issue twenty-six

i love to hate a scam, tbh!

I am not Caroline Calloway, nor have I ever been, or will be in the future. This I know, and I thank my lucky stars every day for. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the aforementioned menace to the streets of the West Village and Glossier stocks alike, here are a few different resources to help you get a taste of her character. I considered many different angles to write today’s issue from, most of which required some sort of primer for the subject. I decided to leave that to others, especially since forming a deciding judgement or opinion on the subject depends on copious amounts of self mythologizing and generally inconsistent accounts from said subject on principle. 

It seems that recently it has been decided that everyone loves a scam. Yes, I watched “Inventing Anna” and yes, I delighted in every flop moment of it. I don’t particularly lean towards scammers as my preferred strain of true crime, which I tend to abstain from as a whole more often than not. IMO much of the interest in scammers is generated by the debates over whether their crimes were victimless, or harmless, or just plain shameful. 

When you prop up Caroline Calloway next to Anna Sorokin, the former seems entirely unimpressive. Despite her attempts to reframe and reclaim her identity as a scammer and further profit off of it, she has failed. Remarkably, she has done so with the good breeding and generational wealth that Sorokin presumably lacked. Calloway has squandered and scrapped until she couldn’t anymore, which is why she is currently in internet hiding to (again) fail to make good on another digital promise. 

The privilege part is what gets me, not because I am jealous or petty but if you start so close to the finish line, what has to go wrong in order to go completely off the racetrack? My guess is ambition and self inflation that gets one in over their head, but at a certain level of leveling, all that has to fall away, right? Maybe this is my introvert overthinker tether talking, but I can’t imagine not wanting to possess a certain degree of certainty about everything in your life. I’ve learned to let go of a lot of things, considering that I can never know or control them. But if I was an opportunistic grifter with the amount of know-how and feigned confidence that girls like these do, I would probably approach it a bit differently than the scatter-brained, braggadocio unapologetic and entirely unprepared defense they poise. 

Back to why people love to watch a scam: we as audiences love a spectacle and even more, we love a failure. The snarkers and fans alike who observed for years as Calloway hit wall after wall, dense comment after dense comment and essentially bulldozed what was left of her own prospects. Her shamelessness about it all definitely didn’t help, but it certainly helped engagement if nothing else. 

This begs the question: why dig the hole even deeper? Why not just keep the Yale plates? Why refuse to confront a loss in its most minimal sense even if it doesn’t entail self incrimination? Just give up!

My near encyclopedic knowledge of these two specific scammers is in due part to well justified quarantine obsessions and a wealth of maddeningly useless information at my fingertips. I’ve mostly kicked said obsessions due to the fact that media surrounding them is increasing in quantity and decreasing in quality. I don’t want to dedicate the fullest extent of my writing and attention to an in-depth piece on Caroline Calloway, because she’s the only person who cares enough to do that. And did. I’m just rambling, and relaying that I thought “Inventing Anna” was bad and maybe we should just pay attention to the scammers who have the spoons to actually pull it off. Here are some good points on why, but I too have gripes of my own. Sometimes bad TV does not heal all wounds, I guess. See you next week!