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WLife can’t be easy without a conscience? Imagine the freedom. There is no fault. No worries. No sense of responsibility, no investment in what people think of you, no restrictions on your behavior… My God, what a life. And above all, think about the money you can make. To be honest, I admire all the scammers out there who steal money. If I could, I’d be the next Elizabeth Holmes or Bernie Madoff in a (stone) heartbeat.
Now I have a new crush: Amanda Riley. Scamanda (it’s a gift, really) is his documentary, produced by ABC News Studios and premiered on Hulu last year. During her years of pretending to be terminally ill, Riley defrauded her friends, church members and others out of thousands and thousands of dollars (the exact amount will not be known because most of the money was paid by unaccounted for) to pay off her medical bills.
Now the BBC has stepped in to help fill the schedules while all the football is going on. And fill them up it does. Each of the four parts (called Part 1, 2, 3 and 4, as the cancer is, which is the most difficult and the most disgusting) lasts 40 minutes. It needed two hours in the main, but the scam documentary is among the most guilty of the modern sin of inflammation. The producers seem to have succumbed to the human temptation to show you every little detail of the protagonist’s actions, to show you how truly evil this character is. Then they slavishly follow the investigation that is launched to create a conflict – where they often kill because once you provide the documents, you never go back – before that, which also involves a trial to eliminate the evidence against the prosecution, followed by a sentence and a long prison sentence.
Scamanda, which is based on a podcast hosted by Charlie Webster (who was interviewed here but, surprisingly, not so long that it is given to victims and investigators instead), mainly follows this plan, with all its flaws. It is also exporting a number of silent demonstrations. Don’t worry if you can’t imagine the hospital or Riley walking up and down the hospital corridor or what blogging looks like – it’s all here, most of the time.
An important and compelling story, as all stories are. Riley was a wife (to Corey – now divorced), a stepmother to her daughter and a beloved member of her local megachurch when she announced in 2012 that she had terminal cancer and began blogging about her treatment. His youth, his charisma, his faith – which only grew, he said, as he fought his illness – meant that people rushed to give him time and attention, and gave money to help the doctors who spent seven years practicing what we and they now know is fraud, and experiencing “miracles” that kept him alive. One was a pregnancy that “reversed” cancer – temporarily – and gave her a co-born daughter Jessa.
But before 2012, Riley and her husband were friends with Lisa Berry. Berry stopped talking to her after she began to question Riley’s claims that she had terminal cancer. His behavior and appearance showed nothing of the sort. When Berry learned of Riley’s comments on her website (which is now asking for donations), she told TV investigative reporter Nancy Moscatiello, who investigated the blog and quickly contacted police. Their investigation led to the involvement of the IRS fraud unit (online donations can be fraudulent) – they seem more dangerous here than any law enforcement agency – and together they had enough to arrest Riley and charge him. He was expected to be sentenced to 18 months in the case, but the judge threw the book at Riley and he received five years.
As before, I’m not really sure about the point of the documentary. To tell us that there are bad people out there? Well, but we know that. Aren’t we at a point where advertising to them gives us the wrong idea of how big they are and destroys trust instead of informing people? There is no real reason for what Riley did. There is no information here. Just a good story. Is that enough? I don’t know.
