The Great High School Imposter

May 2, 2018 2:50 PM

"Before putting the plot into motion, before the five-year masquerade, before the honors and the scholarships and the arrests and the deportation, before any of that, he rode into town on a Greyhound bus on a sleepy spring afternoon, marveling at how smooth the roads were all along the way. He'd come a great distance—5,000 miles from Nova Kakhovka to Harrisburg... The way he'd envisioned it, he would show up to the States and save some money and enroll in a university that very fall. But he'd assumed the local colleges would cost what they do in Ukraine, a couple thousand bucks a year. He couldn't believe that they were asking for 10, 20 times that amount. That was more than he could make working full-time. And if he had to work full-time, where did school fit in? The paradox left him cold. The impossible bind left him panicked. He was already so lonely—no friends, work all day—and for what? The summer was flying, he was expected to depart in September. By mid-July, he realized anxiously, he was rapidly running out of time."
posted by bookman117 (22 comments total)

This reminds me a lot of the trajectory of Tommy Wiseau, what we know of it. But Tommy made it out of whatever shady situation he found himself in.

I don’t quite know what to make of Artur, however. He’s the hero of the piece, and yet the girl is treated as a technicality. Still, I feel sorry for anyone that has to survive the system like this, as both criminal and victim.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:32 PM on May 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

Amazing how you can spot a scumball the second they open their mouth and the word "God" comes out.
posted by Scattercat at 4:06 PM on May 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

TL;DR version: another narcisstic young man is angry the world doesn't play by his rules despite the fact that he is waaayyy smarter than everyone around him.

Saved you a lot of time and you don't even have to read as far as I did, wondering all the time how empathetic to feel, only to find out that he was busted at age 22 for "touching" a 15-year-old girl.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Except for his novel alone, Daniel Riley seems completely uninterested in the notion of real human women as protagonists....or even significant characters.
posted by Miko at 4:07 PM on May 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

The more I look at how this is written up, the more reprehensible I find it. First, it seems quite clear that he didn't "touch" the girl, he had sex with her. Second, the writer implies that Samarin's own adoptive parents turned him in as a punishment for running away, when it seems instead that "Someone called Harrisburg police in December, concerned that an adult man in the United States illegally was attending high school and "having sexual relationships with female students". That could still be one of the parents, I suppose, but some of these stories mentioning their own checkered backgrounds don't make me think they'd be eager to bring themselves to the attention of police. At any rate, the sex charges, not terrorism, seems to have been what blew his cover.

For more enjoyable reading, here is the application easay he wrote for the newspapers "Best & Brightest" award.
posted by Miko at 4:28 PM on May 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

What I liked is the idea that Harrisburg is a dreamy Eden. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that there are actually a lot of good things about even the most forgettable places. There's a lot of other creepy stuff in the story, but that was a nice reminder.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:05 PM on May 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

he knows "that the police are not America, the government is not America."
I wish I believed this as much as Samarin does.
posted by dancestoblue at 5:36 PM on May 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

That's the downside of the Al Capone Effect: a certain class of the sorts of characters we've learned to regard as rollickingly entertaining antiheroes—the wildcat mavericks who play by their own rules, and so on—turn out, more often than not, to be predatory narcissistic sociopaths, and fractally awful people who cause harm on both grand and small scales. Because if you're entitled to have a grand adventure outwitting the dull flatfoots who enforce the rules, you can probably also rationalise cheating people out of their money, or serially seducing people for the variety/challenge, or other acts of harm.

In the past, people wouldn't have looked as closely at this story as now, and Samarin would have probably ended up being played in a Hollywood adaptation by Leonardo DiCaprio or someone, characterised as a likeable, puckish charmer, with the statutory-rape angle being minimised or otherwise swept under the carpet. (Case in point: the Revenge Of The Nerds film in which one character raping a woman by deception is a victory, Bill Murray's character in Ghostbusters being essentially a predatory narcissistic conman, or indeed glibly sociopathic heroes like Ferris Bueller.)

Hopefully now—after #MeToo, but also after glib, privileged narcissists from Julian Assange to Boris Johnson have been exposed for what they are—people are less likely to buy this sort of narrative uncritically. Well, we can hope.
posted by acb at 5:38 PM on May 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

Saved you a lot of time and you don't even have to read as far as I did ...

Gracias!
posted by octobersurprise at 6:22 PM on May 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don’t understand - I thought it was clear that the phrasing "touched the girl" was a figure of speech, it comes after this part which explains clearly that it was a sexual relationship:

More significantly, though, authorities began looking into a relationship he'd had with a fellow student at the high school, a relationship that would've been appropriate if he was who he said he was (a 17-year-old boy with a 15-year-old girl) but was wholly inappropriate—and severely illegal—given his true age, exactly five years older than he'd purported to be in school.

I didn’t see any implication in the article that the relationship was not consensual. Did I get this wrong? I’m confused.
posted by bitteschoen at 6:42 PM on May 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

How could the 15-year-old consent? Samarin wasn't who he said he was.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:53 PM on May 2, 2018 [12 favorites]

I thought it was clear that the phrasing "touched the girl"

Clear to whom?

which explains clearly that it was a sexual relationship

You know what explains it clearly? Writing something like "At the age of 22, he had sex with a 15-year-old girl."

