on the Theranos board. It helped that Holmes looked like a brilliant entrepreneur. Her “daily uniform”, as described in the influential 2014 New Yorker profile, was “a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs”. Not merely reminiscent of Jobs, it turns out: the Apple co-founder was Holmes’s idol, and her Issey Miyake turtleneck habit was a direct lift from the Jobs playbook. Holmes’s hairstyle, an obligatory detail in profile pieces, was “an unruly bun”. She spoke in an oddly booming baritone, like a professor mid-oratorical flight, though it would later come out this, too, was affected. All of it added up to the image of a girl genius, too busy with test tubes to worry about trivial matters like clothes, or even hairbrushes.
“My wife and I feel that one of our jobs is to bring her out,” George Shultz told The New Yorker. Kissinger described Holmes as possessing a “sort of ethereal quality”. He said that with his wife’s help, he’d been setting Holmes up on dates. Kissinger and the rest of the board didn’t know that Holmes was concealing yet another truth, this time of a personal nature: she and her COO, Sunny Balwani, were an item.
A cottage industry has since sprung up to catalogue Holmes’s evasions, lies and grand deceptions. There’s Carreyrou’s bestseller Bad Blood, a Hollywood adaptation of the book now in production that stars Jennifer Lawrence (due for release in 2020), a podcast and an HBO documentary from renowned filmmaker Alex Gibney.
Anna Delvey is the subject of similar intense fascination. Rachel DeLoache Williams, who went to Morocco with Delvey, says the friendship was “the worst experience of [her] life”. But don’t feel too sorry for her: the former Vanity Fair photo editor now has a book releasing locally this month through Hachette Australia titled, My Friend Anna, the result of a publishing deal said to be worth nearly A$450,000. HBO has also optioned her story, which could net her the same amount again. And there’s a Netflix show in the works – from Shonda Rimes ( Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal), so you know it’s going to be a hit. Delvey has said she wants Jennifer Lawrence or Margot Robbie to play her and she’s been described by London’s Evening Standard as the “unofficial breakout star of the summer of the scam”.
So why can’t we look away? I surveyed obsessed friends, and many landed on the universally acknowledged truth that we love crime stories. They cited the enduring popularity of Law & Order; Zac Efron as Ted Bundy in a bizarrely glamorous new movie; and, most of all, the profusion of grisly My Favorite Murder- style podcasts. Maybe there’s a temptation to think of white-collar crime stories as a less-guilty pleasure. No-one really got hurt, right?
But white- collar criminals can still ruin lives. Consider that in the case of Holmes, small-time investors were swindled out of their life savings and Theranos customers sometimes didn’t receive diagnoses in a timely way. As a former employee said: “If people are testing themselves for syphilis using Theranos, there’s going to be a lot more syphilis in the world.” In a particularly tragic chapter, the chief scientist of the company, Ian Gibbons, took his own life in 2013 because, in the words of his wife, “he was so distraught” about the prospect of coming clean about the faulty technology.
These crimes weren’t victimless, and they also weren’t performed in a vacuum. Some of the greatest storytellers of our time – the Rimes and the Gibneys and the Lawrences – are presumably interested in the way these scammers hold a mirror up to our culture, tapping into the anxieties of our age. There’s the inevitable artifice of social media; the ever-increasing importance of appearances; and the impossibility of truly knowing people when we seemingly know more about them than ever before. How we look has been confused with what we are. Anna Delvey could throw on rich-girl staples like a Rick Owens leather jacket
How we look has been confused with what we are. Anna Delvey could throw on rich-girl staples like a Rick Owens leather jacket and become a trust-funder
and become a trust-funder; Elizabeth Holmes resembled a female Steve Jobs, so she had to be a tech genius.
Nowhere is this elision more clear than on Instagram, which was launched in 2010 but hit its stride a year later, when Justin Bieber joined and millions followed his lead. And no-one better exemplifies Instagram’s Vaseline filter on reality than Belle Gibson. Our homegrown con artist was in the news recently because she, too, was obliged to show up in court. After making $420,000 from claiming she cured her cancer through healthy eating, Gibson was exposed by Australian journalists as a fraud in 2015. She’s now on the hook for a $410,000 fine imposed by Consumer
Affairs Victoria. The judge who handed down the punishment described Gibson as having a “relentless obsession with herself”.
