ANNA MARCH: Nom de Plume

0:00You are listening to a bonus episode of The Opportunist, exclusively available on Cast Plus. This episode contains disturbing content. Please take care while listening.

0:19Back in 2002, Andrea Hickman was a receptionist at the Washington, D.C. public radio station, WAMU. And that's where she met Nancy Cruz. Everybody seemed to know Nancy Cruz and Nancy Cruz was the bomb. She was a development consultant for WAMU and she seemingly made quite a bit of money. So she decided she was going to start her own consulting firm to do these public auctions. Nancy left WAMU to start her own company and she offered Andrea a job. Development officer for her new fundraising company, Cruise and Partners. Cruise and Partners organized auctions for public radio stations across the U.S., and Andrea's job was to solicit donations.

1:05I'm very good at that, to be frank. I can call up a hotel and ask them for a weekend getaway in Hawaii, and they will generally give it to me. And at the start of it, I mean, we were meeting with new stations, and we were traveling all over the country and staying in wonderful hotels and having a ball and getting these wonderful donations. And everything was pretty hunky-dory for the first couple of months. Andrea admired Nancy Cruz, the way she had built this company from scratch. She felt lucky to have aligned herself with a powerful, successful woman, someone she could learn from, look up to.

1:45She was more of a friend than a boss. That was her sort of MO. She wanted to be everybody's friend. It's almost like she kind of took you under her wing and you thought, well, this woman's going to be able to teach me a lot because look how far she's gotten in life. Andrea's parents had previously given her$25 ,000, a generous gift to help their daughter get set up in the world, maybe used for a down payment on a house or to have around in the case of an emergency. But Andrea was so devoted to Nancy Cruz, so convinced that her company would become successful, that she decided to invest all$25 ,000 into Cruz and Partners.

2:22And for a while, the company seemed like they were doing really well. That is, until 2004. Andrea started hearing rumors that Cruz and Partners might not be able to make payroll. And then, despite the fact that she had excelled at her job, Andrea was fired. I was also, you know, basically the first to be fired from her company, despite the fact that I actually invested in her. What Andrea wouldn't find out until much later was that Crews and Partners had stopped issuing paychecks. They'd also stopped paying employees 401ks and insurance premiums. After she was fired, Andrea emailed Nancy about her investment in the company.

3:02Her reply was, NKMP is defunct and has no assets to speak of, no cash assets. And then you can now address my correspondence to me at my house, which is a beautiful townhouse in Georgetown. Andrea never got her money back. It turns out, Cruz and Partners was a fraudulent enterprise. Nancy Cruz did host auctions on behalf of radio stations across the country, selling prizes, raising money. But the radio stations never received the bulk of the money from those auctions. Judgments were filed against Cruz and Partners for$380 ,000 of missing funds. Most of that money was never paid back. She's just like brilliant almost, like wickedly brilliant that she can pull this kind of stuff off.

3:53That people, I guess you could say stupid as me, don't research her, you know. But it's hard to when she changes her name every however long. Nancy Cruz had done this type of thing before, just under a different name. She was learning how to shapeshift in and out of identities, and she was getting better at it all the time. Soon, she would take the literary world by storm. From Cast Media, this is The Opportunist. This is Anna March, nom de plume. A story told in one episode. I'm Hannah Smith.

4:43In 2015, there was a party on the rooftop of the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The bar was packed. It seemed like everyone in the L.A. literary scene showed up. But why they were all there was a little puzzling. The party was hosted by a newcomer to L.A., a woman named Anna March. Anna was bubbly and seemed to be well-connected, but very few guests actually knew who she was.

5:10Anna March:The whole point of this party was to announce that she was moving to Los Angeles. She was wearing a red and white polka dotted dress, a red dress with white polka dots, and she had pink hair at the time. This is Melissa Chadburn, a writer and reporter who attended that party. Anna March had only just moved to L.A., but the guest list to her welcome party was impressive. not just writers, but also editors from publishing houses. A guest who was there was Dan Smetanka, who was an editor at CounterPoint. And I think she was spending all day telling everybody that she had a lunch meeting with him and sort of projected this idea that perhaps there was a book deal underway with him.

