A thoroughly entertaining and darkly
humorous roundup of history’s notorious but often forgotten female con artists
and their bold, outrageous scams—by the acclaimed author of
Lady Killers
.
From Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey to Frank Abagnale and
Charles Ponzi, audacious scams and charismatic scammers continue to intrigue us
as a culture. As Tori Telfer reveals in
Confident Women
, the art of the
con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some
of the best—or worst.
In the 1700s in Paris, Jeanne de Saint-Rémy scammed the royal
jewelers out of a necklace made from six hundred and forty-seven diamonds by
pretending she was best friends with Queen Marie Antoinette.
In the mid-1800s, sisters Kate and Maggie Fox began pretending they
could speak to spirits and accidentally started a religious movement that was
soon crawling with female con artists. A gal calling herself Loreta Janeta
Velasquez claimed to be a soldier and convinced people she worked for the
Confederacy—or the Union, depending on who she was talking to. Meanwhile,
Cassie Chadwick was forging paperwork and getting banks to loan her upwards of
$40,000 by telling people she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter.
In the 1900s, a 40something woman named Margaret Lydia Burton
embezzled money all over the country and stole upwards of forty prized show
dogs, while a few decades later, a teenager named Roxie Ann Rice scammed the entire
NFL. And since the death of the Romanovs, women claiming to be Anastasia have been selling
their stories to magazines. What about today? Spoiler alert: these “artists”
are still conning.
asks the provocative
question: Where does chutzpah intersect with a uniquely female pathology—and
how were these notorious women able to so spectacularly dupe and swindle their
victims?