You're listening to a Mother mea podcast. Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on from Mamma Maya. You're listening to No Filter. I'm mea Friedman and today I am bringing you an interview that I did a little while ago because there has been a big new update in this story and it remains one of the most fascinating true crime bizarre stories you have ever heard. It's about a woman called him out as a party, who keeps pretending to be
a child. She's a grown woman, and she keeps getting arrested. And this story, if you saw it in a movie or a TV show, you probably wouldn't even believe that it's true. But it is true, and there's an update. I'll be back at the end to tell you what it is. So she won't seek help, she doesn't want to get better.
Yeah, then the question arises, what do you do with someone like Samantha.
When you hear the words scammer, you probably think of one of those bloody, annoying text messages that you get, the ones that try and trick you into clicking on a link and handing over you bank details. Or maybe you think of catfishing, where people pretend to be someone else online to trick someone into falling in love with them and sending them money. But the common denominator is money though, right, that's our understanding of what a scammer wants.
But what you're about to hear is the story of a woman called Samantha as a Party and Dakota Johnson and Harper Heart and Aurora Hepburn and Emily as a Party and dozens of other names that she made up, along with forged documents, to trick people into into caring for her, worrying about her, giving her attention.
One of the first things she said to me when we spoke was, Oh, I'm so relieved you're a real person. I thought maybe you were a forwardster because there are so many fraudsters on these Facebook groups like you do you not?
Samantha is one of Australia's most prolific and determined scammers, but it's not money that she seems to want, and that doesn't mean that her twisted stories and extraordinarily elaborate schemes haven't devastated her victims. They have, and they include famous athletes, young couples, vulnerable teenagers, and even young children.
One of the scams Samantha returns to most regularly is passing herself off as a schoolgirl, even enrolling in schools again and again, despite being in her twenties and then in her thirties.
In her role, she looks about fourteen or fifteen.
She just looks colds and frail. She seems like a traumatized young person to me. Samantha has been charged more than one hundred times in Australia and has been jailed for several of her crimes, which have occurred all over the world. But she just can't stop.
Why would she do this? What is she hoping to gain from this?
Now?
I just think she's a great con woman.
She's really good at.
What she does.
For Mamma Maya. I'm mea Friedman. You're listening to no Filter. Sharon Davis is my guest today and as a Walkley Award winning investigative journalist, she spent the past couple of years working on a podcast about Samantha as a party called Finding Samantha. So did she find her?
Oh?
Yeah she did? And that's when things got even weirder. This isn't just a fascinating story. It's also about the power of one small, unassuming woman to successfully trick hundreds of really smart people again and again for almost twenty years in County. Here's Sharon Davis. Sharon, this story doesn't start in Dublin, but I would like to start with the General post Office and a little girl that was found wandering in the street in October of twenty thirteen.
This week there were reports that a teenage girl was found wandering in a dazed street on O'Connell Street in Dublin.
What happened on that day.
Well, on that day, as you say, there was this little girl looking sort of waiflike and disheveled outside the Dublin post Office and she looked kind of lost and forlorn and alone, and a police officer in the street saw her and became concerned about her welfare. Now, this is against a backdrop in Europe and in the UK and the Ireland where there was quite a lot of
sex picking teenaged bills going on at that time. I mean there still is, but that was when people were starting to become aware of it, and authorities were certainly starting to become aware of it, and so the police officer approached her and couldn't really get any answers out of her about why she was there. In fact, she didn't speak, She wouldn't spect. They didn't know whether she understood English.
Even she appeared pleasant or didn't communicate, didn't want to speak, no way contact.
She kept her hair down over her face.
So the police were concerned, and they contacted the station. The station said, well, we can't just leave her there. She may be in desperate trouble.
Did she seem distressed, Yes.
She seemed very distressed. So they contacted child welfare authorities who suggested that for her own safety, that she needed to be hostilepitalized while she was checked out as to what a health situation was, and while they also tried to ascertain who she was because she wasn't speaking.
When she was admitted to hospital, she continued to not speak, but she drew some pictures. What did she draw?
