A jailhouse interview with “Clark Rockefeller,” who authorities believe is really Christian Gerhartsreiter of Germany, will be broadcast Monday and Tuesday on NBC’s Today Show.
According to an article on MSNBC.com, the bogus Rockefeller now claims that his ex-wife knew he wasn’t really a Rockefeller, and used the name to advance her career. Still, he insists that he doesn’t remember if he is Christian Gerhartsreiter, and he grew up in New York City.
UPDATE 8/25/08 – See the first Today Show interview.
Rockefeller in the New York Times
I wonder if the Today Show interview will be as clueless as a story in today’s New York Times.
Plastered across the front of the Sunday Styles section was a half-page photo of Gerhartsreiter’s scruffy face, next to the headline, Ready-Made Rockefeller.
“What traits of background and character drove him to concoct his aristocratic aliases, which convinced some who met him, even as others were dubious?” asked the authors, Pam Belluck and Sara Rimer.
In an article that took up a full page and a half, they only came up with two answers:
• Gerhartsreiter’s lawyer, Stephen B. Hrones, said that because the guy is under 5 feet 5 inches tall, “he concocted ‘tall tales’ to build himself up.”
• And the good people of Cornish, New Hampshire, where Gerhartsreiter and his former wife, Sandra Boss, shared a home, speculated that he was hiding from his past, which might include the murder of a California couple.
Textbook psychopath
Reading the article, of course, I see all the signs of a textbook psychopath:
• The Times wrote that Gerhartsreiter had “impressive conversational knowledge of everything from physics to art to the stock market.” Psychopaths often claim to be experts in an impossible range of fields. My ex-husband, James Montgomery, literally told me that he knew everything.
• The Times wrote, “Among the autobiographical details he reportedly told various people at various times: his parents had been kidnapped in south America and he needed to pay ransom; he and his friends were ‘Star Trek’ groupies who conversed in Klingon, a private chef made four-course meals for his dogs; and he became a mute as a child for 10 years because he was distraught at the death of his parents in a car crash.” Can anyone say pathological liar?
• The Times wrote that in 1981, he married a woman in Wisconsin, “apparently to get a green card,” and then immediately disappeared. Using marriage to gain a benefit—now there’s a common Lovefraud theme.
• The Times wrote that, according to the guy who cut Gerhartsreiter’s hair, the con artist ingratiated himself with women at the Episcopal church, getting free meals and concert tickets in return. Have any of us dealt with a manipulative parasite?
• Finally, the Times described how, after Gerhartsreiter and Boss divorced, he showed up at a gallery party hosted by art dealer friends. “He was the life of the party that night, he really was,” the art dealer said. Charming, glib, grandiose—that’s how psychopaths reel people in.
But nowhere in the entire article did the authors mention psychopath, sociopath, or personality disorder. So the clueless media, in a case as blatant as the fake Rockefeller, again miss an opportunity to educate the public about these dangerous predators.
That made me feel crazy watching it! Seriously, what was the point of the interview?
bird- my guess is it’s a slow news week…
which is good for the world…but the world and certainly the truth would be better served by either showcasing these wacko’s AND labeling them (at the VERY least using narcissist/socio/anti-social verbiage) or ignoring them all together. These gratuitous interviews serve only the sociopath and further damage their victims.
I think they don’t label it … perhaps not consciously on purpose… but I think there’s a deliberateness to it.
That is, I think if you label it, it’s something quantifiable, that you can deal with rationally.
And that doesn’t make good SENSATION.
If you just put it out there as mysterious… it’s sensational. It’s scary. It’s something special. It’s tantalizing.
Trying to give people the uneasy feeling that this could be anyone at all – and there’d be no way to even suspect. And it’s just not the case.
I think of these 2 pieces from the book “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin DeBecker, that point out what I see wrong in media coverage about this sort of thing… and apparently I’m not the only one who’s bothered by it….
The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker
From Chapter 1 “In the Presence of Danger”
A television news show reports on a man who shot and killed his wife at her work. A restraining order had been served on him the same day as his divorce papers, coincidentally also his birthday. The news story tells of the man’s threats, of being fired from his job, of putting a gun to his wife’s head the week before the killing, of his stalking her. Even with all these facts, the reporter ends with: “Officials concede that no one could have predicted this would happen.”
That’s because we want to believe that people are infinitely complex, with millions of motivations and varieties of behaviour. It is not so. We want to believe that with all the possible combinations of human beings and human feelings, predicting violence is as difficult as picking the winning lottery ticket, yet it usually isn’t difficult at all. We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond our understanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it. We need feel no responsibility for failing to read signals if there are none to read. We can tell ourselves that violence just happens without warning, and usually to others, but in service of these comfortable myths, victims suffer and criminals prosper.
From Chapter 3 “The Academy of Prediction”
The blind eye, of course, will never recognize {the human predator}, which is why I devote this chapter and the next to removing the blinders, to revealing the truths and the myths about disguises someone might use to victimize you.
I’ll start with the hackneyed myth you’ll recognize from plenty of TV news reports: “Residents here describe the killer as a shy man who kept to himself. They say he was a quiet and cordial neighbor.”
