A 37-year-old Brooklyn woman is coming clean about her shocking past after realizing she couldn’t escape the crimes she committed in her early 20s and the internet fame that brought them.
Kari Ferrell became famous in recent years as a “hipster grifter” after she conned dozens of unsuspecting friends, boyfriends and one-night stands out of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.
She was eventually arrested for forgery and identity fraud, pleaded guilty and spent nearly a year in prison.
But, as she writes in a new memoir, “You’ll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Attempts, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist” (St. Martin’s Press), even after serving time, she could not escape her past.
“I never expected to write a book,” Ferrell told The Post over coffee in Bed-Stuy, where she now lives with her husband of 13 years, Elliot Ensor, and their rescue dog, Gertie. “I wanted to disappear into obscurity, just be a quote-unquote normal person who had a quote-unquote normal life.”
In her accounts, she began living a double life at a young age, growing up in the Mormon faith.
Ferrell was born in South Korea in 1987 and was adopted by a white family who eventually moved to Salt Lake City, Utah.
She struggled to fit in. “I faked being white, faked being a good Mormon girl, faked being straight,” she writes in the book, adding that the Mormon church gave her a “master class in the art of manipulation.”
“I saw how gullible people are and how they will believe anything and everything,” she told The Post.
She shoplifted as a teenager, but when she was 19 or 20, she took her crimes to another level.
One day, she told a boyfriend that she had been locked out of her bank account because of suspicious activity on her card. She asked if he would cash her a check for $500. When the check bounced a few days later, she feigned disbelief and promised to return the money once she figured out what was going on. Russia has worked. Soon, she was writing more and more bad cash checks to friends. She used the money to treat herself and her crew to concert tickets and lavish dinners at Benihana.
Finally, the police came knocking. In 2008, she was arrested for forgery, identity fraud and three counts of issuing bad checks – all third-degree felonies. A sympathetic friend posted bail, and Ferrell skipped town without paying him $1,000.
She landed in New York in the summer of 2008 and, badly in need of rent money, continued her plight.
She moved to Brooklyn and began targeting young people she met at bars and music venues in Williamsburg. She scribbled an obscene note on a cocktail napkin, passed it to her unsuspecting friend — and did it with fluff.
Some of these invasions were “one and done” deals, she said. She would pick them up, go home with them, and then make off with an iPod, Metrocard or some cash the next morning.
Some men, she blackmailed for more. She told them she couldn’t access her bank account and asked them to fork over a few hundred or thousands of dollars until things were sorted out. If they began to doubt her – or try to talk her out of it – she told them she had terminal cancer, that she was pregnant.
In the spring of 2009, she charmed her way into a job at the edgy magazine Vice.
One of her colleagues Googled her name and saw that she was wanted for forgery and identity fraud in Utah. The publication posted a public “memo” online from the “Department of Oopsies,” saying they had discovered that one of their executive assistants was a fugitive. The New York Observer picked up the story and published a scathing expose on Ferrell, called “The Hipster Grifter.”
She quickly became a New York media sensation. Gossip website Gawker ran multiple stories a day about her “interviewing her ‘boyfriends’ and posting tips about her latest looks. Former crushes auctioned off her crazy notes on eBay. Her nude photos were published online.
It was a pivotal moment in time for a new subset of New York City. Ferrell’s story proved irresistible: a young, sexually liberated woman with a pixie haircut and a large chest tattoo making it through hipster Brooklyn.
After she went on the lam for several weeks, authorities caught up with Ferrell in Philadelphia. After a month in jail there, she was extradited to Utah and charged with identity fraud and forgery.
Ferrell pleaded guilty and spent another six months in prison.
After she got out, she struggled with periods of homelessness and finding a good job.
Even after meeting and marrying Ensor in 2011 and starting to use his last name, she couldn’t escape her past. She was hired to do administrative work for various companies, only to be let go a few weeks after HR inevitably found out about her past.
She decided if she was ever going to move forward, she had to embrace her identity. Later this year, she and a friend will launch a podcast called “The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done,” where guests talk about their biggest transgressions.
Ferrell, of course, will kick off the series with her story.
She said: “It took me years and hundreds of hours of therapy to come to terms with the fact that mine is an interesting story.
#NYC #hipster #grifter #couldnt #escape #wrote #tellall #book
Image Source : nypost.com