She was drawing planes, she was drawing stick figures, She was drawing I think at one point she drew a gun. They were all things that made the authorities concerned that what she was saying was that she had been sex trafficked. They were also concerned as to why she wasn't speaking, about whether she was so traumatized that she couldn't talk at all, or whether this was a language issue. I mean,
this was a real conundrum in front of them. They had this young girl who they believed was about thirteen or fourteen, not speaking, lying in a hospital, bear very thin, who showed lots of signs of trauma and distress. And so they were calling in different psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, health workers, child welfare workers to try and figure out what this story was about and who this young woman was.
On Toursday, the tenth of October, at approx. Be four fifteen pm, members of Renguarded Chicana discovered a young female on O'Connor Street in a distressed stage. She is described as being favored sex and haste, slim bill and having a long blonde hair. Do you recognize this girl?
How long until they decided to go public because I imagine revealing a photograph of her to the world to try and find out who she is was a big decision.
That was a huge decision, and it was a decision that actually required because they believed she was a minor. It required the court to be involved, so they actually had to go to the court to get permission to publish her photo, and that was many, many weeks after she was first found in the street in Dublin, so she was in hospital for at least four weeks or more while this discussion went on about how they would approach this and how they might in the end find
out who she was. And essentially why they wanted that photo was to try and release it to other police agencies around the world really to see if anyone could identify her before they went public. They didn't go public straight away with the photo. Even they did circulate it amongst police first of all around the world through Interpol.
And they had no luck. Inter poll knew nothing.
Well interestingly enough, they had no luck. But then what happened was they then circulated it publicly. This was all in a matter of a couple of days. But at the same time as they got a lead on this young woman from Ireland, there was also a police officer in Western Australia that contacted them and said I think I know who this girl is. So they had kind
of two sources for their information. One was a man who lived in Ireland, who had been a stepfather for a while and the mother and he had separated and he had gone back to Ireland because he was Irish by origin, but he lived with the family in Australia, and so he contacted the police and said, I know who this girl is. That's the daughter of my previous partner. And at the same time they had this Western Australian police officer contacting them saying I think I know who this girl is.
Because what they told the authorities in Dublin who were trying to find out who this little girl was, is that she wasn't a little girl. She was a twenty five year old woman called Samantha as a Party.
Ireland's mystery girl who was feared was the victim of sex trafficking and it turned out to be an Australian woman who's known to police and who is now on her way home.
Samantha as a Party was in fact a fraudster and had confections for fraud and Australia and this was her part of her mortus operande, and that fraud was something that she specialized in.
That's right. She wasn't thirteen or fourteen years old, and she wasn't a human sex trafficked victim. She was in fact a young as you say, twenty five year old, not so young, but certainly a young woman from Campbelltown in Sydney.
How did you get involved at this point?
Well, it's interesting because you know, I've been making radio programs and podcasts for a while, and I have to admit me that I've always been fascinated by scammers, like a lot of us are. A few years ago, I actually wanted to make a series, a general podcast series about scamming and the psychology behind it and why people
do it. And so I was collecting stories and this story emerged of this young woman just down the road from my Sydney in a city suburb who'd gone to school pretending to be a traumatized, down fourteen fifteen year old and she had been caught. But she'd been going to that school for a while and it was a school for troubled and disadvantaged kids.
How long had she been going to school.
Oh, she'd been there for more than a year.
Just going to school, taking.
Classes, taking classes, hanging around with other kids, pretending she was a literate. So she was getting special attention from social workers and literature teachers. She'd been found by a couple in the street in Auburn, outside of Sydney Western Suburbs.
They had taken her in and had decided that she needed their help, and they thought she was a young girl, and she told them she was on a US Witness protection program and that she was hiding from a situation where she'd been sexually abused, and they believed her, and they put her into this school in Marrickville, the School of Good Shepherd in Merrickville, the disadvantaged kids who had education issues, and she was there for a really long time.
But during the time she was there, what happened was the school needed to work out her identity. They needed some sort of bona fides. They asked for birth certificates, and a birth certificate wasn't forthcoming, And they also asked for medical records because she disappeared from school for a couple of months and they didn't know where she was.
Was she still living with his family with a couple.
She was living with his family. Her story was, you know, and the family story was that she hadn't been well and hadn't been able to attend school. And then they get a birth certificate, and you know, it later emerges that their certificate is fake, but it shows her as a US citizen called Harper Heart, and the school starts to kind of look at a little bit further because they're really worried that there's something that isn't quite right
about this. But this is all going on over a process of months, you know, months and months and months, and in the meantime, you know, Samantha is getting these resources and a lot of attention from some of the school teachers.
