The Man Who Lied Constantly

David Grann’s profile, from 2008, of a serial liar. View in browser | Update your preferences Annals of Crime The Chameleon The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin. By David Grann This past week, the Republican civil war over the House Speakership eclipsed the arrival in Washington of one of the strangest figures ever elected to Congress. George Santos, the incoming representative for New York’s Third Congressional District, appears to have lied about most of his biography, from his education (Baruch College and New York University have no record of his enrollment) to his professional history (Goldman Sachs and Citigroup say they have never employed him) to his religion and family background (his grandparents were not Jewish refugees from the Holocaust). Federal and local prosecutors are now investigating the alleged falsehoods, and Brazilian authorities have reopened a fraud case against him. The congressman-elect recently admitted to “having embellished” his résumé. In 2008, the New Yorker staff writer David Grann profiled another purported serial liar: Frédéric Bourdin, a youthful-looking Frenchman who had “posed as more than a dozen fictional children” and carried out cons in at least sixteen countries. Bourdin performed his deceptions not to acquire political power but, in the words of one French prosecutor, for reasons that were “purely emotional.” Law-enforcement agencies and Bourdin’s own mother denounced his behavior, but his skill and bravado were so striking that they inspired, at least in certain quarters, something akin to admiration. (The principal of a school where Bourdin, then thirty, successfully impersonated a fifteen-year-old remarked, “Of course, he lied, but what an actor!”) In an attempt to evade authorities in Spain, Bourdin made a desperate, fateful error by choosing, in 1997, to assume the identity of a boy who had gone missing in Texas. Bourdin, in his new guise, was quickly “reunited” with the family—who, despite obvious physical differences between the Frenchman and the absent child, embraced him. For Bourdin, the unexpected reaction initially came as a relief. But as time went on, and as certain family dynamics emerged, the seasoned con man began to wonder whether his rescuers might be keeping secrets of their own. Read the story Also from the Archive Annals of Imposture The Big Little Man from Brooklyn From 1968: Stanley Clifford Weyman impersonated everyone from a doctor to an official with the U.S. State Department. How did he do it? By St. Clair McKelway A Reporter at Large The Mark From 2011: The F.B.I. needs informants, but what happens when they go too far? By Evan Ratliff More from The New Yorker Letter from Biden’s Washington Kevin McCarthy Is Not the Only Loser in the House G.O.P.’s Speaker Mess Notes from a historic debacle on Capitol Hill. By Susan B. Glasser Page-Turner What Lies Do to a Life In “A History of Lying,” the novelist Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel argues that lies are inescapable. But being in the periphery of a real man who couldn’t stop lying casts light on the ways that’s not quite true. By Lucie Elven Thanks for Reading. Let us know your thoughts about today’s edition. Plus, browse more newsletters and invite a friend to sign up for The Daily. You’re receiving this e-mail because you signed up for the New Yorker Classics newsletter. Manage your preferences | View our Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from the products and services that are purchased through links in our newsletters as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.