Maddie Jonson is just your typical beautiful, caring, and compassionate woman looking for her Prince Charming—but actually, she’s a career criminal and sociopathic con artist who has a trail of ex-husbands and ex-wives in her past, spouses whose money she ran off with, never to be seen again. Quite the busy, multifaceted gal. The television show Imposters only ran for two seasons, yet it remains one of the best and most compelling television shows ever aired about sociopaths, and we miss it dearly. Here are three love lessons we learned from Imposters about sociopathic manipulators—and why we demand a third season.
They choose their “targets” or marks not because of just their vulnerabilities, but also their strengths.
When Ezra Bloom, freshly conned by Maddie his wife, opens her last video message to him, she says something quite telling. She tells Ezra that he has a great heart and is a good person—and that’s exactly why he became a target in the first place. Most targets of sociopaths are people who are loving, trusting, empathic, and willing to trust. In a relationship with healthy, empathic significant others, these qualities are beautiful ones to have. In a relationship with a sociopathic con artist? Not so much. Lesson learned: if you give your compassion and empathy and trust to the wrong person without building up an organic sense of trust over time where you observe the person’s character and behaviors long-term, it can and will be abused. As Maddie tells the “scorned ex-spouses” gang when they team up to confront her, “It’s my job, it’s what I do, and because you let me.” Quite the victim-blaming statement, but nonetheless, it tells you exactly the distorted manner a manipulative person thinks about the world. To a narcissistic or sociopathic con artist, the world is for the taking, and they have to make themselves believe the victims deserve it in some way for having the wool pulled over their eyes. Some even experience duping delight when they succeed.
Manipulators are shapeshifters and chameleons, future-fakers who will appear to give you everything you want just to get you hooked. Be wary of anyone who appears to be your Prince and Princess Charming, too good to be true, who seems to give you everything you’ve ever wanted.
Ava. Alice. Cece. Saffron. Will the real Maddie Jonson please stand up? Maddie dons many different identities and personas to get her victims hooked, much like real-life narcissists and psychopaths who love bomb their victims with flattery and false promises to get them invested for a hidden agenda. Unlike most real-life con artists, Maddie Jonson may not be a full-fledged psychopath—she seems to experience genuine remorse and is capable of falling of love, as she does authentically with the FBI agent who unbeknownst to her is tracking her, before he was ever a “mark.” She is more “sociopathic,” engaging in criminal activity because of being shaped by her environment. She was lured into the lifestyle of con artistry and learned how to manipulate others at a young age, shapeshifting into whatever people desired from her in order to manipulate people into a marriage just so she could exploit them. In the television show, this became a survival tactic as she herself is dominated by the leader of the con artist group she is a part of and is threatened by The Doctor and his right-hand woman, Lenny Cohen, to continue such a life without being able to create her own authentic life. She even has true feelings for some of her marks. In real life, however, full-fledged psychopathic manipulators are con artists who shapeshift because they truly lack empathy and remorse—they do not develop real connections with the people they harm, and weaponize love-bombing, future-faking, and take on different personas to dupe people.
The biggest con is the one of the heart. Being duped has just as much to do with the sense of betrayal and evil you experience, as much as it does about what was physically stolen from you. To avoid betrayal, you must stay loyal to yourself and your discernment of the red flags.
As Jules, Maddie’s ex-wife tells her, “You didn’t just steal our money, you took our dignity.” Even her fellow con artist Max, who appeared to love his partner Sally, betrays Sally in order to save his own life from the Doctor. This calls attention to the fact that it’s not always the nature of the con that harms the individual the most—it’s the sense of betrayal that lasts a lifetime as victims are blindsided by the person who love bombed and lured them into a scam. It’s the trauma bond that developed when a manipulator builds a connection with their victims, only to pull the rug under from beneath them. Whether it’s a financial scam or emotional con artistry, such actions can be deeply damaging to a person’s sense of self and their reality. If it looks too good to be true, it often is. Nevertheless, if you’ve been conned, it’s important to move into your healing and gain justice if you can. As the Imposters gang would say—always forward, never back.
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