Female con artists sprang from historical representations of women as “Eve,” duping men into deviant behavior in the way Lady Macbeth does to her devoted husband. In this way, a female confidence artist is nothing new, yet the Victorian era gave birth to more modern portrayals of femininity as above such guises. The original “confidence man” was, in fact, a man in the 1840s who asked strangers to entrust him with their watches, with which he then absconded. It is this Victorian image of virtuous women playing damsels in distress that gave way to more contemporaneous portrayals, beginning in the 1940s noir genre with the “femme fatale” who, rather than luring men into coordinated mischief, entrap men to gain the upper hand, only to discard them later. Julie Clark’s The Lies I Tell seeks to dismantle this gender paradigm of women as either angelic and virtuous or sinister black widows.

Female con artists have been the focus of many recent popular portrayals, such as the popular Netflix original, Inventing Anna, inspired by the true events of Anna Sorokin’s life as she conned her way to the top of influential and wealthy social circles in New York City by lying that she was an heiress.