Ashley Anne Kirilow

I am living in Toronto for the summer, where the press is going wild over a local case of sympathy-fraud:

Ashley Anne Kirilow, a 23-year-old Burlington native, admits she faked cancer, ran a bogus charity and collected thousands of dollars from hundreds of people. She shaved her head and eyebrows, plucked her eyelashes and starved herself to look like a chemotherapy patient.

... When I first saw this news case, I thought to myself (yes, rather cynically): there is no way that anyone other than a young, attractive, normative person could have pulled this off. If Kirilow had been—for example—fat, in her 30s, plain-looking and homeless, few would've given her the time of day. Much of Kirilow's success seems attributed to the fact that she easily roused pity with her little lost girl story and her brave smile. Kirilow embodied a version of white womanhood that we want to believe in (or at least we've been socially conditioned to embrace it): pretty, plucky, determined, and in need of rescue.

Kirilow is a prime example of a sympathy grifter: a grifter who uses racist/sexist/classist/etc beliefs in their favour, to get money, affection and attention, or to (literally) get away with murder.