The woman who earned the derisive nickname “Scamanda” by faking a prolonged fight with terminal cancer and raising money for herself may have Münchausen syndrome – a psychological disorder involving the feigning of illness to win others’ nurturing, according to prosecutors.
That finding about Amanda C Riley – who pleaded guilty in a California federal courthouse in 2021 to defrauding more than $100,000 from hundreds of donors – surfaced as prosecutors successfully argued against an effort by her legal team to secure an early release from prison, as first reported recently by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Prosecutors maintained that Riley had continued fabricating maladies while serving the five-year sentence handed to her in 2022 for the misdeeds documented exhaustively in the Lionsgate Sound podcast Scamanda.
While attorneys for Riley have essentially contended that her ailments are genuine this time, three doctors and a nurse who have treated her during her incarceration wrote in their notes that she appears to have factitious disorder, an alternative name for Münchausen. A fourth doctor actually diagnosed her with it.
Those medical opinions not only convinced federal judge Beth Labson Freeman to keep Riley’s punishment the same, citing persistent and “serious questions about her credibility”. They also offered compelling evidence of a potential motive for the way that – as Riley has acknowledged – she preyed on people’s kindness.
For seven years beginning in 2012, Riley presented herself as a woman battling – and nearly dying from – Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She recounted her purported fight with the sickness in a blog as well as on social media, where she asked for money to fund her supposed treatments.
The ex-Bay Area elementary school principal also shaved her head to convince supporters chemotherapy had caused her hair to fall out. Furthermore, she posted pictures of herself at hospitals while falsifying medical records, prosecutors said – and she pursued a civil harassment lawsuit against the investigative journalist Nancy Moscatiello as she began unraveling Riley’s ruse.
Riley never had cancer. Federal authorities ultimately filed criminal charges against her, identifying 349 people who gave her more than $105,000.
After pleading guilty to wire fraud, she has been imprisoned at a federal lockup in Fort Worth, Texas, to be closer to where she eventually moved with her two sons and her husband, who was not ensnared in the criminal case pressed against her by the federal Internal Revenue Service.
During her first 18 months in prison, Riley logged two dozen emergency room visits, including for complaints about chest pains, her heart beating rapidly and a cut to her head. She was brought repeatedly to the hospital by ambulance, and by April, her attorneys had filed papers portraying those trips as reasons to either end her sentence entirely or at least reduce it by more than a year.
Riley’s attorneys said their client could better grapple with a wide range of health issues – asthma, sleep terrors, hypotension and irregular heartbeat, among others – from out of custody.
Yet assistant US attorney Michael Pitman countered that the medical professionals who treated Riley reported having caught her trying to influence tests so that the results made her seem sick. Healthcare workers saw her “holding her breath during an oxygen saturation test”, attempting “to manipulate an infusion pump administering potassium to her”, and stressing her body on purpose to speed up her heart rate, Pitman wrote in court records.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, however, defendant’s medical records make clear that she does not actually suffer from any acute health problems at all,” Pitman wrote, before noting the opinion of various medical professionals that Riley “exhibited symptoms of Münchausen syndrome”.
Freeman in the end ruled that Riley’s purported health problems did not warrant an early release for a crime that carried up to 20 years in prison.
Yet Freeman made it a point to explain how the “chorus of skepticism from the medical professionals treating” Riley made the judge conclude that the 39-year-old convicted fraudster was continuing to “fake her ailments”. And she also wrote that “the overwhelming reports of … feigning illness” suggested it was likely Riley was bound to reoffend if released early.
“The court is satisfied that [five years] of imprisonment is the fair and proper sentence at this time,” Freeman wrote.
