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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Hollywood Con Queen

For seven years, Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani impersonated prominent female Hollywood executives to deceive film and television aspirants into believing that they were being offered significant career opportunities. Thinking they had spoken to figures such as the Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, contractors accepted jobs to work on major film projects in Indonesia. They financed their transportation and communicated with Tahilramani, who provided excuses as to why shoots faced repeated delays—and that’s just the beginning of it. Two million dollars and 500 victims later, Tahilramani was arrested in the U.K. in 2020. Today, he is fighting extradition and is the subject of a three-part docu-series produced by the team behind Fyre and Tiger King. In the show, the investigator Nicoletta Kotsianas and the reporter Scott Johnson retrace Tahilramani’s schemes, track him down, and set out to learn his story and motives. “Their sole purpose was psychological devastation,” Johnson says about the Con Queen. —Jeanne Malle

Photo courtesy of Franckreporter/Getty Images