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?