Aren’t you tired of this? A more accurate and honest way for TV news to interpret the banal interviews they conduct with neighbors would be to report, “Neighbors didn’t know anything relevant.” Instead, news reporters present noninformation as if it is information.
It’s like muddy water, obscure, foul, possibly deep, possibly dangerous territory. Unless you have a known substance like a Ted Bundy, the wow factor of con artistry or domestic abuse is publically reaped and then it’s relegated to yesterday’s dirty laundry. No one wants to deal with it and most don’t even want to hear about it again. It’s still considered something only the “foolish” allow and it’s something that happens only to “others.”
Mental health professionals seem still to be taking samples instead of clarifying much of anything, seeming divisive and/or uninformed. But it also seems directives and public education must start there. The public must be trained to recognize and evaluate it before they can label it.
Until society recognizes and bears the heavier burden of this pathology instead of the victims, only then will we see change.
Benz
There are interesting similarities between what he says about his name and what is said about Reed. eg. wanting a new life. To me, he looks anxious during some of the questions. It is terrible that they let him get away with blaming poor Sandra for his choices. The attorney is a paid accomplice at this point, calluding with his twisted reality. He was the house husband? As if someone who makes it through life by conning can ever occupy a meaningful social role!
I haven’t seen the interview but as usual it is probably enabling the abuser rather than sympathetic to his victims.
I have a copy of ” The Gift of Fear” too. I couldn’t put it down and wish it was in every home. Maybe then people would be better educated and stop buying into the lies.
Swallow
I think they “want a new life” because they figure they’ve used up the one they most recently stole. You can only get so many miles out of a Dodge…or a lemon.
I think my “favorite” part was when he was asked about his accent…to which he replied something to the effect, “I doon’t ave an aK-cent.” Denial in the face of evidence is the socio trait I had the hardest part “understanding.”
And these slime-ball atty’s that defend these nutjobs?!?!? Do they ENCOURAGE them to go on tv or do they go with them because the socio’s ego won’t listen to legal advice? Drew Peterson’s atty is another piece of work.
Dr Leedom, I also had a sociopathic “house rat.” It was less embarassing telling people he was a sahd than “unemployable bum.” He made a mess of the house, emptied the bank accounts, slept with the babysitter, sexually abused one of my children and then wanted a divorce settlement, child support, and the house he’d put into foreclosure. I should have stocked up on D-Con instead of marriage vows. I wonder if he has one of those rodent/hamster wheels in his prison cell?
And what is WITH those glasses? Does he go to the same stylist as “the Donald”?
What REALLY bothered me about the interview is that he is at that stage where the mask has slipped. People see that interview and think he’s always that out of touch and halting sounding. When he was stacking up victims and patsy’s, he was glib, charming, and quite convincing. That guy in the interview wouldn’t be able to sell water in the desert. It is truly an unfair and slanted view of him- and again allows the victim to be painted as a foolish dolt. She didn’t fall for THAT guy!
D-con lol..so true. We had one of these kind of guys once. Ours was pretty harmless though, I don’t think he had a sociopathic bone in his body, and he wasn’t much of a liar. Thankfully. The only thing I remember about our house-rat was he once ate a whole batch of chocolate chip cookies with my daughter and they both got sick lol.
I am afraid the Today Show and the New York Times are making the problem of ignorance of sociopathy/psychopathy as pertains to con artists worse by not identifying behaviors like pathological lying, and adopting multiple “identites” as symptoms of sociopathy. People who read these stories become familiar with this kind of behavior and so tend to normalize it. The truth is that these behaviors do indicate an individual who is potentially dangerous on many different levels. Psychopathy indicates dangerousness.
The attorney says “I’m not a psychiatrist” then procedes to declare there is no evidence that his client is dangerous. Because the Today Show staff are also ignorant of sociopathy/psychopathy they allowed those statements to go unchallenged.
There is one news show that I would like to mention appears to attempt to use the terms we’re all familiar with: Nancy Grace on CNN. 8/10 est time. The show has been profiling the Casey/Caylee Anthony case for about a month now. If you aren’t familiar:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/
It took me all of 30 seconds of the first time I heard about this case to think, “sociopath.” Quickly- 3 yo daughter was “missing” for over a month before the grandmother (who appears to be a controlling, disordered chickie-poo in her own right. Not to mention an enabler) “found out” the child was missing and called 911. The child’s mother, Casey, appears to be unable to tell the truth, about anything. Casey also appears to be unbothered by her missing child- but is constantly smothering smiles at all the attention and complaining that all anyone cares about is the missing kid instead of being concerned about HER. She’s revolting. Truly.
Tonight, the reporter, filling in for Nancy this week, asked a psychologist about what is wrong with the tot’s mother, Casey. She’s been called anti-social, socio/psycho-path, narcissist, bi-polar and etc. The psychologist broke down the various terms by trait and suggested she felt Casey was socio/psycho.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the terminology used by the experts called upon by the show… probably one of the reasons I like the show. That, and Nancy likes to sneer and yell at criminal defense attorneys.