Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion

by Tori Telfer Narrated by Jaime Lamchick

Overview

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.*

Confident Women*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?

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

12/07/2020

In this compulsively readable account, Telfer (Lady Killers) delivers a darkly humorous tale of some of the most outrageous con women who ever scammed the public. Her subjects range from Jeanne de Saint-Rémy, who engineered a scheme in 18th-century France involving a cardinal, a diamond necklace, and Marie Antoinette that led to a scandal and contributed to the fall of the French monarchy, to Bonny Lee Bakley, who ran a mail-order porn scam, conned actor Robert Blake into marrying her—and wound up murdered for it in 2001. In the early part of the 20th century, there were hundreds of fake Anastasias, purporting to be the Russian princess, who bilked believers out of money, apartments, cars, and furs. More recently, Telfer writes, fake spiritualists and mediums have swindled the American public out of $2.1 billion a year, among them Rose Marks, who gave spiritual advice to romance novelist Jude Deveraux to the tune of $17 million from 1991 to 2008. Then there’s Alicia Head, who had a horrifying story of surviving 9/11 that made her famous and the leader of a survivor network. It wasn’t until 2007 that the New York Times outed Head as a fake who wasn’t even in the country on 9/11. Assured prose complements the vivid portraits. True crime fans are in for a treat. Agent: Erin Hosier, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

"Whether she's describing women pretending to be doctors, socialites, or just another nice lady who desperately needed help, Telfer dishes up their scandalous schemes for true-crime fans to relish." — Booklist

"Readers who appreciate a well-executed sting will enjoy this thoroughly researched yet breezy guide to notorious women." — Library Journal

"Grifters! Fake Heiresses! Phony Royalty! Imposter Chinese Princelings! Faux Ghostbusters and More! The brilliantly crazy conniving women in CONFIDENT WOMEN have a helluva lot of nerve—and I love it!"

— Marisa Acocella, New York Times best selling author of Cancer Vixen, Ann Tenna and The Big She-Bang: The Herstory of the Universe According to God the Mother

Marisa Acocella

"Grifters! Fake Heiresses! Phony Royalty! Imposter Chinese Princelings! Faux Ghostbusters and More! The brilliantly crazy conniving women in CONFIDENT WOMEN have a helluva lot of nerve—and I love it!"

Booklist

"Whether she's describing women pretending to be doctors, socialites, or just another nice lady who desperately needed help, Telfer dishes up their scandalous schemes for true-crime fans to relish."

Booklist

"Whether she's describing women pretending to be doctors, socialites, or just another nice lady who desperately needed help, Telfer dishes up their scandalous schemes for true-crime fans to relish."

Library Journal

12/01/2020

Keep your hand firmly on your wallet as Telfer (Lady Killers) takes you from the court of Marie Antoinette to Harlem's occult scene to the aftermath of 9/11. She shines a spotlight on infamous grifters, adventuresses, imposters, and femmes fatales—each exhibiting brazen confidence and the uncanny ability to sell an outlandish story. Her rogues gallery is divided into four con artist categories—the Glitterati, the Seers, the Fabulists, and the Drifters—with memorable examples highlighting each section. Telfer can coherently summarize an intentionally convoluted scheme, such as a real estate swindle targeting China's elite, while acknowledging the human cost. She also embraces the morbid humor of situations such as Roxie Ann Rice performing a trick play on the NFL with information gleaned from an issue of Ebony. Then there's the outright tragic, including those who profit from disasters or the ill-fated Bonny Lee Bakley, who desperately wanted to marry a Hollywood star. VERDICT Readers who appreciate a well-executed sting will enjoy this thoroughly researched yet breezy guide to notorious women.—Terry Bosky, Madison, WI

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177110929
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/23/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,085,978

Videos