When Con Artists Tell Their Side of the Story
After many years, my friend, Kari Ferrell, a.k.a. "the Hipster Grifter" shares all.
There’s a game that I used to play when I hosted dinner parties at my place in Brooklyn.
When someone new arrived, I’d ask them to survey the room. “Someone in here has done time in a prison for crimes that made international news. Can you guess who? ”
In 10 years, no one ever guessed correctly — my friend, Kari Ferrell, a.k.a. “the Hipster Grifter”.
This week, after many years of work, Kari’s memoir, “You’ll Never Believe Me,” comes out. I was honored to provide a blurb – the galley blew me away.
Since Kari first made headlines in 2009, the true crime boom crescendoed. Con artists, especially female ones, are media sensations. But seldom do we hear their stories firsthand, up close, with raw honesty.
It wasn’t long after she served time that Kari moved back to New York and, at a night of East Village karaoke, we were introduced through mutual media friends I had made as a Gawker.com (RIP) intern.
Gawker and Kari’s stories were interlinked, as the New York gossip site covered her rise and fall closely, helping make her a counterculture icon of the New York media scene. Her face appeared on posters taped to dive bar walls, her nickname buzzed in office water cooler chatter. In recession-era New York, even though Kari had confessed to scamming friends and family out of thousands of dollars, her targeting of unsuspecting dudes in the Brooklyn scene made her something of a Robin Hood-y antihero.
(Only in New York can a nerdy Wall Street Journal reporter who interviewed billionaires befriend one of the most notorious scammers in town.)
And one of the many things that surprised me about Kari, and I say this with love, is she was incredibly normcore.
She lived in Williamsburg with her military veteran husband, Elliot. They had a dog. She didn’t drink. She worked an office job and loved reading, even becoming an advocate of my book club. She tirelessly volunteered her time to causes she cared about.
Over the years, I got the sense that she was a really good person who maybe messed up in her past. (Who hasn’t, to some degree or another?) But she seemed determined to build a meaningful life for herself, one day at a time.
I’ve interviewed people in and out of prison. I’ve meant some good people who screwed up. I’ve sat across from some truly violent psychopaths. There are people who do horrible things and aren’t sorry that they hurt people, they’re sorry that they got caught. We love a clean redemption story, but it’s seldom that simple.
Then, there’s Kari. Seeing her memoir pages come together, it forced me to think, who gets second chances? What do people do with them?
One of the things that Kari’s story is a testament to is “doing the work.” Her book focuses on the depths of therapy sessions, tough conversations, and the act of writing her story itself, as a means to not just revisit her story, but confront it in all its brutality. Not in a bumper sticker woo way, but in those more difficult What the hell have I done? moments.
Born in South Korea, Kari was adopted as an infant by a Mormon family in Utah. As she writes, many people in her orbit growing up were well intended, but being non-white and queer, she felt was “wrong” and “I could feel it in my bones.”
Familiar rites of passage – the awkwardness of sexual education classes in puberty, the thrill of shoplifting from a Wal-Mart, cutting class – are seen through the lens of a kid who lost her way, rooted in a deeper sense of self-hatred. By 17, “I was running away from bridges I had lit on fire with the explosive combination of shame and resentment (for everyone, for myself), and with the awareness that I was spiraling and needed to get the fuck out.”
So, she begins to steal. From friends, family, romantic partners.
“I didn’t steal money for drugs,” she writes, “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.”
When I first read that sentence, I felt the air leave my body. It’s devastating. And, I believe it to be honest. It’s the primal desire for attention, to be seen, even if for messed-up reasons.
There’s a self awareness that she brings to behavior that she, herself, describes as repugnant. It’s interwoven with the psychology of wanting to be loved, identity and coming of age, as well as raising questions about what it means to occupy space.
“Sex, blackmail, and collusion were weapons I frequently pulled out of the arsenal,” she writes. But there’s a recognition that before she hurt others, she felt hurt herself.
She doesn’t ask for forgiveness or pity. In fact, some of the greatest tension in her story comes years after she’s grifted up a storm. Will she get “outed” at her new job? What will happen when she travels to South Korea? Who gets forgiven and why?
Memoir is a deceptive genre. There’s a lot of schlock and self-puffery out there, faux vulnerability that’s hunting for a movie deal or speaking tour.
But to actually delve into the soul — and share it with the world — that’s brave. Particularly, if you’ve done unsavory things.
The memoir that is my North Star here is the late, great David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun.” One’s past becomes fodder for not mere recaps, but for digging deep, as stomach-churning as that can be. Facts aren’t static, rather our relationship to them changes every time we pick one up and examine it in light.
The privilege of getting to know someone like Carr or Kari, the emotional diggers among us, up close, you don’t see the cartoon character of a media personality — you see a human being. To be able to translate that to a page and share it, I think that’s the best of what story can do.
Kari says she has authored her “truth as best I can,” she writes. “But maybe you’ll never believe me.”
Indeed. And maybe the next time you’re at a gathering, consider that the guest list may have more to it than meets the eye.
