Podcast Corner: Scams, sex and false sickness
Anna Sorokin passed herself off as a wealthy German heiress known as Anna Delvey.
From Inventing Anna to WeCrashed to The Dropout, TV in 2022 is very much the year of the scammer. The stories have all been charted on various podcasts over the past couple of years.
If you're interested in Anna Sorokin/Delvey, BBC Sounds released the excellent Fake Heiress series in 2019.
Wondery’s WeCrashed series, about the incredible rise and fall of WeWork, came in 2020 - there’s a companion podcast to go with the TV series available on the same podcast feed this year, too.
And we got the Dropout in 2019, following Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, with a subsequent season on Holmes’ trial last year released alongside the court case.
So if podcasts precede hit TV shows for scams, what are the wild tales you’ll be watching out for in the next couple years? Here are some of the latest releases.
This is less aurally stimulating, but no less compelling, coming across like Creep Dive as Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi narrate the story of a ballet startup and react throughout to various wild aspects of it. It sounds like a good idea, a ballet company for people who don’t look like ‘traditional’ ballerinas, but it soon gets out of hand for Doug and Ashley Benefield.
Although the production values aren’t as high-end as HeidiWorld, there are any number of bits that leave you agog at how this scam grew. Scamfluencers is running through a number of stories - Ballet’s Lethal Start-up takes up two episodes while they’ve now moved onto The Hollywood Ponzi Scheme. How many scams will the podcasters clock up by the end of their run?
The synopsis of this show will have you scrambling to listen: “For 20 years, Sarah Delashmit told people around her that she had cancer, muscular dystrophy, and other illnesses. She used a wheelchair and posted selfies from a hospital bed. She told friends and coworkers she was trapped in abusive relationships, or that she was the mother of children who had died. It was all a con.”
The Heidi Fleiss Story is about more of a hustler than a scammer, as the celebrity madam did indeed deliver the sex she advertised.
In fact, all Heidi Fleiss did, says narrator Molly Lambert, was dare to broker sex work. She became the most powerful ‘madam’ in Los Angeles in the 1990s, running a high-end escort business, albeit briefly, brought down by “a combination of snitches, hubris, and plain old bad luck”.
The podcast features a vast voice cast including Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This, and while the series is a little baggy, it’s titillating and salacious - how can you resist?
