Fabulist grifters are everywhere

I hadn’t heard about this one before, but apparently it’s about to generate a bunch of streaming content:

Seven years ago, world-renowned surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was the subject of an ongoing Vanity Fair investigation. He had seduced award-winning NBC producer Benita Alexander while she was making a special about him, proposed, and promised her a wedding officiated by Pope Francis and attended by political A-listers. It was only after her designer wedding gown was made that Alexander learned Macchiarini was still married to his wife, and seemingly had no association with the famous names on their guest list.

Vanity Fair contributor Adam Ciralsky was in the midst of reporting the story for this magazine in the fall of 2015 when he turned to Dr. Ronald Schouten, a Harvard psychiatry professor. Ciralsky sought expert insight into the kind of fabulist who would invent and engage in such an audacious lie.

“I laid out the story to him, and he said, ‘Anybody who does this in their private life engages in the same conduct in their professional life,” recalls Ciralsky, in a phone call with Vanity Fair. “I think you ought to take a hard look at his CVs.”

You can probably guess what happened next.

A particularly interesting angle here is that famous hospitals all over the world decided to try to keep things very quiet after they discovered that Signor Not Exactly A Properly Trained Surgeon After All was doing totally untested experimental surgeries on patients without their knowledge, let alone consent.

After all, who needs a class action suit?

The larger point is that one reason why lying grifters get away with so much is that the most respectable institutions will cover for them, if the alternative is some damage to the institution’s own reputation.

I saw this first hand in the context of The Tales of Goffman when, after I’d discovered that large portions of Alice Goffman’s celebrated book — the subject of no less than three glowing New York Times articles — had in fact been fabricated by a fabulist academic nepo baby, the several very prestigious institutions that had been taken for a ride decided to pretend that none of this had happened. And that was, sociologically speaking, the end of the matter.

A vastly more consequential instance of the same dynamic is the political career of Donald Trump, which has been enabled and extended by the fact that Trump’s core identity as a fabulist grifter isn’t something that could ever be acknowledged in words of one syllable by the mainstream media until it was too late, and, as a consequence, the Michigan Man of the Year became and may well become again president of the United States.

Another basic truth here is that liars lie and grifters grift, and that somebody who lies and cheats in one area of his life is a good bet to do so in others. That’s why waiting for the day that Donald Trump became president was like waiting for that wire transfer from Nigeria, although it only took about seven years for the legacy media to figure that out (I will admit they’ve been better about this lately. 43 times burned, 44 times shy I guess).