Kaitlyn Dever as Belle in Apple Cider Vinegar.
From Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna to Melissa Caddick in Underbelly: Vanishing Act, TV over recent years has been fascinated by the crimes of notorious con women. We’re getting another dramatisation of a true story this week with the release of Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar: the “true-ish” tale of disgraced Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson.
These series present a rogues’ gallery of offenders: grifters, thieves, fantasists and fraudsters. The crimes might vary, and motivations might differ, but at the heart of all the stories is a mystery spiralling out of the protagonist. Not just how did she do it, but why? It might be ambition, a craving for money, power or recognition, or it could be something harder to identify. These shows present the women as rule-breakers, disruptors who don’t feel bound by law, ethics or morality.
Our fascination with such stories could well have something to do with widespread questions of trust. With cries of “fake news” regularly resounding, and social media becoming an echo chamber for dubious claims that can catch on like wildfire, it’s an appropriate time to examine a range of tales about predators taking advantage of unwitting victims.
Conmen have been the subject of popular Netflix titles such as FYRE and The Tinder Swindler, but it increasingly feels like female fraudsters are running the show. Here’s a guide to six recent series exploring this fertile territory.
Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix)
This glossy, insightful and energetic six-part production, the latest addition to TV’s line-up of female fraudsters, traces the rise and fall of Belle Gibson. Created, co-written and executive produced by Samantha Strauss (Dance Academy, The End), it portrays the self-proclaimed health guru suffering an upbringing scarred by neglect and bullying. She discovers faking illness can attract concern and attention – perfect tonics for a girl aching for approval – and that she can lie convincingly and get away with it. This version of Gibson, played with edgy determination by American Kaitlyn Dever (Dopesick, Unbelievable), carefully crafts a public persona and can be flirtatious, keenly focused or ferocious as required. The captivating drama has a keen eye for the harsh realities of life and illness, as well as the complexities of modern human relations.
Joan (Stan*)
Perhaps the least-known production in the pack, this six-part series is adapted from Joan Hannington’s 2002 memoir I Am What I Am: The True Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief. Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) stars as a working-class London mother who flees a miserable marriage and must find a way to support herself. A chance meeting with antiques dealer Boisie (Frank Dillane) introduces her to a life of crime, and she finds that she has a taste and talent for it. Joan comes to love the thrill of planning and executing her heists, as well as the lifestyle that her ill-gotten gains can bring. But she’s also endeavouring to reunite with her young daughter, who’s been taken into foster care. The series revels in the ’80s period detail and Turner delivers a performance that evokes the title character’s toughness and vulnerability.
Con Girl (7Plus)
Emma Krieg plays convicted conwoman Samantha Azzopardi in the true-crime documentary Con Girl.
This 2023 documentary series follows the intriguing case of chameleonic Australian grifter Samantha Azzopardi, played in the evocative dramatised re-creation scenes by Emma Krieg. Azzopardi connected with her targets via social media, assuming myriad identities. Among the 75 aliases that law enforcement agencies identified were nannies, abused adolescents, a Swedish daughter of spies, a Russian gymnast and a modelling agent.
Often, she played a teenager under threat and requiring urgent assistance. Yet even as the series spends four hours chronicling Azzopardi’s activities over more than a decade, the woman at the heart of the story remains an enigma. Her scams seemingly weren’t motivated by money or malice, although they caused significant damage. The games played by this agent of chaos appear to be about the thrill of gaining control over her targets by wrapping them in a fiction she has created.
Underbelly: Vanishing Act (Stan)
The first half of this four-hour drama casts Melissa Caddick (Kate Atkinson) as a slick operator, a luxury-loving status seeker who networks avidly and has no compunction about involving family, friends and trusting clients in her Ponzi scheme. As ASIC officials begin to investigate her business dealings, the semi-fictionalised drama introduces George (played by a smoothly sinister Colin Friels) – a shadowy invented figure who complicates matters. But having presented a pacey and engaging set-up that makes the most of Sydney’s visual assets, the second half of the drama is less substantial. Caddick becomes increasingly rattled, moving from blithe confidence to self-pity and righteous indignation, but apparently feeling no remorse. The reliably excellent Atkinson (SeaChange, Wentworth) is terrific as the conwoman, creator of a facade that is breezy yet brittle.
The Dropout (Disney+)
Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) aims to revolutionise and democratise medical testing. She sets up Theranos, a shiny-looking start-up, claiming to have invented a portable machine that can be used domestically to detect disease from a single drop of blood. Quick, easy, inexpensive, minimally invasive. Eureka.
Yet as this eight-part 2022 series reveals, the big ideas and grand claims turned into a large-scale scam as the vaunted company failed to produce a single viable test, even as Holmes grew more frantic, concealed the problem and pressured her staff to work tirelessly to fix it. Like Gibson, she’s seen to cannily craft her public persona and, as in Apple Cider Vinegar, the attention and acclaim of traditional and social media is a key factor.
Inventing Anna (Netflix)
Made in 2022 and perhaps a little long at nine episodes, the series tracks the deceptions of Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) as she sweet-talks and swindles her way into New York society. Posing as a European heiress and enthusiastically promoting plans for an ultra-plush club to attract A-listers, Delvey becomes one of the beguiling “It Girls” beloved by Americans, gracing society pages and gossip columns and profiled as a rising star in business magazines. The talented Garner (Ozark, The Royal Hotel, The Assistant) plays Delvey as a wily predator who can turn on the charm like a light.
*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.
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