There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish

By Anna Akbari

Page I bailed on: 20

Verdict: I had really, really high hopes for this one. A woman, with the help of some similarly situated friends, tracking down an Internet romance scammer sounded like a great story. And in fact the story turned out to be a lot weirder than I was expecting. As it turns out, the scammer here, who presented himself as “Ethan Schuman” online, was actually a New Jersey woman named Emily Slutsky who had degrees in nuclear science, biomedical engineering, and literature from M.I.T. and who was at the time a medical student in Ireland. She would later become a practicing gynecologist back in the U.S. That’s weird! And interesting. I mean, she wasn’t even getting any money from these women she met online. She just seemed addicted to the game.

But boy did the first chapter, which is all I read, put me off reading any more. I did skip ahead and read the Afterword, but after Ethan’s initial “courtship” of Akbari I had to pull the plug.

So what triggered me?

Akbari is a sociologist with a special interest in the construction and performance of identity. She also was a veteran of the online dating scene when “Ethan” hooked her. So no excuses there. What led to her undoing then? As has been stated countless times before, but is still worth repeating, a con works when it tells people what they want to hear, and encourages them to believe what they already want to believe. And for most people this isn’t something that’s hard to figure out, as most people want the same things. You may get upset at someone “telling you what you want,” but in fact this is easy to do. When it comes to dating it’s even easier, as there are mountains of data telling us exactly what it is we want. Romance scammers, appealing to either gender, don’t have to work very hard.

Akbari was an easy mark. She gives Slutsky far too much credit for her special insight into a well-educated, professional woman’s needs, due to her in fact being a well-educated, professional woman. But some guy working in a boiler room in Nigeria knows just as much what buttons to push. These aren’t professional secrets.

And so I laughed out loud at the dating profile “Ethan” had set up and posted on OKCupid. He was, of course, 6-foot-tall, good looking (Emily used some old pictures of a guy she knew, so “Ethan” also looked much younger than he claimed to be), a graduate of Columbia and M.I.T. (where he got a Ph.D. in applied math), drove a BMW, worked in finance (Morgan Stanley, of course), lived on the Upper West Side, split his time between NYC, DC, and Ireland, and had a dog named Harvey.

Oh, please! Tall, good-looking, rich (the Holy Trinity, or triple-6s), hyper-educated at the top schools, vaguely progressive, a job in international finance, a fashionable and affluent address, has a dog . . . it’s like Emily used a template, not even bothering if any of it was believable. It’s the equivalent of a female catfish dating profile of an attractive young woman in a bikini who loves to cook and “take care of her man.” In other words: a complete joke, and I would have thought a transparent one at that.

If “Ethan” were real these qualities would put him somewhere in the top 0.1% of the value charts. Guys like this are not on dating sites. And if they were, they likely wouldn’t be interested in the women who fall for them. But Akbari – who has to be praised for her openness and honesty, however deluded she may have been – “wanted an equal” and thought she’d found one in “Ethan.” “Ethan was impressive – there was no denying that,” she tells us. “But we felt well matched.” We felt? Who’s that we? Akbari had a Ph.D. in sociology and was teaching at NYU. As the Reverend Elton tries to explain to Emma Woodhouse, everybody has their level.

The word usually used to describe the dating strategy at work here is hypergamy: the idea that women only date and mate up (men are less concerned with status). Akbari, whose doctorial dissertation had been on “aspirational identity,” was dreaming a romantic cliché in thinking she’d found a soulmate in “Ethan.” But no different in any respect from any female victim of this con that we’ve heard about. And again I applaud these women for their honesty, and note in passing that I believe statistics show that slightly more men fall victim to romance scams than women, only we hear less from them. But just to take other examples that have recently been reported on in the news, there is no way a “starchitect” who designs luxury resort properties around the world, or a former special forces soldier who looks like a model from a men’s fitness magazine, or a businessman with his own private jet, is going to be interested in a middle-aged office administrator or nursing assistant living in Des Moines. Or, for that matter, a university teacher, tenured or not.

Akbari didn’t need to be more on guard, she needed to be more self-aware. Instead of admitting (to herself at least) that she was looking to move up she couches her quest to find love in terms of finding an “equal . . . who matched my energy and curiosity,” “romantic companionship” and “emotional connection.” This is the crap you put on your profile page. But you can’t believe your own propaganda.

My cynicism doesn’t come from any of this background analysis though, but instead is a response to how the language of love has degraded in the age of instant messaging. Even in the longer-form missives “Ethan” indulged in, he sounds dull, superficial, and frankly insulting toward Akbari right from the get-go. Is this what people mean by having “game”? Reading their correspondence I couldn’t for the life of me see what she was seeing in the guy’s personality. Which reinforced my feeling that she wasn’t interested in his personality at all, but perhaps more in the generic alpha-male profile. It was his “cleverness, his openness, and perhaps most of all, his eagerness to keep the conversation going that swept me off my digital feet.” No evidence is given of any of these qualities. Not one display of wit, creativity, humour, or even intelligence.

Was Akbari just lying to herself? Probably. But in writing a book about her experience I couldn’t help feeling that she either still hadn’t figured all this out or wasn’t being quite as open and honest as I was being led to expect. In any event, I was, as I say, triggered, and despite how interesting a story it seemed to be I just skipped to the end and tossed it.

The DNF files