Con Artists, Netflix, and Single Women

A pattern.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.

Girl dinner.

I gotta get this out of me before I develop an ulcer. Like many of you, I enjoy a documentary that exposes something while it’s still happening, so that others may benefit from the information presented and thus avoid ruin. I love avoiding ruin. Over the last couple of years, but maybe also always, I have noticed a disturbing pattern in the non-murder true crime sphere, and the fact that it overlaps with a huge branch of my work compels me to point it out.

What do The Tinder Swindler, Twin Flames Universe, and Dr. Paolo Macchiarini of Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife have in common? Two out of three of them are still breathing free air, fully able to continue their cons, and the only reason Macchiarini can’t is that he went to jail for killing people with falsified medical research and inhuman surgical procedures—even then it took ten years to get him off the street and out of an operating room. The other main thing they have in common that I need to discuss before I fucking melt: every one of them preyed on single women.