Last week Lovefraud posted a new True Lovefraud Story about a con artist named Dennis SanSeverino. The creep pretended to be loving and rich long enough to convince his victim to trust him. Then he took her home and inheritance.
This story is a classic case of a sociopath targeting the vulnerable.
When the victim, Trish Rynn, met SanSeverino, she had just endured a difficult breakup with her boyfriend. In the months that they got to know each other—Rynn initially refused his many dinner invitations—he must have been listening intently as she chatted about her life. Rynn’s ex-husband was physically abusive. After the marriage ended, Rynn spent 10 years in court fighting child custody and child support battles. The strain sent her into clinical depression, from which she was just beginning to recover.
Rynn was vulnerable, and SanSeverino was attracted like a shark to blood in the water.
SanSeverino started taking Rynn’s money—under the guise of helping her, of course. When Rynn found herself in serious debt due to him, she slipped back into depression. That’s when SanSeverino took her house and the rest of her inheritance.
Sad stories made worse
Lovefraud has heard these truly sad stories over and over again: Grief-stricken people who have lost a spouse or a child, and then lose their insurance settlement to a sociopath. Disabled people who are targeted because they get a minimal subsidy from the government. People struggling to care for someone else—like children or elderly parents—who learn that the assistance promised by a sociopath makes their burdens worse.
And then there are the lonely. Anyone who is lonely for any reason is walking target for a sociopath.
Vigilance when vulnerable
It’s sad, really. When we have problems and need help, we want to be able to trust that offers of assistance are real. When we’re looking for companionship, we want to be able to believe that the person pursuing us is sincere.
But the truth is that when we’re vulnerable, we need to be especially vigilant. Sociopaths are predators, and wounded prey make for an easy kill.
Yep…. it happened that way with me… wife died.. had the insurance settlement… and then from nowhere she appeared.. beautiful beyond my dreams.. charming…and she was interested in ME….. she rode the wave with me for a year… I spent a ton of money on her.. thought she would always be there.. she made promises… she cried tears…. she pretty much said what I longed to hear…. then she was gone….. I got schooled in the ways of evil…. but it’s ok now… I learned from my mistakes, and thanks to this place.. I will see the red flags forever….. I became humbled…. forgave myself and her….. and now I’m a wiser guy for it all… I must admit… I had a lot of fun with her… but with a big price…. I’ll be ok.. and I know that not every woman is like that…. I’m not jaded….but hopeful…. bad things happen to good people, but also.. people will treat you like you let them….. it’s a fact.. but I am determined that I won’t let what she did to me and to my son ruin the rest of my life and my outlook about life… I know that it could have been so much worse…. yeah.. I wasted a couple of years of my life, and several thousands of dollars.. but in the end…. I come out ahead…. I am no longer vulnerable….my education took me along a road of heartache and betrayal…I’m smart and wise and for the first time in my life, I love myself enough to not feel the need to please someone else.. to try and make them happy, so they will be with me…. for now I know that it’s really about my heart, my mind, my charector… and if those things are not enough for you to want to be with me.. then by all means… take a hike. It all made me look within.. and to see the things in me that needed attending to….. the parts of me that gave her a license and a green light to manipulate…. I worked on fixing those things in me…..I believe that all of us here will arrive at the point, when we will look back and see the advancement of growth in ourselves that came from having the bad luck of running into a sociopathic person who took advantage of our vulnerbility… and our desire to have and give love to another.
Thanks. I dealt with the devil too. I’m trying to heal. It’s a long journey. I found this blog last week. Thank you, Ms. Andersen.
>It’s sad, really. When we have problems and need help, we want to be able to trust that offers of assistance are real. When we’re looking for companionship, we want to be able to believe that the person pursuing us is sincere.
my post keeps truncating and only keeping the quoted part 🙁
great article!
I foolishly thought the S was the love of my life…we’d had a really casual relationship, off and on, spanning several years and then one that was more real…until he poofed again. So when I wanted to reach out to him, I kept him on my group email list and one day I sent my blog.
BIG MISTAKE. When a few years passed and my life began to go through serious trials, he popped out of the woodwork again. Still blind to P and S ideas, I naively thought he really did love and miss me…not that he’d been gathering info on how to best seek and destroy.
I tend not to let other people in when it comes to problems in my personal life. I’ll talk about them, but never ask anyone to step-in and help. Consequently, it was a mighty lonely time as my parents became more and more incapacitated. His arrival seemed like a Godsend.
Too bad it was a Satansend and I had to toss it back on the return counter — but not before it damaged my trust and intuition levels. I WILL trust again. I will. There’s no legacy I want from that man, but the last thing I’d ever let him accomplish is to kill my trust in other people.
We have to believe in the goodness of life beyond the P/S. We saved ourselves for just that purpose!!
