Hello Scam Fam!
To our newcomers, I'm so glad you're here! I will try not to disappoint you, at least until I have your SSNs and DOBs and have implemented PHASE TWO of this operation. To the rest of you, how are those routing numbers coming?
This week let's discuss a subject that hits a touch close to home: Well Intentioned White Women (WIWW). Yesterday the grown up Encyclopedias Brown I work with over at ProPublica published a fantastic and characteristically depressing investigation into More Than Me, a foundation run by a gang of inexperienced, mostly American do-gooders who are trying to liberate Liberia's girls from sex work via education. It's a noble goal that's hard to argue with until you consider that they got a child predator named Macintosh Johnson to run their local program. Then it becomes pretty easy to argue with.
Here's More Than Me's founder and scammer-in-chief Katie Meyler explaining how she came to hire Johnson even though one of his ex-girlfriends had told her they'd broken up because "he loved children":
Meyler said she couldn’t remember if she ever questioned Johnson directly about abusing children, but she said she had asked him questions when interviewing him for his job, “to make sure he was, like, a good person.”
I am VERY curious about which questions reveal whether or not someone is, like, a good person, mostly because I wish to ask them of myself in case I get a different answer than the one I suspect to be true. (The one I suspect to be true is that I am the BEST person.)
Meyler was just a regs young adult from suburban New Jersey when she went to Liberia in 2006. When she posted about Liberian children on social media, people straight up started sending her money (as you know, GET CASH is rule #1 in the Scammer's Guide to Life) to pay their tuition. Cut to this scene straight out of Amy Schumer's pre-fame comedy:
Meyler left Liberia in 2007, but a friend suggested she start her own organization. In a story she would tell countless times, Meyler said she wasn’t sure she was qualified. Her friend told her: “Get over yourself! It’s not about you!” In 2008, Meyler incorporated a charity called More Than Me.
You can tell she took the advice to not make it about her seriously from this spoken word poem she recorded in 2011:
(The real good stuff starts at 2:40)
Or from posts like this one Meyler put up last year after More Than Me added Ebola treatment to the services it was not entirely qualified to provide but did anyway:
Dance heals, y'all.
What I truly admire about Meyler and all the WIWW out there is the sheer refusal to accept we may not be able to will what we want into being. Reading Bad Blood this past summer, I was struck by how Elizabeth Holmes (moment of admiration for a true artiste de scam) kept demanding people build her a tiny little impossible blood machine and just 100% would not in any way listen when they explained why they couldn’t because she wanted a tiny little impossible blood machine so that she could be a billionaire tech king. Even when faced with a bunch of evidence that she was doing the opposite, I believe Meyler still wanted to help. How else was she gonna prove her heart is bigger than yours?
I don’t endorse cyberbullying (#bebest), but the comments on this guy take a real turn after the story published.
Stay brave, and never stop scamming,
<3 Ruthie
PS: If you need a reminder that scams are FUN, the Fyre Festival guy was sentenced today and the last five words of the NY1 story on it are perfect.
My Week in Consumption
My best trick for getting out of a reading slump is picking up critically acclaimed bestselling books from the '90s, which is how I came to Regeneration by Pat Barker and wow is it incredible. (This only works if you have decidedly middlebrow taste like I do.)
I super enjoyed learning about Sandy Lerner who founded both Cisco Systems AND Urban Decay. Thank you to mah gurl Claire for alerting me to this podcast via the superb Of a Kind newsletter.
Getting into sports during the postseason is a thing I do with some regularity. I'm not gonna try to sell you on baseball because whatever you've decided about baseball is the right thing for you, BUT I will say that Ron Darling, who's called the games I've watched, has a voice that I find to be extraordinarily soothing.