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In 2016 Don Shipley and I helped a reporter from the Amarillo Globe-News realize he had been conned by a fake Navy SEAL.\u00a0 \u201cThe Hair\u201d flew out to Amarillo with a fellow SEAL and confronted the phony with the reporter. The reporter used a few quotes from me in the article and Don went back to Virginia to bust more phonies.<\/p>\n
A few days after the article ran, another reporter from New York contacted me after seeing my name. She had her own experience with a different phony SEAL and was looking for information. She told me an amazing story that I had sadly heard before. She met man. He amazed her with tales of his military adventures. She fell for him, but the relationship fell apart when she learned his story was full of lies.<\/p>\n
But there was something different about her story. Many of those con men prey on na\u00efve women, often single mothers, looking for a man to take care of them. That was not Abby Ellin.<\/p>\n
She was a successful reporter and freelance writer and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Also, the man in question was legitimately a successful physician in Beverly Hills when she met him. He did leave a lucrative practice to serve as a physician in the Naval Medical Corps. But according to Ellin, that wasn\u2019t enough for the man she calls, the Commander. \u00a0Ellin says between the true stories, he conducted a symphony of tall tales. \u00a0The stories came to an end when an NCIS agent contacted her with some questions about her former fianc\u00e9.<\/p>\n
Unlike other people who have contacted me, she was not seeking confirmation she had been duped. She knew exactly what happened. She was now writing a book about her experience and was looking for more information on the subject. Fast forward to 2019 and Abby Ellin\u2019s memoir, Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married, <\/em>hits bookshelves today.<\/p>\n The current issue of Marie Claire<\/em> magazine has an excerpt from the book.<\/p>\n