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Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion
Harper Perennial Read Kindle PreviewA thoroughly entertaining and darkly humorous roundup of historyβs notorious but often forgotten female con artists and their bold, outrageous scamsβby the acclaimed author ofΒ 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 inΒ Confident Women, the art of the con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some of the bestβor worst. In the 1700s in Paris, Jeanne de Saint-RΓ©my 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 Confederacyβor 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 Carnegieβs 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 βartistsβ are still conning.Β Confident WomenΒ asks the provocative question: Where does chutzpah intersect with a uniquely female pathologyβand how were these notorious women able to so spectacularly dupe and swindle their victims? Start Reading CONFIDENT WOMEN Now
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