Confident Women

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

About the Author

Tori Telfer is a full-time freelance writer whose nonfiction pieces have appeared in Salon, VICE, Jezebel, The Hairpin, Bustle, Barnesandnoble.com, Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart nominee and recipient of the Edwin L. Shuman Fiction Award, and her fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Moltov Cocktail, Watershed Review , and elsewhere. She majored in creative writing at Northwestern University and completed one year of an MFA at Indiana University before moving west. She lives in New York.