NYC’s hipster grifter writes tell-all memoir of Brooklyn cons
A 37-year-old Brooklyn woman is coming clean about her shocking past after realizing she couldn’t run from the crimes she’d committed in her early 20s and the internet notoriety it brought her.
Kari Ferrell rose to fame in the late aughts as “the hipster grifter” after she swindled dozens of unsuspecting friends, boyfriends and one-night-stands out of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.
She was ultimately arrested for forgery and identity fraud, plead guilty and spent nearly a year in prison.
But, as she writes in new memoir, “You’ll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist” (St. Martin’s Press), even after serving time, she couldn’t escape her past.
“I never anticipated that I would be writing a book,” Ferrell told The Post over coffee in Bed-Stuy, where she lives now with her husband of 13 years, Elliot Ensor, and their rescue dog, Gertie. “I wanted to disappear into obscurity, just be a quote-unquote normal person who had a quote-unquote normal life.”
In her telling, she started living a life of duplicity at a young age, growing up in the Mormon faith.
Ferrell was born in South Korea in 1987 and adopted by a white family who eventually moved to Salt Lake City, Utah.
She struggled to fit in. “I faked being white, faked being a good Mormon girl, faked being straight,” she writes in the book, adding that the Mormon church gave her a “masterclass in the art of manipulation.”
“I saw just how gullible people are, and how they will believe anything and everything,” she told The Post.
She shoplifted as an adolescent, but when she was 19 or 20, she took her crimes to another level.
One day, she told a boyfriend that she was locked out of her bank account due to suspicious activity on her card. She asked if he would cash a check for her for $500. When the check bounced a couple days later, she feigned disbelief and promised she would get him the money back as soon as she figured out what was going on. The ruse worked. Soon, she was writing more and more friends bad checks to cash. She used the money to treat herself and her crew to concert tickets and lavish dinners at Benihana.
Eventually, the police came knocking. In 2008, she was arrested for forgery, identity fraud and three counts of issuing bad checks — all third-degree felonies. A sympathetic friend posted her bail, and Ferrell skipped town without paying him the $1,000 back.
She landed in New York City in summer of 2008 and, badly needing rent money, continued her grift.
She moved to Brooklyn and began targeting young men she met at bars and music venues in Williamsburg. She would scrawl a lewd note on a cocktail napkin, pass it to the unsuspecting dude — and fleece him.
Some of these conquests were “one and done” deals, she said. She’d pick them up, go home with them and then abscond with an iPod, Metrocard or some cash the morning after.
Some men, she extorted for more. She told them she couldn’t access her bank account and asked them to spot her a few hundred or thousand bucks until things got sorted out. If they began to suspect her — or tried to dump her — she told them she had terminal cancer, that she was pregnant.
In Spring 2009, she charmed her way into a job at the brash Vice magazine.
One of her coworkers Googled her name and saw she was wanted for forgery and identity fraud in Utah. The publication posted a public “memo” online from “The Department of Oopsies,” saying that they had discovered that one of their executive assistants was a fugitive. The New York Observer picked up the story and published a scandalous exposé on Ferrell, called “The Hipster Grifter.”
She soon became a New York media sensation. The gossip website Gawker published multiple stories a day about her — interviewing her “boyfriends” and posting tips about her latest sightings. Former conquests auctioned off her salacious notes on eBay. Nude photos of her were leaked online.
It was a key moment in time for a certain young subset of New York City. Ferrell’s story proved irresistible: a young, sexually liberated woman with a pixie haircut and large chest tattoo screwing her way through hipster Brooklyn.
After she went on the lam for a few weeks, authorities caught up with Ferrell in Philadelphia. After a month in jail there, she was extradited to Utah and charged with identity fraud and forgery.
Ferrell plead guilty and spent six more months in jail.
Once out, she struggled with bouts of homelessness and finding a good job.
Even after she met and married Ensor in 2011 and started using his last name, she couldn’t get away from her past. She was hired to do administrative work for various companies, only to be let go a few weeks in after HR inevitably found about her past.
She decided if she was ever going to move forward, she had to embrace her identity. Later this year she and a friend are launching a podcast called “The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done,” where guests talk about their biggest transgressions.
Ferrell, of course, will kick off the series with her own tale.
She said, “It took me years and hundreds of hours of therapy to come to terms with the fact that mine is an interesting story.”
