The Hipster Grifter Tells All

YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE ME: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist, by Kari Ferrell

In 2009, The New York Observer published “The Hipster Grifter,” an article identifying a small-time scammer prowling the Brooklyn scene, extracting cash from unsuspecting men. Her name was Kari Ferrell, and she was 22 and immensely charming. She left a flurry of notes in her wake, cocktail napkins etched with sexually explicit jokes, sometimes signed “Korean Abdul-Jabbar.” It worked as long as her marks didn’t Google her name and find that she was wanted for felony fraud in Utah.

Once exposed (and detained), Ferrell became a recurring obsession on Gawker.com. Napkins were auctioned on eBay. Nude photos appeared online without her consent. Though she briefly penned a jailhouse column, her motivations remained mysterious. She was flattened into a filthy erotic character, and then she disappeared.

In fact, Ferrell herself did not know why she was driven to lie and steal, but she seems to have spent much of the next 15 years figuring it out. She has re-emerged with “You’ll Never Believe Me,” her captivating, sharp and very funny memoir.

The “Hipster Grifter” story launched a genre of tales featuring young women labeled “scammers” who revealed some hypocrisy of their spheres: Elizabeth Holmes, the scam of start-ups; Anna Delvey, New York society; Caroline Calloway, social media. Internet tabloids made Ferrell into an avatar of the depravity of millennial excess in gentrifying Brooklyn. But her untold story is a great American tale. And as she unspools it, she builds an indictment of the country’s central myths: the scams of race, of class, of justice.

It begins when she is born in South Korea and adopted by Americans. Ferrell’s parents are white, as is everyone around her in Salt Lake City. She remembers a woman approaching her, as a small child, in the grocery store and leaning in to say: “You must be so grateful that your parents saved you.”