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.”
The message? Her very existence in this country is provisional; she needs to earn her keep. Her identity develops into a bluff. When she realizes, in adolescence, that she is attracted to girls as well as boys, she adopts a “boy crazy” bravado to suppress the thought. From the beginning, she writes, “I faked being white, faked being a good Mormon girl, faked being straight.”
Now older and viciously self-aware, Ferrell compares her past self to a competitive hot dog eater, moved to “cram and cram” her feelings inside until she’s about to explode. In high school, she shoplifts from superstores to fit in with the straight edge crowd. Then she starts stealing from the punks themselves, kiting checks and inventing chaotic excuses to cover her trail. She leverages her grifts to make herself appear “useful,” snagging friends tickets to shows or treating them to dinner at Benihana. She seems driven to sabotage all of her intimate relationships, to confirm what she had always suspected about herself. After the cops come knocking, she skips bail and runs to New York with only a stack of American Apparel separates.
With an inflated résumé, Ferrell lands an assistant job at Vice magazine, where her shaky assimilation project climbs to a dangerous new height. There, at ground zero of hipster cultural production, where “the air felt electric in its indifference,” Ferrell endures racist diatribes from white man-children to assure them she is cool. At night she exacts a sick kind of revenge. She seems drawn toward “white guys with good hair,” the same ones who would have stared through her in high school and whose bank accounts seem bloated with parental deposits. She leverages her own contested identity to reel them in, with a self-deprecating wink.
Ferrell is on a bus to Bushwick, scrolling through Gothamist, when she sees her own mug shot. Her memoir crystallizes a moment in internet culture when the possibilities of the social web were just beginning to sour. Though Ferrell finds friends (and marks) on Myspace, she can also be thwarted by a search engine, and becomes an early target of a full-scale Twitter harassment campaign. She is labeled a subservient Asian and a crazy slut, the hateful specters that have haunted her whole life. (“It obviously didn’t help that I had used those two stereotypes to my advantage to con so many people,” she writes.) Once jailed, she dreams of being sold to the highest bidder by an auctioneer. “White on the inside, yellow on the outside, this exotic little banana will make all of your manic pixie dreams come true,” she says.
But it’s also in jail that Ferrell first feels like she can be honest. “I STOLE A BUNCH OF MONEY,” she yells to applause when prompted to report what she’s in for. At the heart of her book is an earnest critique of the incoherent cruelties of the criminal justice system. She grows close to her cellmates, often caged for nonviolent drug offenses, some of them pregnant. After surviving a riot that’s violently suppressed, “I felt not like an ‘other’ but part of a larger ‘them,’” she writes.
Once released, she’s subjected to a parole system that seems designed to force her to reoffend. Her punishment for hipster grifting — she pleads guilty to charges including forgery and attempted identity fraud — ends up being not only jail time but rounds of public shaming, stints of homelessness and a vulnerability to sexual assault that only ends when she moves into a house of former Army guys. She marries one of them, and they move back to Brooklyn, where she tries to live an anonymous life under her married name. She works a series of administrative jobs at uncool companies, but each ends when H.R. discovers her past. Again and again, she’s denied a shot at a boring, honest life.
The “Hipster Grifter” story anticipated our obsession with self-involved scammers, and now Ferrell has turned that narrative on its head. Her book is generous and ambitious; she drops juicy details from her chaotic life even as she leads us to examine forces beyond herself. It’s also more evidence that she really is very charming, and that even after a gantlet of traumas and humiliations (ones inflicted by herself and others), her biting humor survives. Her ultimate redemption is the memoir itself — proof that the story of her life is good and big enough to belong in a book, not on a cocktail napkin. I got my copy for free, but I’d gladly open my wallet for her.
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