We ARE all trying to save ourselves! And I must say, although it is a long hard journey of recovery at least we are now on it. Because of the pain caused by My S it led me to this site, therapy, and back into school for distraction (and my BA). So I guess looking at the flip side of things he actually forced me to take a closer look inside myself. I am broken put not beyond repair. As I forge forward I am realizing that the rear view mirror is quite small compared to what I can see ahead of me. It is easier said then done and you do begin struggling, I still do. But I will, I know I will come out of this storm a stronger and even better person! He has not won and never will. I pray for the day that I no longer dwell on the questions in my head. And I can yell Victory is mine and I celebrate ME!
Yes, change06 — We ARE!! What you mention, leaping into other things to get away from the pain…weird, but in the strangest way after the Wolf (I’ll call him that – always did to his face, anyway, and Bad Man belongs to AlohaTraveler), I was always a better person. Not to give him credit. Just more to say that my own stubbornness drove me to improve my life, or reflect on what was wrong with me, what I needed to work on.
This may be the one silver-lining of interaction with Wolf and Weasel S types. When the fog lifts, or as it is lifting, we’re so struggling to find our footing and our selves that we come away much grown for the experience.
Not to say the experience is worth it. No way. Just to say we can create value from nearly any experience if we’re true to ourselves and incorporate events into useful learning devices.
This, along with loving others, empathy, vulnerability and trust, is another quality the S does not have, hates us for having and wants desperately to steal. How great is it that we not only OWN these qualities, but use them to heal ourselves after the S is out of the picture?
(I picture a bunch of S guys sitting around like frustrated Rumplestiltskins upon being called by their true names!! They can’t like it at all that we bounce back STRONGER….if nothing else drives any of us after the initial shock and trauma of an N/S experience, maybe this is a start….)
Ok, I believe this will be by far the most evil deed by a female sociopath. My soon to be ex-wife I caught cheating 4 months after the birth of my second son. For some reason, dont ask me why, I had a paternity test done. I just wanted to know, yes I know the paternity test seems like a mean thing to get done, and yes, I agree today that there was no need, so lets not go there. So anyway the results of the test, I found out my first son had none of my DNA, but the second son did.
Now you think that is bad, it gets better. My X had problems ovulating and was taking fertility medication. This means at some point we wanted children and we went to the doctors to see what the deal was. The doctor gave my wife medication and we went to work. The crazy thing is we had a schedule of what days during the month things needed to happen, yes a schedule when pregnancy was optimal or you could say in sociopath terms, we had a schedule when you probably should not cheat on your husband. So anyway the courts do not care how evil this really is, they are like so how does this prove she is an unfit parent. I can only respond with, first you have to prove to me that she is human, then I will prove that she is an unfit mother.
So my sociopath lied to everyone for 5 years, and yes she knew the entire time, but felt ok with that. So my perfectly innocent 5 year old boy who has done nothing to hurt anyone gets to one day be told that the dad in his life that is his dad and will be the only dad he knows, is not his bio father – Machiavellian is not good enough to describe the pure evil of a sociopath.
Hi Mongo,
Men and women alike do sick averse things to their children, that potentially run the risk of a child seeing their other parent in a negative light, when all along it was the sociopaths evilness. I will share a story.
When I was pregnant he urged me to get an abortion, then when I had my son he was over-joyed. “Every man wants to have a son” He promised to be there for me and his son. Then, we had no contact for nearly a year. He started to come around again shortly after my sons 1st birthday. At that time he criticized that my son was bow legged when he walked and insisted it wasn’t natural. He had been walking about 6 weeks at the time. He was appalled that I hadn’t potty trained him yet. He agreed to make time to see his son and be with him, but as it turned out would only come over in the evening before our son went to bed, and then, once he got the timing down, afterwards “Oh, I missed him?? Darn…”
As our son grew, he never took him on his own. Claiming that he was living with a bunch of men, with assorted bad habits, and that he much more enjoyed being with both of us. But I saw no quality time going on between father and son, as much as between mommy and daddy.
Around the time my son turned 3, I told his father that this wasn’t him being a parent. He had claimed he wanted this responsibility, but was not making any kind of an effort. We did not hear from him until 3 months later. I get a phone call from him, that he wanted to take his son for the weekend. It was what I wanted and I was glad – maybe I got through to him.
Visitation was inconsistant, but it was happening. His father had moved in with a woman (who turned out to be a sociopath herself, which just made things worse) and essentially, he was taking his son over there, to play with her 6-year old, and she was given the duty of caring for both of them. At the time, I didn’t know that that was what was going on. I honestly thought my son was spending quality time with his father.
Like I said, visitation was inconsistent at best. And after a discussion, he said he would take his son 3.5 days a week while I worked (he was jobless of course, and he was living off her while she was defrauding welfare and had several thousand in the bank from a slip an fall lawsuit scam at a local grocery store).
This arrangement only happened one time. She called my boss at work and said I had abandoned my son at her house, and that I was claiming that my child was her boyfriends son, and she wanted my boss to know what kind of person she had working for, that I was a person that would just abandon a child with basically a stranger.
