Imposters: unmasking identity scripts

By Jackie Randles

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 73 spring 2008

It’s easy to think of your identity as static and readily discernable, implicit in notions of ‘I am who I am’. But are you? Could it be that identity is merely a life-script, a way of presenting one’s self to others? Jackie Randles explores the concept that identity is performed.

Who amongst us presents a straightforward and unified personality to the many people we meet from different walks of life? Who doesn’t find it irresistible at times to tailor responses to suit the situation at hand, or to exaggerate and embellish the truth? How permissible is it to tweak your identity?

In many ways we’re expected to enhance the stories of our lives – to correct imperfections, polish our experience and present ourselves in the best possible light. Everybody does it to some extent, and the chances are that many applicants to jobs, dating sites and even public office massage their credentials somewhat. They may add a degree, delete a conviction or a divorce, bump themselves up the corporate ladder in a resume or take a few years off once they’ve reached a certain age.

When a well-known person’s cover is blown the embarrassment is palpable – hearing about such deception, you might cringe until you recall the minor omissions and little white lies in your own life script. But where does one draw the line? It could be argued that there’s a fine line between identity enhancement and becoming an outright impostor.

When we think of impostors, we tend to think of high-profile, news-grabbing frauds. In this context, impostor stories abound, with media coverage often honing in on the rich and famous or tales of bizarre deception.

Then there are the whacky impostor stories about the people who steal buses and pose as bus drivers or pretend they are ambulance officers, surgeons or lawyers. Impostors in dental and medical practice tend to make headlines (imagine if they’d been working on you?), as do purported survivors of disasters such as 9/11, plane crashes or tsunamis (shame on them). And there’s nothing like the tale of Europe’s most-wanted, war criminal masquerading as a bearded alternative therapist to intrigue the masses, or the audacious concoctions of Norma Khouri, whose fabrications were captured in the recent film Forbidden Lies.

Stories like these are common place in the media, but most identity fraud is more mundane. What we don’t hear as much about, are stories of people who discover that the people they’ve married, befriended or worked with have been pretending to be someone else.

After a chance meeting on a tram when I was a twenty-year old uni student, I became friendly with a French guy called Bernard. He was charming, funny and incredibly generous. He called himself Bernard Henri de la Cauvinière, said he was a Count and that he had come to Australia with his elderly aunt, the Countess.

As I’d just spent some time in France, I enjoyed practicing my French with Bernard and was seduced by his impeccable French-ness, not to mention his noble connections.

Bernard was full of talk about how he was planning to establish an Arabian horse stud in the Whittlesea area north of Melbourne where he’d rented a large property complete with stables, paddocks and dressage arenas.

He would often send a local taxi into town to pick me up and take me out to this property for the day. No cash was ever exchanged, for Bernard held an account with the taxi company. Being young and gullible (and broke), I was impressed by his flamboyant nature and a little in awe of how much money he seemed to have.

After a few months of regular contact, I was summonsed to the Carlton police station. Bernard had been arrested. To my surprise, the police told me that he was not the Count Bernard Henri de la Cauvinière. They did not know who he was, but were certain that he had coerced the elderly woman he called his aunt to sneak out of a Parisian nursing home, accompany him to Australia and give him all her money.

She was indeed the Countess of La Cauvinière, and I don’t think she was here under duress – judging from my experience, she seemed to be enjoying the hoax immensely and loved her new surroundings in the company of her impostor nephew.

When I came face to face with Bernard, brooding in a cell, he refused to concede that he wasn’t the Count. Nor would he admit to any of the larceny charges levelled against him. Worried that I’d somehow be implicated in his crime by all those free taxi rides, I soon left the police station. A few days later he’d vanished – as far as I know, he’d somehow fled the country, escaping all charges.

Some months later there was a current affairs story about the man I knew as Bernard on TV. The story showed people who were owed plenty of money – from taxi drivers to shop assistants and real estate agents in Whittlesea. Everyone, it seemed, was dazzled by the handsome French Count spending up big around the place and was keen to share in his largesse – they had extended him credit and were now left severely out of pocket.

It could be argued that the fragile nature of self means that identity can be far more fluid than we might care to admit. It’s hard to pinpoint just how much embellishment is acceptable, and when people go too far. In some instances it’s unclear why people pretend to be someone else, whereas in others situations, impostor tales may signal delusions of grandeur and signs of mental illness of some kind or another.

In the case of Bernard, I now think that he was probably suffering some kind of bipolar disorder and was having a tremendous high. But I have to ask myself how genuine was my own role in this relationship: was I pursuing some kind of fantasy to befriend a dashing French Count and see where this adventure would take me? Enchanted by his performance, I most certainly augmented my own.