5:55The party was fancy. It had a free open bar. But no one could really tell you what the party was for. And certainly, no one at the party knew that Anna March was actually Nancy Cruz, the same person who had scammed public radio stations 10 years before. Now, she was Anna March, an up-and-coming writer who had just moved to L.A. And she did write. She actually published an essay for the famous New York Times column Modern Love in 2014. It's called Finding My Own Rescuer. It's about her relationship with her boyfriend, Adam, who is in a wheelchair. She has since been criticized for using her boyfriend's disability for her own gain, because getting published in Modern Love gives you clout.

6:42Anna March:Really, this is sort of like the golden ticket, you know, to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, if you can get it to Modern Love. And so that was like, I think, really what earned her a lot of street cred, is that she had this piece in Modern Love. Anna started befriending writers in L.A.'s literary community, people who helped her get more embedded in the scene, people like Ashley Perez and Seth Fisher, both MFA graduates who were freelance writers at the time. Here's Ashley. She was just like, I really want to be a part of the literary community, and I hear you're someone to meet and know in the community.

7:19And Seth. She was somebody who had come into town and wanted to be a part of this community. and she appeared to have a lot of money. Anna March seemed to have it all. Money, connections, opportunities. She looked like the picture of success, a writer who was actually making money and getting published, something that both Ashley and Seth wanted to be. Anna was almost 50 at the time, and she acted almost like a benefactor to Ashley and Seth, who were in their 20s and 30s, struggling to make ends meet. Anna often took them out to dinner, her treat. We would go to Musso and Frank's, which is this amazing steak place in Hollywood, or we would go to get crabs and oysters or something that we as writers would ordinarily never be able to afford.

8:11And it was kind of fun. And, you know, we did hang out with her quite a lot. And she, you know, she was very supportive and warm. and she had great stories. Anna loved to go to a fancy dinner and regale people with tales of her busy life as a writer and her connections to big-name authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Roxanne Gay.

8:37Anna March:She's always name-dropping, always talking about other celebrities. She's told elaborate stories about being really close to Bob Dylan. She also liked to shower people with gifts. but why they were receiving these gifts, that was kind of unclear. She would send these boxes with these really expensive sausage and cheese and different things around the world. And it had like$200 worth of stuff, at least, in it. And the people who received it were all pretty famous and well-to-do already, you know. And they were always appreciative, but also kind of like, hmm, what's this for? Melissa Chadburn said that she was skeptical of Anna March.

9:23Maybe it was because of how Anna treated her boyfriend Adam, the one from the Modern Love piece. Melissa remembers Adam being at that Ace Hotel rooftop party, but he wasn't on the rooftop with all the other guests. He was downstairs greeting people.

9:38Anna March:And I will say that the most off-putting thing about the night, her boyfriend at the time, Adam was in the foyer and he was in a wheelchair. And he was just directing everyone to the elevator to go up to the party. but it was just kind of, he was the cruise ship director, basically. Like, he was just hanging out in the foyer, telling everybody where the party was at, and, like, directing people to the third or fourth floor. So it's part ableism, but also part just, like, let me have my boyfriend direct traffic downstairs while we all party upstairs. The whole display put a bad taste in Melissa's mouth.

10:22It made her wonder, was Anna using Adam? But she said overall she didn't really interact with Anna that much. That is, until she got a call from Anna out of the blue. Anna said Melissa had won an award. Melissa had no idea what Anna was talking about. Anna called it the Lulu Fund, a fund that Anna created to benefit underrepresented writers. The prize was$1 ,000.

10:48Anna March:It was supposed to support, you know, other writers who were marginalized in one way or another. There was a banquet and a ceremony. So she had this party at the Palm, and it was an auction where people could bid on items, and then she presented an award. Yet again, Anna garnered an impressive guest list, including the writer Cheryl Strayed. Melissa and a couple other writers of color were presented with awards. They were told they would be mailed checks for$1 ,000 later. And then shortly thereafter, a group of us got an email from her with a GoFundMe link attached, talking about how she needed some sort of surgery and she was having some medical complications and she was asking for money.

11:37Anna March:And so I reached out to her directly and I said, hey, if now is a bad time for you to give me this award, I understand. And she kind of was really brusque in her response. I'm like, how dare you insinuate that I don't know how to manage my money? Of course, you know, I keep all my funds separate for the Lulu fund, then I do my life and don't worry about it and I'll get it to you. And then from that point on, I think at least once a month, I would ask her for the$1 ,000 and some different life event would make it impossible for her to give it to me. The most bizarre part about this is that none of the writers applied for the Lulu Fund.