How old was she at this time?
This was only a few years ago. This was twenty and seventeen, so she was at the time about twenty seven.
Wow.
Yeah, she's good. She's really good at doing this stuff. She was drawing freckles on her face at that time, according to the police officer who eventually did the investigation into her at the school, detected Barren Power from Berwood Police Station.
When we arrested her, we noticed the freckles she had on her face, making it look like a little thirteen year old girl, were actually fake.
They're actually drawn on by her. They'll make up.
What was her response when she was arrested, She.
Knew who we were was like she could smell police.
She was very cool and calculated. She seemed very disciplined, showed no emotional response. I wouldn't cooperate with police, wouldn't answer any questions, and maintained her right to silence.
He was quite taken by how good she was at changing her identity. He called her a chameleon.
When was the first time that she came to the attention of authorities?
Okay, so in two thousand and seven she appeared in rock Hampton. As far as I know, that was the first time she attracted police attention. At that time. Her name, she said, was Lindsay Lana John Bennett, Coplan. It's interesting that her names often have some relationship with either movie stars or people of some notoriety, And at that time, I think that John Bennett case in the United States
was really known and popular. So she turns up in rock Hampton and she's charged with a couple of minor offenses, and those offenses were intentioned to defraud. She was using fake Medicare cards, so she'd obviously got them somewhere, and she'd also been picked up for shoplifting and a thing. But then she kind of flies under the radar for another couple of years, and to be quite honest, I think there's other stories about Samantha out there that still
haven't come to the surface. So she flies under the radar for a couple of years and then re emerges again in about two thousand eight ten in Brisbane and then she is Dakota Johnson. She wants to enroll in a school in Brisbane. Again. She gives a story about her uncle who has been sexually abusing her, and that she's run away. She was trapped on an island with her uncle. And she basically turns up at this school and wants to enroll, and the welfare authorities again become involved.
They become very concerned about her. They enleissed a number of social workers to help her. The social workers, of course, have to involve the police. You have to notify police when you've got a child who you expect is in danger in the same way that that had to happen in Dublin, So they contact the police. There is an investigation that started. It's found that she's not who she says she is, but again takes about a month. It
involves child protection authorities, it involves the police. It involves social workers, and she's charged with falsely representing herself with intention to defraud. She's again charged with a whole range of documents, having a whole range of other people's documents in her possession. You know, when she's picked up by the police, she refuses to give her name, her day to birth, so again the police have to go into quite a lot of investigation to find out who she
really is. So she was charged with that as well, but she got a sort of a wrap over the uncles and a fine.
Sharon. Usually, when you think about fraud, you think about or scammers, you think about someone trying to get money.
Yep, right.
And what's fascinating to me about this story and about Samantha is that most people spend their lives trying to get away from school.
Yeah, I know.
And she seems to spend her life trying to go back to school.
Yes, this was a woman that was ten years older than the person she was portraying to be going back wanting to go back to school. Most kids, you can't get them to go to school, let alone go back twice.
And this is something that keeps happening throughout her life, doesn't it.
It does, and I think it may have a relationship with her childhood. I think she had interrupted schooling when she was a child. I think school was particularly difficult for her. I think that she may have had some learning difficulties. She was certainly at one point in a section of the school which was for learning difficulties. When she was at Ed's High School in Campbelltown. People that knew her at school, some of the people that I spoke to were really scathing about her, and I thought
that was pretty awful. You know how school playgrounds can be really nasty, and if you're dealing with someone who's particularly vulnerable, that can have a real impact on someone. And I think at that time in her life she was very vulnerable, and I think she was also having some mental health issues. Certainly there were schisms in her family. Her mother and father had separated. It appears that she wasn't very settled as a child, that she was moved
around a lot to a lot of different schools. Now, I'm speaking as somebody who had that experience in my own life as a child, I was moved around a lot, and my family were not a happy family, and I know what that means. I know how that can kind of disconnect you in many ways and make you feel like you don't have a firm surface to sort of stand on to grow. So I sort of see that in her, and I see that in that history of her.
You know, when she kept going back to school as an adult pretending to be a child, did she befriend are the kids? Was she popular? Was she also just a bit of a misfit at school?
