I Almost Married A Con Man

After a lifetime of MR. WRONGS, Abby Ellin thought she had found THE ONE—dashing, attentive, NOBLE. But throughout their courtship then ENGAGEMENT, his behavior and stories of his past made her QUESTION who he TRULY WAS. The ANSWER was one she NEVER SAW COMING.

- Abby Ellin

My ex-fiancé helped orchestrate the raid on Osama bin Laden. He received a Purple Heart for his military service and a medal of honor from Golda Meir. He thwarted a bioterrorism attack in New York City and saved the grandson of one of the world’s wealthiest men from an attempted kidnapping. None of it was public. He didn’t write a book about his escapades or sell his story to Hollywood. His goal wasn’t to become rich and famous but to keep his children—and all of America—safe from the “bad guys.” “I’m not going to sit by while people are in danger,” he’d often say as he packed his bags for a secret mission.

It was wonderfully noble, except for one minor detail: None of it was true.

Let’s rewind to early 2006, when I was writing an article and needed to cite a medical expert. Someone recommended a doctor with a posh West Coast practice. His quote made it into the story, but the article was put on indefinite hold. Nearly a year later, when the piece was finally slated to run, I called him to fact-check.

He had quit his fancy practice and moved to Florida to work at a naval hospital. He told me he had served in the military years earlier and had reenlisted in order to open a hospital in Iraq for kids with cancer. He was a lieutenant commander. Soon, he would start a job at the Pentagon. What a coincidence! I was planning on moving to the capital to attend graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I wanted to write about global human-rights issues, and this hospital project was a story worth pursuing. “Keep me posted,” I said. And so he did, emailing every few months with snippets of information. In December 2009, the emails began picking up in frequency. By late January, they had blossomed into daily, almost hourly, telephone calls.