As if being a freelancer weren’t hard enough, try being a freelancer chasing down invoice payments halfway around the world, after already getting conned into shelling out thousands of dollars in pursuit of your biggest Tinseltown dreams. That’s the reality that more than 500 people were put through—to varying levels of severity—in the grandiose scam chronicled by Hollywood Con Queen, the new three-episode docuseries dropping on Apple TV+ May 8.
What begins as a record of an impressively detailed swindle gnarls itself into a portrait of online deception, mirroring scandals big and large, from the Harvey Weinstein case to something as relatively niche as a recent scam by a disgraced RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant. Hollywood Con Queen is a quick binge that has everything fraud-obsessed viewers could want, as long as one of those things isn’t an overarching point. While the show is a blast to watch, it’s another instance of a docuseries spinning its wheels, needlessly bloating itself to keep its audience engaged. But even though the ending might leave something to be desired, the show’s journey there is compelling, thanks to some novel firsthand documentation and one egocentric enigma behind the whole thing.
If you’re familiar with the 2014 Sony hack and its subsequent info leaks—or if you’re a chronically online social media user, hypnotized by her wig at the Challengers premiere—the name Amy Pascal might ring a bell. Pascal is the former chairperson of Sony Pictures Entertainment whose name appeared several times in those leaked documents almost 10 years ago, mostly in an innocuous correspondence with Rooney Mara over a scrapped Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that still haunts me. In 2017, Pascal once again found herself inadvertently at the scene of a crime, when a fraud used Pascal’s name to impersonate the mogul and deceive freelance photographer and videographer Will Strathman. The fake version of Pascal repeatedly lured Strathman to Bali, at his expense, to photograph storyboards for an equally bogus project. It was a months-long process that ended only after Strathman’s father got in touch with Pascal’s people, who told him the harrowing truth: They had received numerous complaints of the same nature.
This crook, who would later be deemed the “Con Queen of Hollywood” by The Hollywood Reporter, didn’t just stop at Pascal, either. They also impersonated some of the entertainment industry’s other most powerful women, like Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, former CEO of 20th Century Fox Stacey Snider, and producer and entrepreneur Wendi Murdoch. For viewers who think they might be too savvy to fall for this con, there are a couple of ripples. The Con Queen was so well-researched—with intimate knowledge of each victim, their professions, and the people they were impersonating—that those being duped believed there was no way it could be a scam. But perhaps even scarier, the Con Queen was so skilled in impersonation that they had the feds, victims, and tycoons all believing that several women were behind it all.
In reality, all this maneuvering was being done by a single man: Hargobind Tahilramani, aka Harvey, aka Gavin. Tahilramani was hiding in plain sight, as an obnoxious food blogger and influencer who had alienated a good chunk of London restaurants on his insistent personality alone. The scams continued even as Tahilramani tried to put forth a squeaky-’weclean public image, and Hollywood Con Queen probes this dissonance throughout its latter two episodes.
Scott Johnson, investigative journalist, tracking down the Con Queen in Indonesia in Hollywood Con Queen.
Apple TV+The premiere episode is a masterclass in documentary scene-setting, complete with incredible evidence implicating Tahilramani in the form of recorded phone calls of him impersonating all of those Hollywood magnates. The only thing more exciting than finding out that one victim began to record their phone correspondence is finding out that multiple victims did. Together with shocking emails, texts, and requests, these calls are the hooks that Hollywood Con Queen sinks into its audience, keeping them coming back for the series’ next two installments.
The second and third episodes are slightly less persuasive but no less astonishing. Once the series gets into the lascivious murkiness of Tahilramani’s manipulation—which includes brief, graphic phone sex and requests for over-the-phone kisses that will make your stomach churn—it recalls Weinstein’s similarly abhorrent behavior. So, when it’s revealed that Tahilramani once cited Weinstein as an inspiration, the scammer’s motivations take on a frightening new clarity. “The money is an added benefit,” Scott Johnson, who wrote the Hollywood Reporter article, says in the series. “The satisfaction was had in their suffering.”
It’s Johnson who ultimately pursues Tahilramani in the show’s second half, tracking him through digital evidence all the way to Manchester, England. (It’s no surprise that an egomaniacal gay man could be traced to his location by an Instagram live video, but it is hysterical.) Once Johnson comes face to face with Tahilramani, Hollywood Con Queen becomes both unnerving and darkly comedic. Watching Tahilramani squirm, while also completely downplaying the extent of his crimes, is strangely amusing. But it’s the series’ third and final episode, which spends far too much time letting Tahilramani ramble, while Johnson and others speculate about what mental health conditions the scammer might be suffering from, where the show stumbles.
While it’s critical to deliver an evenly considered portrait of a scam, devoting so much time to Tahilramani’s meandering tangents about his love of movies, the entertainment industry, and his childhood threatens to make this grifter too sympathetic. Considering the number of people he scammed, traumatized, and stole from—a shocking monetary value was amassed, but I’ll leave that to the show to disclose—getting too close to Tahilramani risks extending an unneeded amount of empathy to someone who didn’t have the same concern for his victims. The middle of the final episode gets nowhere fast, and by the time Joker allegories start being made, it’s time for Hollywood Con Queen to pack it up.
The show’s conclusion isn’t completely satisfying, but no ending ever really is when hundreds of people have been defrauded out of money that they might never see again. Hollywood Con Queen would have done well to hammer that point down, instead of pontificating on Tahilramani’s motivations ad nauseam, especially when those questions have no answers. Still, the docuseries is an undeniably thrilling ride, one that provides a necessary cautionary tale to anyone who mistakenly thinks that being a freelancer is ever as simple as it may seem.
