Liar Liar: BRAIN ON FIRE

Welcome to the age of the fabulist. Facts are more accessible than ever, yet charlatans are thriving. Are humans getting more shameless? Or is brain science showing us that we just need something to believe in?

- PAUL TULLIS

In the late 1990s Christopher Rockefeller was married to a former Playboy Playmate, driving a Ferrari, and living in Los Angeles, where he had booked himself an entire floor at the Beverly Wilshire. After growing bored of having his picture taken beside blondes with sculpted abs by D-list paparazzi, the French-born heir to an oil fortune moved back east, and in 2000 he lived on Further Lane in East Hampton, where he enjoyed telling people about the Pissarro and the Chagall in his art collection and taking calls from President Bill Clinton on his cell phone.

Except that he didn’t live on Further Lane, he had no art collection to speak of, and he had probably never met Bill Clinton. He lodged in only one room at the Beverly Wilshire, not an entire floor, as he would tell 60 Minutes in 2002, and he stiffed the hotel for $60,000. The marriage to the Playmate—that might have been real.

And his name wasn’t Christopher Rockefeller. It was Christophe Rocancourt, and in 2003 he would be sentenced by a United States federal judge to 46 months imprisonment for wire fraud and scheming to defraud, and he was ordered to pay $1.2 million to people he had fleeced.

Rocancourt sustained his grift with a dizzying array of lies. One victim told 60 Minutes he had promised to help her financially— he was a Rockefeller, after all—but first he just needed a little bit of cash upfront. Then he disappeared.