When I first watched The Tinder Swindler last month, in anticipation for an interview with director Felicity Morris, I was, like many viewers, completely absorbed by the story.
Several women meet a man on Tinder who claims to be the billionaire heir to an Israeli diamond fortune, lavishes them with attention, flies to them on actual private jets, then swindles them for hundreds of thousands of dollars? I’m a single woman in my late 20s in New York: of course I ate it up. The documentary was also much, much better than it could have been; I appreciated that Morris didn’t have much interest in probing the psychology of its swindler, Simon Leviev. Instead, she foregrounded three women’s first-person accounts of getting conned – why they believed him, why they cared for him, what such manipulation and confusion does to someone – as well as the journalists at the Norwegian paper VG who unspooled his lies for an initial exposé in 2019.
Still, I figured that The Tinder Swindler would be a hit – it’s true crime meets scam meets Catch Me If You Can meets the perils of modern dating – and that made me nervous. I have come to associate “Netflix hit”, at least in the reality and documentary department, with a feeling of ominousness, portentous of something queasy, cringey, sad, or sinister. The scale of Netflix’s reach is such that almost anything that succeeds on the streaming platform invites exploitation; Netflix fame opens subjects who might not be prepared for international recognition up to intense levels of scrutiny and at this point in the life of the internet, there’s always a dark, seedy undercurrent to attention. Popularity attracts backlash, desperation and grifters.
Netflix fame has traditionally not aged well – think of 2020’s standout Tiger King, which spawned a virtual cottage industry of hustling for its dubious participants. Or another Netflix hit, the docuseries Cheer, whose participants – junior college cheerleaders in the small town of Corsicana, Texas – became overnight stars. I wrote in February 2020, at the peak of Cheer’s popularity, about the unsettling experience of watching its stars’ “character” arcs wrap on screen as their fame expanded, warped and monetized in real time off it. I loved the show’s first season, but the buzz around it, its brief ubiquity felt unstable, fragile. Then its breakout star, Jerry Harris, was charged with soliciting sex from minors and alleged to have abused his influence with younger athletes for sex. (I have not seen Cheer’s second season, which premiered earlier this year and addresses the fallout of fame and Harris’s arrest, in part because of this wariness.)
It was practically a given that someone would adapt The Tinder Swindler into a dramatic film. (Netflix is in early talks of doing so, though no formal plans have been announced.) It is also a given, if you have seen the documentary, that Simon Leviev would attempt to spin his new notoriety into some sort of financial gain. But I’m still impressed by the speed at which this attention curdled. Earlier this week, Leviev signed with Hollywood talent manager Gina Rodriguez, a self-described “D-list diva” who has turned the scandals of a truly impressive roster of unscrupulous figures into deals, further exposure, and cash. (An incomplete selection of her client list: Lindsay Lohan’s parents, Nadya Suleman, AKA “Octomom”, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, AKA the White House gatecrashers, “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham, and several Real Housewives.)
Leviev also launched an account on Cameo, a platform through which people can buy personalized shoutouts from celebrities, charging $200 for personal use and $1,400 for businesses. “I’m Simon Leviev – if you want any blessing, anything birthday, whatever, shout out … I’m so excited to be here,” he says in his intro video; there’s a button to join his fan club “to unlock even more content”.
I don’t want to blow this out of proportion – just because Leviev signed with a talent manager and has expressed an interest in having a dating show doesn’t mean he’ll actually get a content deal. He’s already been banned from dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge. Upon the release of the film earlier this month, he posted an Instagram story to his account (heavily featured in the film and since deactivated, though it can be hard to know – there are now countless impersonations of @simon_leviev_official) that he would soon tell his version of events, but so far that’s nothing more than bluster. (Morris and her team were in contact with Leviev during filming – his voice notes are included – but he declined to sit for an interview.) His Cameo account has, as of this writing, just five reviews and 51 fans.
It is possible that Leviev will fade into obscurity with the tide of viral content. But it’s unlikely – grifters will grift, attention begets attention, and there’s so many ways to parlay 15 minutes of fame into a life of hustling content for deals, cash and fans. It is a bleak comment on which avenues attention greases that while Leviev has signed with a veteran manager and is hustling his fame for money, the three women featured in the film – Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte – have started a GoFundMe to help pay off their debts from Leviev’s cons and offer a legit alternative to several fake fundraisers. “We don’t want more people getting defrauded,” the three wrote in their info section. “All we want are our lives back.” As of this writing, the page has raised about $193,000 of their roughly $800,000 goal. Since the documentary, a study emerged that found Americans lost more than $1bn in 2021 alone to “romance scams”.
This is not to blame the film-makers for spawning Leviev’s demi-celebrity. Leviev was still at large when Morris began the project, and the three victims – first Fjellhøy and Sjoholm, then Charlotte – were justifiably trying to spread the word as far as possible to protect other women. The film is much more about the experience of being conned, both emotionally and financially, than about Leviev; lots of true crime series get hung up on the question of why someone hurts someone else, but The Tinder Swindler thankfully just accepts Leviev as a pathological narcissist and liar, no explanation needed.
It’s just that the swift churn of attention to profit, regardless of what said subject has done and who has paid for it, is fatiguing. None of this is surprising, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth noting. With Netflix true crime hits, if you’re enjoying it, if you’re interested, then there’s likely a cost – if not the dark toll of fame, then someone unsavory profiting from it.
