It’s Okay: Bad Things Happen to Bad People!

Thanks to Amanda Riley, I have a very thoroughly waterproofed grill table. I was searching for a podcast to listen to while doing the weatherproof stain, and I found Scamanda, the hit podcast from Lionsgate Sound. I think I added at least two more coats than I needed because I wanted to keep listening. It’s a story that’s hard to turn away from, so grisly and strange and laden with conceit that it carries the fascination of the proverbial trainwreck.

Riley, the titular Scamanda, was a beloved megachurch member, a wife and mother, and a truly outlandish con artist. She pretended to have cancer for years, a massive and thorough fraud that included checking herself into the ER to take “chemo” selfies, maintaining an extensive blog, and soliciting tens of thousands of dollars in donations. Then, she got caught. And raided by federal agents.

Now she’s a pop culture boogeyman figure. What kind of person would do this? And what’s more, what kind of person would try to double down after getting thoroughly found out?

The whole sordid tale tumbles out over the course of the eight-part podcast series, and now over the course of the four-part miniseries streaming on Hulu. The show doesn’t add anything substantive to the account —if anything, it winnows its story down to a shorter format. But it’s undeniably fascinating to see the scale of the fraud in the many, many staged medical photos. It’s a very see-it-to-believe-it kind of thing. Listening to the descriptions on the podcast doesn’t have the same effect as seeing the absurdity and melodrama of Riley’s performance in photos and interviews.

She’s not the only unsavory character in the mix, alongside her husband. However, the bad actors are thoroughly outnumbered by the decent and dedicated procession of friends, investigators, agents, reporters, and psychologists who uncover and then dissect this obscene crime.

I find it pretty fitting that ABC advertises Scamanda alongside Perfect Wife and airs Scamanda directly before that other story of a beloved wife and mother using a fictive horror story to elicit sympathy from anyone who would listen. It’s the genre of “Don’t Believe This Woman” true crime.

The pretty white woman in question, in both these shows, is reprehensible and quite easy to hate, an explosive inverse of all the sympathy they worked so hard to cultivate. I think part of the appeal of these shows and their villainesses is that they’re fake victims and they get caught. The media that spins out of that discovery is the performance of catching and shaming them repeatedly with each set of eyeballs on the screen.

Yes, these are horrible people, but there’s a very ugly undertone (even for true crime) in how we crave and consume these stories, a sense of vindicated misogyny that says “She was never a real victim.”

To its credit, Scamanda features many people in the story’s orbit who relate personal stories of loved ones—or themselves—who battled (actual) cancer. It’s a reminder that Riley co-opted a narrative of grief, loss, and struggle that she generalized from a disease that has touched most of us in some way. There are real survivors and patients on screen, holding space for grim reality rather than solely featuring Riley’s farce.

I think this is a better way to approach a scam story like those in Perfect Wife and Scamanda: to make clear that these con artists have earned the scorn and horror heaped on them, but also to make sure we still emphatically take the narratives they hijacked—and, centrally, the people who experience them—with the seriousness and gravity they deserve.