She did befriend the other kids. And we have had some correspondence with parents of those kids who are very angry about the fact that her school friends believed that they were dealing with someone their own age, and then they find out that she's in fact an adult and she's a fake, and that nothing that they've told them is true. So they're very angry about what that means
for their children. None of those kids have been willing to speak, and I kind of understand that there's a lot of traumatized people in the story, including Nothink Samantha, and so it's very difficult, and a lot of them are young, so it's very difficult for them to talk about their experience again, and a lot of them and their parents don't want them to have to relive it. I think the big thing that she did in those wool rules, she got a lot of attention from teachers.
She got a lot of extra attention and help. And maybe that's what she craved. Maybe that's what she craved at school. Maybe that's the basis of all of her scams, is some sort of feeling of being protected and looked after and loved and nurtured in a way that maybe didn't happen at school.
She turned up in Canada in twenty fourteen. She was twenty six by this time. What was her scam in Canada?
Oh, my goodness, this scam is so complicated. What'samantha does is she often sets up her scams as well, So there's quite a lot of pre planning and pre thought to a lot of her scams. So what she did was she rang the police and said that her sister Aura had gone missing, and that her sister and herself were part of a cult and they'd run away from the cult and their lives were in danger. And of course in the cult there was sex abuse and there
was all sorts of weird stuff going on. So she reports her sister as a missing person.
So she makes up a fake person to report herself, who was also fake to be missing.
Yep, exactly. It's complicated, isn't it. Sometimes this stuff does your head in.
Yeah, so this is.
All via phone. She rings police, and the police put an alert for this missing girl, and then two weeks later she walks into another police station and says she's the missing girl. Aurora, Aurora.
It was on September sixteenth of twenty fourteen that a young girl walked into the Alexandra Community Health Center, which is in downtown Calgary. She was complaining about nausea and vomiting that she'd.
Had a head injury.
She said her name was Aurora.
Hepburn again, she's hospitalized. There's a lot of hospitals that come into this story as well. The person in a hospital there is the focus of attention, aren't they. They're getting a lot of attention, a lot is happening around them, but they're the focus. So yeah, she's put into a hospital while the police do investigations. Her fingerprints are taken and by this time her fingerprints are on file and they figure out that she's in fact samanthas a party
Australian Samantha as a party, they detain her. She goes to jail there and they deport her from Canada.
Calgary Police Service of Chars and Australian Women with mischief after claiming she was underage victim of sex trafficking and exploitation. The woman told investigators she'd endured years of violent sexual abuse torture for several weeks. Investigators and healthcare workers spent countless hours working on the alleged victims to establish the extent of her abuse and provides services for her recovery.
But again, you know, she's basically spent thousands of dollars in state resources and in resources such as nurses, hospitals, care workers that probably would have been spent on somebody who really was a victim rather than somebody who's just playing a game.
So each time this happens overseas is she deported back to Australia in Ireland.
The first time she was accompanied back to Australia by Irish police, she didn't talk on the whole flight home. She capped up the ruse of being up, the ruse on the whole.
Victim of sex slavery.
When she arrived back in Australia, from Canada. She was actually arrested because she'd been traveling on passports, so the Australian authorities met her at the airport and arrested her. And she did sometime in jail in twenty fifteen because of traveling on false passports. So she has done a bit of jail time as well, but it doesn't seem to be a huge deterrment. She did jail time for the Merrickville Harper heart story as well, but it wasn't
a huge deterrent. She's done time in Melbourne. That's when Samantha's offending becomes even more serious. Somethink up.
Next, Sharon tells us what happens when Samantha made her way to Melbourne and the family that unknowingly became involved in yet another of her scams. This one was just devastating. Let's talk about Melbourne. What happened when she got there in twenty nineteen.
Well, she answered ads on all Pear sites. What I've found in the process of making this is that because childcare is so hard to come by, and there's a lot of busy women out there who really need to find a solution to their childcare issues, they often don't do enough due diligence on who they're bringing into their homes they're making part of their families. Now that was certainly the case with Samantha. Is that she answered ads
on an all pair site in Melbourne. But before she went to Melbourne, she'd also answered an AD on all peir site in Brisbane, so she'd been in Brisbane. So if we wind back a little bit, she'd been in Brisbane she answered an ad on or all pair site and she got picked up by the Jarvis family Jazzy Jarvis and Tom Jarvis and Tom is a famous bass before and so she had all paired for them and their daughter for about six months in Brisbane. They were
very happy with her. She works very well in families and she often has a great relationship with the kids that she's all hearing. We had no confounds at all quite a time.