I didn’t see any implication in the article that the relationship was not consensual

Oh please don't.
posted by Miko at 6:53 PM on May 2, 2018 [19 favorites]

Miko, I’m not sure what you were reading into my comment there or what your "don’t" refers to, but I was only referring to the implication as made in the article, not to the actual situation itself!
I mean of course the situation itself is objectionable, even if consensual the age difference makes it wrong - but thing is, I don’t personally see where the author is excusing it, or obfuscating it, on the contrary...

You know what explains it clearly? Writing something like "At the age of 22, he had sex with a 15-year-old girl."

Well, sure, yeah, fair enough, but isn’t that the same as "wholly inappropriate—and severely illegal—given his true age, exactly five years older than he'd purported to be"? I don’t see any ambiguity there - or am I being too naive?
posted by bitteschoen at 7:30 PM on May 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

isn’t that the same as

Nope. The lack of specificity minimizes it and leaves open to interpretation what is actually, factually not open to interpretation. Writing this way is weaselly, fudging issues of personal accountability, as if the simple and straightforward facts about his pursuit of a sexual relationship with a minor using a false identity are are not important. They are important. That may even be reasonably counted the worst of his misdeeds, in many eyes.

And it can't be consensual - a 15-year-old in PA is legally unable to consent with anyone over 19. The "oh please" is because I hope we don't go down the MRA/Romeo & Juliet argument over age of consent ever road again. We shouldn't because this is a case where consent was not even possible, for not one but two definite reasons.
posted by Miko at 8:27 PM on May 2, 2018 [13 favorites]

So what happened to the two who 'adopted him?'
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 9:30 PM on May 2, 2018

Miko - thanks for clarifying what you meant, I understand better and can see your point now. And no no no there was no intention on my part to start that specific argument. I just read the article engrossed by the story of the crazy deception and I didn’t get the same impression about the intentions of the author at a first read, but I do see your point now because indeed the statutory sexual assault charge is brought up a little too incidentally, and now that I think of it, you’re right, it might be the worst of his misdeeds. I’m sorry for the bad wording of my first comment on that.
posted by bitteschoen at 1:35 AM on May 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

So what happened to the two who 'adopted him?'

That was only addressed in the later part of the article, when the author went to Ukraine.

By then, Michael and Stephayne Potts had been convicted for their part in the plot. Michael received two years of probation and Stephayne received five months in federal prison and two years of probation, after pleading guilty to charges of Social Security fraud and harboring an illegal alien. (Stephayne's sentence was greater due to previous convictions for fraud and theft by deception.)

posted by Miss Cellania at 4:20 AM on May 3, 2018

I had sex with someone well over 19 (32) when I was 15. While I later regretted the choice (it was a choice) and he obviously had problems if he was seeking out 15 year olds, I don't know if I would want him to have gone to jail for it. Statutory rape laws have always struck me as being more about property protection than worried about the safety of young girls (as I was).

Obviously, this doesn't take into account the issue of deception. But if we care about the girl in question, then we need to also give her agency. We don't know how she felt about the deception or the true age difference. After it came out, she may have felt truly violated. Or maybe she didn't - and instead felt violated by all of the people rushing to her defence. We just don't know.

Also, I can say: the difference between 15 and 22 is a hell of a lot smaller than 15 and 32. From the age of 40, I can get very angry at the idea of a 22-year-old approaching my hypothetical-15-year-old-daughter. But at 15, my view was different.
posted by jb at 4:51 AM on May 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

I think the Potts' got off very lightly: not only did they enable Samarin's crimes, but they allegedly used him as slave labour.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:23 AM on May 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

I don't think giving her agency has anything to do with the fact of his choice to break the law.His age and his knowledge of the many other facts he concealed from her made his actions both deceptive and illegal. That's where my attention rests, and evaluating his choices and actions in light of the law doesn't have to rely at all on how she viewed the situation.

I'm not interested in touching on the broader issue of ages of consent. I'm sure all of us here have some kind of personal experience with relatively harmless or minimally harmful relationships between minors and much older people. At the same time, I'm sure we can all also easily think of exploitive and harmful ones, let alone those that involve trafficking, which these laws are very helpful in addressing. As part of their agency, women and girls have the power to advocate to change laws of consent if they believe there is a need, but unless and until such change is made, there are structures in place built not just on patriarchy, but on concerning, current, and significant precedent of harm.
posted by Miko at 5:31 AM on May 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

In the UK, undercover police infiltrated protest movements in the 70s and 80s, pretending to be activists. In some cases, they formed relationships with other activists, without divulging who they were, and in a few cases, children were born of these relationships.

The consent issues in the Samarin case, as well as encompassing statutory rape, would cover something similar to this.
posted by acb at 6:14 AM on May 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Obviously, this doesn't take into account the issue of deception. But if we care about the girl in question, then we need to also give her agency.

That's nonsense. You can care very much about a child and not think that a child has the mental capacity to meaningfully consent to certain acts.
posted by praemunire at 7:24 AM on May 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

At the very least, a 22-year-old should have understood that a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old, regardless of consent at the time, was inappropriate and morally reprehensible. That the article fails to acknowledge her perspective entirely robs her of agency more than any age-of-consent law.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:26 PM on May 3, 2018 [2 favorites]