Saturday Night Live writer and hilarious comedian, Anna Drezen, takes a break from 30 Rock to stop by the studio and talk to us about the amazing con-artist, Clark Rockefeller. aka Christopher Chichester. aka Christian Gerhartsreiter. aka Chip Smith. This guy has had so many names. And tinted glasses, and the audacity to give David Berkowitz’s social security number on a job application! (He’s the Son of Sam.) The balls! Anna, go put this in one of your skits for SNL. Anyway, we’ve got 17 aliases, 3 hilarious comedians, and 3 dogs in the More Banana podcast studio today. (Our producer, Cait, calls it Kill Room Studios. Should we be concerned? If we go missing, check the Kill Room!)
One of the common themes we see with all of these scammers is that they have a crazy amount of gusto and confidence and people just bow down to that without verifying stuff. Indeed, a scammer is also referred to as a con artist, or con-man, which is short for “confidence man.” The deeper we get into these scams, the more we realize this to be true! It’s crazy that every subject of our podcast, every person we focus on, is super, super super confident. That’s what it takes to be a good trickster, we guess! Clark Rockefeller was so confident that he deserved to live in that lady’s house in California that he killed her kids and buried them in the backyard! Call it delusional, call it crazy, but he was, over everything else, absolutely certain that no one else would call him out on his bullshit. And that’s exactly how he got hired on Wall Street, too. He just walked down to the Financial District with a sharp jawline and a fake name and the Son of Sam’s social security number and knew that no one would question him! It’s wild.
As a woman, it’s much tougher to have that kind of confidence. We’re taught to second guess ourselves,and that something isn’t happening, even when it is. That’s what gaslighting is. When you call someone out on something and they’re like, “I’m not crazy, you’re crazy and here’s why!” Oh! We forgot to tell you this. We tweeted it from our account (@scamwowpodcast), but maybe you missed it because it seems like people don’t use Twitter anymore. Anyway, the New York Post reported over the weekend that Louis C.K. gave Sarma Melngailis an STD! Can you believe?! There were some emails leaked between the two of them and, MAN, were they gaslighty! Louis C.K. was like, “I never told you I was clean. No one is truly clean in this day and age.” Which is SOME BULLSHIT because, um, YES, you absolutely CAN be clean. All you have to is get a test and it will tell you and then get your ailments treated. Oh, in case you don’t recall, Sarma is the former vegan chef and owner of One Lucky Duck and Pure Food and Wine who was sort of brainwashed (we think) into giving all her money to a random guy and her businesses eventually folded and she ended up in a hotel room eating pizza. It was wild. We have an episode on it.
Anyway, things are a trash fire. Hope you enjoy the podcast!
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