Loved her.
They got on really well. We weren't.
She met our I met our family, she met our friends.
She was at.
Basketball games with fifteen thousand people and nobody suspected she was thirty one.
You know, she looked really really young and nobody suspected A theme.
Does she do it as herself under her own name. No, and does she give herself a backstory?
Oh, she gives herself a great backstory. She often comes from rich parents. There are often some of her parents are lawyers. They're often based in the US, or if they're Australian, they travel a lot, so they're often not living in the country at the time. She supprised photos. She has photos of her on yachts and all sorts of things. I think she's pretty good at manipulating social media.
Often the photos don't have full pictures of her face, so they could be her, but they couldn't be her as well.
She's got long blonde hair. It's not that hard.
Yeah, And she's good at stealing other photos of Facebook pages. We've now realized, you know that she's quite good at lifting pictures, Sharon.
This sort of marked a real shift, as you say, you know, going from portraying herself as a victim of abuse or sex trafficking to being a very privileged young woman who is there to take care of other people's children. So she's no longer pretending to be an abused child but a privileged woman. This is like quite a big shift, isn't it? Does it work better for her. Do you think she just ran out of that story.
Yeah, quite possibly, because by that stage she was starting to get a little more known, and there were fingerprints on file and maybe, you know, all of her stories are around being childlike. Maybe this was just another sort of step in the progression. Maybe at times she thought it was a bit harder to pretend that she was thirteen or fourteen. But I'm not so sure about that, because she then came back to Sydney later on and pretended to be a fifteen year old, so she still
gets away with that. I've seen Samantha. She's very young looking. You know, you can look at her and feel incredible empathy for her. You can feel like she's very young. She certainly doesn't look thirty three or thirty four, which she is now. She's very thin, she looks at times very very distress. It's very easy to kind of get drawn into that. But I do think that there was
something about with the or pairing. There is something about the fact that she was becoming more known, so she's got to sort of vary the story a little bit.
And as an O pair, you live in with a family.
Usually again you're a bit more of a focus.
Yeah, you take care of the children, but you're also a little bit of a child yourself, you know, in terms of you get your meals made and you get to live as part of the family. Yeah, in exchange for you know, doing some late housework off of looking after the children. So she lived with the Jervis's. They were happy for six months. Why did she leave?
Oh, she didn't leave. They had to move to Melbourne. And so what they said was they wanted to take her to Melbourne with them, and so she moved to Melbourne with them, and she was all pair for them. But then a few things started to happen in the Jarvis family that made Jazzy Jarvis a bit concerned about who this young woman was and what she might be
presenting herself as. In Melbourne, people rang Jazzy and said that they'd seen a woman with their child who wanted free things and had said that she was married to Tom Jarvis. And when they confronted Samantha about it, and again Samantha was amusing her name. She was harper Hermandez.
When they confronted her about it, she had some sort of fantastic story, but it didn't kind of ring true, and there were a series of incidents like that that started to make Jazzy Jarvis particularly a little bit unsure about who this young woman was in their home. The worst thing that happened, though, was that while she was actually living with the Jarvises, she was also running a
couple of other scams that they knew nothing about. So she would have holidays where she'd go and see her family, but what she was actually doing while she was supposedly going to see her family was running these other scams. So she had put a couple of ads up as a talent scout saying that she was looking for young teenage girls to appear in animations, and a couple of
young girls answered those ads. One was a girl in Sydney and another girl was a young girl in Melbourne, and she was meeting with those girls at separate times. This was a few months apart. She was a different name for each of those girls, and she worked for a different international talent agency. But she was meeting those girls and getting them to perform these kind of very bizarre tasks under the guise of auditions. So she would get them to go into say a Center Link office
and say that they'd been sex trafficked. She'd paint bruises on their faces. There were all sorts of strange things that she was getting them to do. She went by the name Maali to us.
