“Women should not go to prison”: fraud and Farah Damji

Essay here. Excerpt:

'The Uganda-born Asian confidence trickster Farah Damji caused a small sensation in England in 2006 when she absconded from prison and seemed at first to be taunting authorities by keeping in touch with them through a web log. As one-time editrix of a London lifestyle magazine, and a journalist with well-known national and regional papers, she had good media contacts. These got the tale of her exploits into the national news.

What was her public appeal? She had been personable when younger, and had lived in a luxurious style, reportedly owning houses in New York, Hampshire and Chelsea. But it was her apparent nerve that tickled those who wrote about her prison escapade. Her vividness inspirited a grey existence. She seemed to offer herself as some British-Indian Bonnie Parker or Butch Cassidy — a devil-may-care outlaw on the run from dull authority, and against overwhelming odds. In her case she looked like the one at ease with modern technology, while the clodhoppers of the law laboured sweatily to catch up.
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And Damji was no Robin Hood — a figure moved with the rage for equality; nor was she a person fighting for the profile of women or of Asians. She wanted stuff. She was a thief and con artist, whose sole beneficiary was herself.
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When it’s all boiled down it turns out that she was just another woman whose personal chemistry convinced her of her uniqueness in nature, that she alone was not subject to the demands of legality that oppress everyone else. Such females must have whatever their whims dictate for them. They need shoes, gems, the best hairdresser and most fashionable gynæcologist; must have Caribbean holidays and South Sea cruises. — All on tap through someone else’s plastic. Damji knew she was worth it because her body chemistry told her so. She shouldn’t have to work for those things, and it was an outrage that they existed without being immediately available to her. Why should she exert herself like every other mortal? She was a walking embodiment of the female conviction that a girl is a princess, one of nature’s privileged creatures, to whom the laws of physics, biology, economics, need not apply.
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That at last Damji protested too much and was locked up for her temerity, was a small, rare triumph for the principle of gender equality, and for the objectivity of the law. We cannot be wholly confident that her effrontery will not win out in the end. In 2007 she confessed that she was working on an autobiography — or at least trying to hawk the idea of such a work to any London publisher who’d listen. This would evidently be a book that was based on the premise that notoriety sells no less than quality. Here would be a volume that former lovers might not think of putting in their wives’ stockings at Christmas. Our civilisation’s new propensity to wink at fraud, to be amused at the worst that in human behaviour, might yet give Farah Damji — with the backing of female opinion — that social traction she craves. She hasn’t finished with us yet, and may yet use as stepping stones her numerous victims as she resumes her role of picaresque heroine. A plucky good-time girl in the tradition of Moll Flanders, surviving as best she might in an unfriendly world.'