Well, I knew nothing as to why this was happening. I was shocked, I cried, and picked my son up that day, with his father…and he came back to my house saying she was crazy, she was lazy, she didn’t have ambition like me, and she was jealous because of our tie, and she was trying to break it.
So he ends up going home to her, and things settled down for awhile, until I went to drop my now 4-year old off with him..at her house. She opens the door and screams, “This B! is always trying to dump her son off at my house.” So, I thought it was time we had a conversation.
Turned out, my ex had said that I was some girl he had met at a club and went home with…According to the story, I went home with everyone from the club…but that I had this baby and swore it was his. He said he feared for the little child’s life and upbringing, being with such a reckless woman as myself, and he was doing the good Christian thing, by making sure this boy had a consistent male role model, while I, his mother, ran wild in the world. Of course, she had only heard this story RIGHT before my sons 1st weekend visit when he was 3, BUT she had already known my sons father a year or so by that time, and he had told her that he had NO kids, when he actually had two. He had a daughter also, but the daughter was his spitting image…but our son….he was a blend of both of us genetically, and he could use those slight differences to his “advantage” whatever that was.
My sons father was playing both of us against the other, and I ended up getting a restraining order against him shortly thereafter. That gave me about a year or so of peace, but then the child support issues started and so on….
Anyhow, My sons father liked his contrived story so much, at one point, around the time our son was 14, he told me he couldn’t wait until his son was 18 so he could tell him what kind of mother his son really had. And then my ex told me he would tell him that lie, that he really didn’t know if he was his father or not – etc. It was apparent, he believed his own lie. I had dated him for 4 years before I got pregnant….but here he was, threatening to alienate my son from me as soon my son was of a legal age.
Well, by the time my son was 14, I had had enough of the sociopath. My son was abandoned, treated badly and disregarded. My son was told by one of his cousins from his father, the psychopath, promised the cousin his car (that was facing repossession until he found a new female to pay off the loan) that when he “replaced that car, which would be any day now,” my sons father promised the car to his nephew..not to his own child. It is the little things like that that destroys a persons self esteem. As we all know, our self esteems were ruined over time…they were chipped away from us, by the gaslighting, the ‘helpful’ suggestions, the harsh critisizims, the comparisons to other people, the cheating, the lying…..
I know parental alienation is wrong, when a parent is actively working to make that child into a functioning member of society and always has their best interest at heart. What is it when they are not working with the other parent, actively to achieve this goal? The child is now something to eventually be controlled? But that is when I started…not all at once, but as his maturity developed, and scenarios presented, characters or plot points in the media, opened the lines of communication….I made sure my son knew he was highly valued, and that his father was sociopathic. It is an illness, but it infects everyone the sociopath ‘bonds’ with. My sons mental health, self esteem and ability to value, empathize, and make logical conclusions – and above all, to trust his instincts at all times, was the most important thing. Like a deer eating in the tall shrub, he should run if he hears a twig snap, even if he can’t see a possible hunter. I had to be sure that is was conveyed rationally and without a hint of paranoia or that I was overly cynical. It is a fine fine line.
Mongo, I hope you provide a way to keep the lines of communication open with your 5 year old child, and the bond of love is as strong as if he was of your DNA. Perhaps a counselor who has worked with the courts and is familiar with this type of maternal deception can help guide you on the appropriate steps to take and how to honestly broach this information with the child as they develop, and not like the last minute alternative “Hey great, you are graduating from high school, oh and by the way, I am not your ACTUAL father”.
Also, remember that genetically, this child is more predisposed to developing the sociopathic character, especially when being primarily raised by a sociopathic female. Sad but true. My sons father was raised by a female sociopath, with no male role-models, except the male victims of his mothers, that circulated in and out of his childhood. Information regarding that is located somewhere in this site, I am sure Diane, Lianne or Dr.Steve can lead you to that information easily.
Good luck, and stay strong. Women are not self-destructive, manipulating, train wrecks. Your own mental health is important for your children, and with that, you can have a bonded, meaningful relationship.
Lastly, document, document, document…see a psychologist and get a good attorney. If it puts you into debt, it will be the best debt you ever paid, because it is selfless and done out of love. You can make this situation work so your life isn’t chaos.
Hi righteous woman,
Great advice, an NO, I have no intention of letting my son out of my life. I am currently fighting with every cent I have to get 50% custody, which for a male is an impossible task. I am fighting so hard to be around my son who will one day figure out I am not his bio dad, but my sociopath is trying to keep me away from him to punish me for something I had nothing to do with – What the hell”My bond with my first son is enormous and you’ll need more than a forklift driven by a sociopath to pry me away from him. I agree with your statements “remember that genetically, this child is more predisposed to developing the sociopathic character” Every visitation with my children I spend time teaching lessons of empathy. I don’t know if you can counter a genetic predisposition in this manner, but I will never give up trying.