The girl who earned the derisive nickname “Scamanda” by faking a protracted battle with terminal most cancers and elevating cash for herself might have Münchausen syndrome – a psychological dysfunction involving the feigning of sickness to win others’ nurturing, in line with prosecutors.
That discovering about Amanda C Riley – who pleaded responsible in a California federal courthouse in 2022 to defrauding greater than $100,000 from a whole bunch of donors – surfaced as prosecutors efficiently argued towards an effort by her authorized staff to safe an early launch from jail, as first reported lately by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Prosecutors maintained that Riley had continued fabricating maladies whereas serving the five-year sentence handed to her for the misdeeds documented exhaustively within the Lionsgate Sound podcast Scamanda.
Whereas attorneys for Riley have primarily contended that her illnesses are real this time, three medical doctors and a nurse who’ve handled her throughout her incarceration wrote of their notes that she seems to have factitious dysfunction, another identify for Münchausen. A fourth physician really identified her with it.
These medical opinions not solely satisfied federal choose Beth Labson Freeman to maintain Riley’s punishment the identical, citing persistent and “critical questions on her credibility”. In addition they provided compelling proof of a possible motive for the best way that – as Riley has acknowledged – she preyed on individuals’s kindness.
For seven years starting in 2012, Riley introduced herself as a lady battling – and almost dying from – Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She recounted her purported battle with the illness in a weblog in addition to on social media, the place she requested for cash to fund her supposed remedies.
The ex-Bay Space elementary college principal additionally shaved her head to persuade supporters chemotherapy had induced her hair to fall out. Moreover, she posted photos of herself at hospitals whereas falsifying medical information, prosecutors stated – and he or she pursued a civil harassment lawsuit towards the investigative journalist Nancy Moscatiello as she started unraveling Riley’s ruse.
Riley by no means had most cancers. Federal authorities finally filed prison expenses towards her, figuring out 349 individuals who gave her greater than $105,000.
After pleading responsible to wire fraud, she has been imprisoned at a federal lockup in Fort Value, Texas, to be nearer to the place she ultimately moved together with her two sons and her husband, who was not ensnared within the prison case pressed towards her by the federal Inner Income Service.
Throughout her first 18 months in jail, Riley logged two dozen emergency room visits, together with for complaints about chest pains, her coronary heart beating quickly and a minimize to her head. She was introduced repeatedly to the hospital by ambulance, and by April, her attorneys had filed papers portraying these journeys as causes to both finish her sentence solely or no less than scale back it by greater than a yr.
Riley’s attorneys stated their shopper might higher grapple with a variety of well being points – bronchial asthma, sleep terrors, hypotension and irregular heartbeat, amongst others – from out of custody.
But assistant US legal professional Michael Pitman countered that the medical professionals who handled Riley reported having caught her making an attempt to affect exams in order that the outcomes made her appear sick. Healthcare employees noticed her “holding her breath throughout an oxygen saturation check”, making an attempt “to control an infusion pump administering potassium to her”, and stressing her physique on goal to hurry up her coronary heart charge, Pitman wrote in courtroom information.
“Maybe not surprisingly, nonetheless, defendant’s medical information clarify that she doesn’t really undergo from any acute well being issues in any respect,” Pitman wrote, earlier than noting the opinion of varied medical professionals that Riley “exhibited signs of Münchausen syndrome”.
Freeman in the long run dominated that Riley’s purported well being issues didn’t warrant an early launch for a criminal offense that carried as much as 20 years in jail.
But Freeman made it a degree to elucidate how the “refrain of skepticism from the medical professionals treating” Riley made the choose conclude that the 39-year-old convicted fraudster was persevering with to “faux her illnesses”. And she or he additionally wrote that “the overwhelming stories of … feigning sickness” recommended it was seemingly Riley was sure to reoffend if launched early.
“The courtroom is happy that [five years] of imprisonment is the truthful and correct sentence at the moment,” Freeman wrote.
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