She made me pretend that I had been going through like really bad mental health problems and that I needed to see a social worker, and she pretended to be my mom. So it was a bit like scary when I found out that I wasn't allowed to tell anybody about it. I was a little bit weirded out and ordered to tell my parents, but I wasn't allowed.
So it's almost like a form of moonshousens and munshausens by proxy.
Yeah, very strange where.
For attention you you fabricate. Usually it's a physical illness, but in this case it's almost a victimhood that she fabricates, either on herself and now on these other young girls.
Yeah. Well, very similar stories getting these young girls to play out, very similar stories to the ones that she had in fact played out when she was in Dublin and in Canada and in Queensland and in Western Australia.
And why do you think she did that? Is it to get the attention vicariously. Again, it wasn't a financial scam.
It is vicarious attention. But maybe it's also about power. Maybe it's also about getting some sort of enjoyment out of the scam in a way, getting some sort of thrill about the fact that you are able to trick people, that you're good at it. I think there's an element of that in Samantha that certainly as her scams have progressed.
Maybe they did start out this way, maybe they started as something to draw attention to herself, but I think as time has gone on, I think she does get some sort of pleasure or sense of power out of tricking people.
When did things escalate to the point that she was arrested for child's dealing.
Well, what happened in Melbourne was that Jazzy Jarvis let her goes I say, she'd had all of these sort of things occurring that made her uncomfortable, so she let her go as an all pair. At the same time, she's running this talent scout scam with these young girls.
Both of those young girls, I have to say now and did be traumatized, and so are their mothers and their parents because they feel like their children are really vulnerable and that they had some responsibility for that because they were taken in by her as well, and thought that what she was getting the kids to do were auditions. They were sort of pretty naive. They didn't really know
how these things went. One of the families did their due diligence and looked up this international talent agency and there was a person with the name and blah blah blah. So you know. Anyway, she gets dropped by the Jarvisism or pairs, so she answers another or pair site. She's employed by a family who are French and they've only recently arrived in the country and she's got the care of two young kids. I think one was one year old, the other one was three. She's there for a couple
of weeks. Things seem to be going okay. She asked the mom if she can take the kids on a picnic. The mom says fine, but thinks it's a picnic just down the road. She takes them to Bendigo, which is a long way. She's living in a stay in Melbourne that's two hours into a regional area. She takes these kids to Bendigo and as I was saying before, she
sets up scams well ahead. She goes into this mental health place in Bendigo with the kids, and she's also got another backpacker in Toe who speaks French with the kids. That she kind of advertised a job, some sort of data collection job that this backpacker had answered. So she's got her in Toe as well, who doesn't know that she's involved in this big scam. She's been sexually abused again by a relative and these kids a result of that, and the woman behind the counter recognizes it and calls
the police. As I say, she'd set this scam up well ahead. She'd had three months of contact with this used mental health service in Bendigo before she actually walked in there and did this, So this was planned. It was all pre planned.
And Sharon, is that the CCTV footage I've seen of her in a school uniform carrying a baby?
Yep, she had a school uniform which she also bought online some months earlier.
Because that's deeply unsettling. I mean, she does look like a schoolgirl and she's got this toddler toddling behind her, she's got a baby on her hip. It's like a private schoolgirl uniform. She's sort of got this hat and I think she claimed that she was pregnant at the time. This is a woman who's at this stage in what her late twenties, early.
Thirties, yeah, early thirties.
And so the police came, she was arrested.
Well, no, what happened was she figured out that something was up, so she actually took off, went into a local shopping center and tried to kind of disappear, but a police found her and was following her and actually called out Samantha, and she turned around, and so they arrested her. But the other disturbing thing about this is when she was arrested, she totally maintained her silence and
wouldn't tell them who the children belonged to. So it was only by sort of getting a hold of her phone and getting into the details of her phone that they actually figured out who the kids belonged to. So there was a period of a couple of hours, even after she had been arrested, where the police could not identify who the parents were. Oh my god, Now those
parents are like totally traumatized, as you would be. The mother of those kids no longer trusts anyone to mind her children that has had a huge financial aside from the psychological impact that it's had on that family, a huge financial impact on the family because the mum was a working mum and she doesn't want to do that anymore because she doesn't know who to trust.
She has that charisma of getting people to trust her straight away, and that's an art form, and she's getting people to invest in her, invest their time, invest their heart, invest their care in her. I'm not suppanted she betrays all of that.
