Pathological liars are having something of a moment in the media. The Anatomy of Lies wades through the dramatic traumas faked by Elisabeth Finch to further her career as a screenwriter, while in Good on Paper Iliza Shlesinger depicts the dark humor of a relationship with a pathological liar. Apple Cider Vinegar, based on investigative journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s The Woman Who Fooled the World, details the lies of Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson, whose career, built off of a false brain cancer diagnosis, left a trail of devastation. And in publishing, the scandal around the Salt Path is causing quite a stir.
But probably the best account I’ve found online is the six-and-a-half hour TikTok saga, Reesa Teesa’s “Who TF Did I Marry?” Watching it, I sympathized with her insistence upon its mammoth length, with her assertions to “remember this detail,” or that “this bit will be really important later.” It is only with an overwhelming mass of evidence that you can even approach reasonable doubt towards such a dense network of lies. She too felt the need to begin documenting her experience rigorously: her, through contemporaneous voice note diaries, which she began making on instinct; us, through an eventual 22,000 words of notes on memories, conversations, an urge to keep track of what was real that probably appears insane. Reesa Teesa snagged on her own doubts too, with a contrary doubt: “What if they aren’t lying?” Her assembly of the details of quotidian life over hours and hours holds the addictiveness and appeal of the finest poetry, because like metaphor, each simple fact hangs suspended, as you wait for its second, deeper significance to fall into place.
Much of what’s published in popular magazines and journals has been from the perspective of pathological liars themselves. These accounts provide an insight into their fierce internal torment, often with tragic circumstances at the source of their behavior: Joshua Hunt in The New York Times writes of his shame at growing up in poverty, while an anonymous writer for The Candidly describes learning these patterns of thinking and acting from a pathologically-lying parent. But where Hunt’s article is tragic, pitiable, and largely sympathetic—and I want to emphasize, this is all valid and correct—it is also valid and correct that the harm these people can wreak is, to quote Reesa Teesa, “depraved.” Yes, love the sinner—but hate the sin. Curtis and Hart’s study on pathological lying gets at the nub of the issue efficiently:
“The very fabric of human society and interpersonal exchanges hinges on an honesty assumption . . . If honesty was always in question, business transactions would grind to a halt, relationships would bog down in endless verifications of sentiments, and interpersonal bonds would strain under questions of loyalty.”
Lying is so inimical to the fabric of our society that even our legal systems struggle to ultimately bring justice to the truly wicked: Belle Gibson’s lies included claims that her wellness diet helped to cure her cancer, but she was (only?) fined 410,000 Australian dollars by Australia’s federal court in 2017 for unpaid charity donation promises. To this day she has failed to pay anything, nor has she faced any criminal charges.
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