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

“"Whether she's describing women pretending to be doctors, socialites, or just another nice lady who desperately needed help, Telfer dishes up their scandalous schemes for true-crime fans to relish."”

— Booklist"Readers who appreciate a well-executed sting will enjoy this thoroughly researched yet breezy guide to notorious women." — Library Journal"Grifters! Fake Heiresses! Phony Royalty! Imposter Chinese Princelings! Faux Ghostbusters and More! The brilliantly crazy conniving women in CONFIDENT WOMEN have a helluva lot of nerve—and I love it!"— Marisa Acocella, New York Times best selling author of Cancer Vixen, Ann Tenna and The Big She-Bang: The Herstory of the Universe According to God the Mother

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.

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