What I really got from your podcast and from this story was it's easy to say it's a victimless crime because no one is physically harmed. There's no actual physical abuse in most cases, there's no large amounts of money stolen. It's all really playing with people's trust and people's emotions.
And in talking to some of these people, what did you discover that the legacy was because by now we're talking about she'd been involved in over one hundred scams, or she'd been charged over a hundred times by now, hadn't you.
Yeah, these are not victimless crimes. In some ways, these crimes are tougher than if she had a stolen money or you know, identity documents. These are crimes that play with your head. These are crimes that make you wonder who you can trust, who you can let into your life, make you question your own judgment about everything you know, and particularly with the kids and your pair stuff. They make you really question how you are as a parent.
Like, how could I have left my children?
How could I have put my kids in this sort of danger? What kind of parent am I? Am I actually fit to be a parent? I don't know whether you ever get over them.
Every time she was in front of a judge, what did the judges do? Because often the actual things she was charged with were not serious enough for a custodial sentence, or certainly not a long custodial sentence, and yet she's a menace to society.
Well, the judges are really concerned because they've got a young woman in front of them who has done these
same sorts of things over and over again. Some of the judges have been very angry about the fact that she continues to offend and have actually given her custodial sentences, But they're also sort of weighing up often the fact that she clearly has a background where she has had problems in her background, possible sexual abuse in her background, certainly mental health problems in her background.
Is that what her defense is each time she's charged, because she has to table a defense. What is her defense?
Well, it's not her defense because she never speaks in courtner She's always represented by a lawyer. When she appears in court, she rarely says a word. It's the same sort of approach that she has to police when she's arrested. She rarely says anything.
Why is that do you think?
Oh, I think it's clever. Other people do all the defending. I mean, she always pleads guilty. She doesn't plead not guilty. There was only one time where she did that, and she changed her plea fairly quickly.
What's the significance of that pleading guilty?
The significance is that the victims don't appear in the court. She never has to face her victims. Sometimes there'll be victim statements like they were in Melbourne, which is how I know how impacted those families were. But quite often she doesn't have to confront what she's done to these families. And she has lawyers, they're all legally lawyers. She never has her own lawyers, and they are always different lawyers, but they genuinely represent their client as somebody who has
a background with mental health issues. Jail clearly is in the deterrent. She's been in there a few times, She's come out and pretty much offended straight away. You can put mental health orders on her if she had to attend psychological counseling, etc. And that was mandatory, and if she broke that, she would be back before the court. Or she broke that within a matter of months. And so then the question arises, what do you do with someone like Samantha?
So she won't seek help, she doesn't want to get better?
Yeah, does she actually understand the extent of her problem? I think so? Why doesn't she seek help? I can't really understand that. My feeling is it's not easy being Samantha, and that I don't I think that that life would be a life that you would choose, if you could make choices. Maybe sometimes people grow out of this stuff. But she is now close to mid thirty in.
Your research and working on this case for such a long time on this story, does she have relationships, a romantic relationship something that she ever seeks out?
No?
Never, she told one of her psychiatrists in her report before the court that relationships don't mean anything to her and that she hasn't really ever had any relationships, and I don't think she's got a lot of friends either.
What about family.
Her family, at different times, particularly her father, has been it seems quite supportive of her, certainly when she was before the courts last year, when I was following her through a trial in front of picked in court, she was living with her father. But at various times she has told the courts that she's estranged from her family and doesn't really want anything to do with them. So it's kind of really hard to know what the truth
of the family situation is. Of course, in the making of the podcast, I reached out to a number of family members, but none of them wanted to speak.
This wasn't the end of my conversation with Sharon. We kept the microphones turned on for Mum and me as subscribers, because in the next part of this interview that's available now via the link in our show notes, we discuss how Sharon's life became unexpectedly and really weirdly entangled with this case and the impact that Samantha has had on Sharon personally. Here's a taste.
So she does her research, she works out people's vulnerabilities, she works out areas of connection. She does a lot of research, and she's clearly with me, had done research on me as well. So you know, when you get call from someone who's saying they've got documents you need to see about international corruption, and you've got experience and a profile as an investigative journalist that does those kinds of stories, well you're going to buy it. I'm an idea.