Social media, with its lack of gatekeepers and posture of realness, was an integral part of how the supposed cancer victim spread her gospel. On her Instagram account, often posing in the fruit and veg section of the supermarket in athleisure separates, Gibson promoted dangerous alternative medical practices, fear-mongered about vaccinations, and advocated the consumption of non-pasteurised raw milk. By 2014, Apple had jumped on the bandwagon, selecting Gibson’s “health and wellness” app from more than two million available that year to promote with the launch of the Apple Watch. In the preface to her book The Whole Pantry, which was set to be published on three continents, Gibson wrote that the secret to her success was “authenticity and integrity … too many people over- edit themselves”. She went on to say that “now I embrace rawness and honesty”, two words with which any Instagram enthusiast will be familiar.
Anna Delvey used the platform in a similar way to Gibson, which was to help establish herself as a somebody. When Williams first met the mysterious European in a Lower East Side bar, she was impressed to find out Delvey had 40,000 Instagram followers – not influencer-level, to be sure, but a respectable number for a young woman who didn’t seem to have a job. Even now, Delvey hasn’t shut down her Instagram; she has to be chuffed that an unofficial account, @annadelveycourtlooks, boasts a fan base in the thousands. Elizabeth Holmes’s Instagram account is private, but leaked photos depict a woman determined to show she’s turned the page on all that past unpleasantness. Posts capture her glowing in the California sunshine with a brand-new beau, Billy Evans, who, in a stroke of good fortune, stands to inherit billions from his parents’ hospitality business. Like Delvey, Holmes has switched up her wardrobe, now favouring preppy button-up shirts and blue pants-suits. (“Gone from the dark side toward the light” is how fashion critic Vanessa Friedman described the symbolic transformation.)
A constant, though, remains the lying – even about things that are incidental to the scam, even after the scam has been revealed. Gibson made up an autistic brother in her tearful tell-all interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly, and still seems to be fudging her age by a couple of years. (As best we can tell, she’s around 27.) Recently it emerged that the Siberian husky Holmes adopted in 2017, which she flew home first class from a top breeder, was not in fact a wolf, as she had claimed to employees at Theranos. (His accidents on the headquarters carpets were a fixture of the company’s dying days.) Why would you lie about the breed of your dog, unless you had lost track yourself of the line between truth and fiction?
Delvey continues to specialise in the artful blending of reality and make-believe. She maintains from behind bars that she wants to set up her own investment fund, and tells reporters she really did want to start that private club she’d pitched around town during her glory days. “The thing is, I’m not sorry,” she said in a bewildering interview with The New York Times. “My motive was never money. I was power hungry.”
How much greed, as opposed to stranger psychological motives, played a part in these women’s scams varies. For Belle Gibson, the size of her kitty has become a legal issue. She told a court in May she had around $85 to her name, which was why she hadn’t paid her fine, but found it difficult to explain away an extended holiday to East Africa with her eight-year-old son, a betting account and some cryptocurrency investments.
Holmes’s reasons remain oblique. John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who took down Theranos, told Vanity Fair: “She absolutely has sociopathic tendencies … I believe this is a woman who started telling small lies soon after she dropped out of Stanford, when she founded her company, and the lies became bigger and bigger.” Eventually, Carreyrou said, “the line between the lies and reality blurred for her”.
But in the end the question isn’t why these women did it. That’s obvious: they made money, attended exclusive parties, collected fancy clothes and, in some instances, enjoyed widespread acclaim. I would argue that wanting these things isn’t in itself sociopathic. If you squint you can even see how a modest ruse, one or two fibs, might have spiralled out of control. Once you’ve flown in a private jet – apparently Holmes’s one indulgence – it’s probably pretty difficult to go back to economy class. No: what is instead confounding is why we were all so quick to believe them. And to see just how gullible we are, look no further than the White House.
Donald Trump, as Fran Lebowitz famously described him, is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person”. The gaudy gold plating, the oversized Brioni suits and a mastery of social media’s dark arts obscure a fundamental truth. “His whole life is about the cover-up,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd. “He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history.” One of Trump’s most compelling motivating factors, O’Brien concluded, is “mythmaking. Deep down, he knows he’s a pathological liar and he’s not the person he says he is.” The most powerful man in the world has pulled off the mother of all scams. Isn’t it about time some women got in on the action?
“I believe this is a woman who started telling small lies … and the lies became bigger and bigger”