His name was John Meehan, but most people know him as “Dirty John.” A college classmate had given him the nickname, and it stuck.
Mr. Meehan was a good-looking charmer who did nothing exceptional with his life but lie, cheat, steal, manipulate and attempt murder. Still, his story, and that of Debra Newell, one of many women he duped, has become one of the most popular of the last two years. There’s a podcast about him that has had more than 42 million downloads; a TV series on Bravo (whose finale captivated more than 3.3 million) and a documentary on Oxygen, “Dirty John, the Dirty Truth,” watched by 1.6 million.
“Dirty John” is part of a long list of cultural material in recent years about people who aren’t who they purport to be. What do we watch these days? “Big Little Lies,” “The Americans,” “The Affair.” Whom do we talk about? Walter White, Don Draper and Tony Soprano. Not one but two series about the fake heiress Anna Delvey are in currently in development. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for people with hidden worlds, their closets bursting with skeletons.
The online magazine Narratively has an entire vertical dedicated to Secret Lives. These stories are among the most widely read, said Noah Rosenberg, the site’s co-founder; many have been optioned for television and film. Pretend Radio, a podcast about con artists, has had nearly half a million downloads since its debut in June 2017.
“You can argue that con-artist crimes affect more people than murder,” said Javier Leiva, the creator and host.
I know this firsthand. Like John Meehan, my former fiancé was a pathological liar who fabricated heroic exploits; he eventually went to jail for writing fraudulent narcotics prescriptions using, among other names, my own. I learned this when I received a phone call from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service a year and a half after I left him. From a journalistic perspective, it was fascinating. As a person trying to have a relationship, it was excruciating.
But I can take some comfort in having been part of the zeitgeist.
Deception is everywhere, including the nightly news, and, of course, our political discourse. Even our comedies are rooted in the stuff. The protagonist of “Younger,” played by Sutton Foster, is a 40-something woman posing as a fresh-faced literary assistant in her 20s. “Grace and Frankie” is about two women whose husbands cheated on them — with each other! — for two decades.
The word of 2018, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “toxic,” with “gaslight” among the runners-up.
To some extent, of course, we all lead double or triple lives, presenting different selves at work, at home, in love, with friends, on social media. As Chris Rock once said, “When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.”
But most of us are not like Mr. Meehan, my former swain or the serial fabulist Frank Abagnale, Jr., whose life story spawned a cottage industry of deception: a book, “Catch Me If You Can,” a movie of the same name, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Tony-nominated Broadway show. Nor are we Dan Mallory, a.k.a AJ Finn, the best-selling novelist who was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile. Mr. Mallory had claimed that he had cancer, which had also killed his mother, and that his brother had committed suicide. He also said he had a Ph.D. from Oxford. None of it was true.
People who break the social contract in such a protracted and consistent manner inspire both admiration (for the chutzpah it takes to dissemble consistently) and fear.
“These stories make us ask, ‘What if nothing is as it seems?’” said Kevin Balfe, a partner at Red Seat Ventures, which produces CrimeCon, a three-day true crime convention held annually in New Orleans. “What makes someone willing and capable to do that? And what it would mean if more of us had that same capability? Society is built largely on human trust, and when that’s shattered we all suffer.”
In December 2016, Bravo conducted a survey with Research Now of 1,500 people ages 18 to 54, called “Truth and Deception in Relationships.” More than four in 10 wondered if their partner could have another side to them; more than one in three often suspected that their partner was being dishonest about something. Fifty-one percent said they’d kept a secret from their partners, male or female. And 41 percent of online daters had been lured into a relationship by means of a fake online persona, or “catfished,” said Dave Kaplan, the head of strategic insights and research for lifestyle networks at NBCUniversal, which owns Bravo.
It’s not that people were so exemplary in years past — think of ye olde hucksters, snake-oil salesmen and “The Wizard of Oz” — but there weren’t as many avenues for letting our dark sides run wild. And though digital footprints and identity-verification programs like Spokeo might make it easier to track down deceitful people, the internet presents more opportunities to transgress and, upon being caught, to create a new virtual identity.
CareerExcuse.com provides fake reference letters from fake bosses for fake jobs you’ve never had. For as little as $69 a month, Paladin Deception Services will offer character and personal references, landlord referrals, and “verification of specific skills.” Ninety-nine dollars gets you verification of a white lie or “exaggeration,” along with voice mail, a dedicated phone line in the city of your choosing, and a male or female operator — whichever suits your fancy.
For romantic deceivers, along with Ashley Madison, there’s broapp.net, a virtual wingman that sends automated sweet nothings to your lover, so you can spend more time with your mates while remaining in good standing with your beloved.
It’s no surprise that lie detection has become trendy, and not just in response to the Trump administration and its proclivity for what the president himself called “truthful hyperbole.” Ever since Richard Nixon shattered America’s innocence, trust has slowly been eroding in institutions and among the people who inhabit them.
Citizens might be entertained by impostors, but they are also seeking to defend themselves psychologically against them. Jeff Hancock’s TED Talk, “The Future of Lying,” has amassed over 1.2 million views. Pamela Meyer’s “How to Spot a Liar” received over 21 million.
At last year’s CrimeCon, a session called “How to Catch a Liar,” run by an ex-detective, drew almost a thousand people in a standing-room-only ballroom, significantly larger than the organizers had anticipated.
“In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been that surprising,” said Mr. Balfe. “Even institutions that have been bastions of trust in society — the Catholic Church, the Supreme Court, the F.B.I., the military — have either been caught up in scandals, politicized, or otherwise made to seem less than they once were. The result is a natural tendency by many to want to figure out what is real and separate fact from fraud.”
And, one hopes, not end up like Debra Newell. Or me.
This article is adapted from the author’s book, “Duped: Double Lives, False Identities and the Con Man I Almost Married,” which was published by Public Affairs last month.