Remember, you can listen right now by clicking on the link in the show notes. This episode was produced by Cassie Merrett and Emmeline Gazillis. The executive producer of No Filter is Eliza Ratliff, with sound production by Madeline Joanna. I'm mea Friedman and thank you for having me in your ears. I told you that story was incredible and here are a couple of updates. Not long after this interview was recorded, Samantha was actually released from jail and
was immediately back to her old tricks. One of the first things she did was to reach out to our editorial team here at Mamma Mia under a fake name. We believe it was her, and claiming that she had new information about Samantha and it was not what everybody thought, and it was so clearly her. Anyway, we engage with her for a little while and then she sort of disappeared again. But she's been in the news this last couple of weeks because the serial scam artist, who is
now thirty five years old, she's been busted again. Despite these multiple jail terms, the deportations, and the long list of victims, some of which you just heard about then, many of whom have probably never come forward because they're too traumatized or too embarrassed. Yet again, Samantha as a party has been caught out in an elaborate fairy tale of her own making. Except it wasn't a fairy tale,
it was actually a nightmare. So just a few weeks after she was discussed on No Filter, Samantha, apart from reaching out to us, we think she did reach out to family violence support services in Melbourne Southeast and Northern s Burbs, claiming to be a seventeen year old victim of domestic violence at the hands of her abusive stepfather. Now she said she was from Belgium and that she needed housing and transport and clothing and the services because
this is what they do legitimate victims. They jumped in to support her. They gave her gift cards, public transport cards, and other financial and physical support to the tune of twenty thousand dollars. She then faked a pregnancy test, explaining to the workers in broken English because she was from Belgium. Remember, she told them that she was also the victim of sex trafficking. And this would actually turn out to be the combination of several other scams that she had on
the go at the same time. Because while she was faking her life to these incredible support services, who honestly it's just shocking that they were taken advantage of, she was not just pretending to be a Belgian sex trafficking victim. She was also posing as an eighteen year old Norwegian backpacker called Asta Hansen. And it was as Asta in
this persona that she made up. She convinced an unnamed Danish backpacker, a young woman, that she was working for the Hollywood Studio Village road Show and that she was being paid to record her travel diaries, and she would use yet another alias to pose as an employee from that company to convince the backpacker to join her on the road. This is how she does it. She creates these webs and all of these different personas to back
up the stories that she's invented. So she made the Danish woman sign a non disclosure form and as a condition of her employment of this Danish woman, she told her that she was required to pose as a party's sister as they stayed in low budget accommodation all around the country that was supposedly for this TV show. Now the low budget accommodation turned out to be women's refuges, again, taking beds and accommodation and resources from women who really
really needed it. And when the Danish backpacker became suspicious and raised her concerns, this woman was contacted by the village road show employee who was actually as we know Samantha as a party who said to the backpacker, you have to stay there to continue your employment. And it just got more and more complicated while they traveled around Queensland.
The victim, this Danish woman, tried to get away from her employment contract and her fake sister who was Samantha, but Samantha told her that the police were after them and they needed to travel to Melbourne where they would hide again. Doesn't this all sound familiar? And that's when the backpacker realized that her phone and her passport had
gone missing, so she was completely vulnerable. When they were in Melbourne, Samantha created a new identity and attempted to change her appearance, and this time she called herself Ocean Jones and she used a credit card that she'd taken out in another woman's name to get freckles tattooed on her face to also her appearance. This is where in Melbourne she contacted the Family Violent Support Services, telling them that she and her sister were being abused, and they
put them up in this emergency housing. Now, the teams of domestic violent staff, who are already working tirelessly to protect women who are actually victims of family violence, then
got a phone call from police. They believed that the girl in the care of this domestic violence refuge was serial connard of Samantha as a party, and in fact it was, and in court just a few weeks ago, the magistrate could not believe the extraordinary lengths that Samantha as a party went to to deceive the people around her, and the magistrate said, she's organized, cunning, and a repetitive offender.
And look, this is me speaking now. She's an absolute puzzle for the justice system to know what to do with because on one hand, she clearly has massive mental health issues, but on the other hand, she's able to execute these plans where she really harms other people psychologically, financially, emotionally. And we'll be watching this case and no doubt monitoring our inbox for further developments, of which we will keep you posted