12:20Anna just told them that they won. Then she threw a huge party, invited important people, and positioned herself at the center of it all. As this benefactor who cared about equality in the literary world. Who cared about supporting marginalized writers. So why weren't these writers receiving the award money that Anna promised them?

12:44It turns out that Anna and Adam broke up in 2016. And Melissa later learned that Adam had been bankrolling Anna the whole time. He funded the Ace Hotel party, the fancy dinners, the gift baskets, the parties. And once they broke up, Anna left L.A. She moved east to Rehoboth Beach on the Delaware coast. At this point, Anna didn't need to be in L.A. because she had a new plan. She was hosting writing retreats all around the world. These retreats cost between$400 and$3 ,000. They were advertised as a chance to write in beautiful locations, learn from top-tier authors, and to hang out with Anna. One retreat was actually in Julia Child's house in the south of France.

13:30Anna posted about it on social media.

13:33Anna March:I was seeing images of her on Facebook at Julia Child's home, teaching a workshop or traveling and gallivanting around the world. And so I was just, I was like, how can she do those things and not give me my thousand dollars?

13:54While Melissa and the other Lulu Fund winners waited to receive the money Anna promised them, Anna continued to post on social media about the lavish writing retreats that she was hosting all across the world. The biggest appeal to young writers is the idea that maybe Anna could help them get published, which made sense because Anna was getting published. She wrote multiple articles for Salon.com. Her pieces were often provocative and political with clickbait titles. Here's a couple. My Shazam Boobs and Memo to Crotchety Feminists. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and we must embrace her. And then the 2016 U.S.

14:36presidential election happened. Donald Trump was elected, and Anna saw a brand new opportunity. And then she, in the wake of the election, launched a literary magazine called Roar. I don't know if y 'all have talked to other people about Roar. Anna decided to start an online feminist literary magazine called Roar, pushing the idea that she was an advocate, a trailblazing intersectional feminist who championed women and writers of color. But Roar's writers would soon discover that Anna was the furthest thing from an ally. When we were kids, summer meant freedom. As adults, it still does, thanks to Mint Mobile's summer sale.

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16:01Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. Anna started working on Roar magazine at the end of 2016. The first issue launched in early 2017 with the tagline Reflections on Revolution. Luthen Osman was one of Roar's many editors. Luthen told me that Anna's vision for Roar was unique in the literary magazine world because Anna specifically said she wanted to amplify writers of color and she promised to pay writers well and on time. You know, I can't speak for the motivations of other people, but I remember that there were so many submissions that were incredibly earnest, you know, that people were excited that they were not being treated like the things that they were interested in are taboo.

17:02They were not being censored. Anna wrote for the magazine as well. Anna's writing, like her personality, was often over the top. But there was an eager audience for it. Remember, this is post-Donald Trump election. It's the time of women's marches, crowds of people in pink hats. Readers wanted something like Roar. And to Lutton and to others, it appeared that Roar was Anna's version of activism. I just thought, well, here is maybe a very motivated white lady who is disturbed by some of the things that have been happening with the rise of Donald Trump and who wants to use, you know, whatever resources she has or money that she's come into to amplify other people's voices.

17:50Anna raised around$50 ,000 on GoFundMe in order to get the magazine off the ground. Levin also got the sense that Anna was independently wealthy. Some of it was just like, well, maybe she has a lot of money. And there did seem to be a decent amount of money coming in. She had presented herself as being willing and able to pay out some things from her personal wealth, I suppose. But even with the startup money and the enthusiasm from Roar's writers and editors, things quickly started to go wrong. Levin noticed that Anna was disorganized. Submissions started to pile up. No one was getting back to writers, which bothered Levin.

18:32When problems arose, Anna wouldn't address them. Instead, she would just send off an email with bizarre personal details. Oh, I just, I have a headache and I just need to, like, have a beach holiday, like, with my friends. or I need to prepare for this, like, Italy retreat, you know, and get, like, the cheeses and the cottage or whatever the heck that she had going on so that people can write their best nonfiction work. It just got, like, Young and the Restless zany. It just was, like, so strange. Ashley Perez noticed this as well. She said Anna's email communication stressed her out. Her emails were frantic, and Anna appeared to be perpetually in crisis.

19:15Health problems, breakups, pets dying, parents dying, her house being broken into. The list went on and on. Ashley believed Anna at first. But after a while, she suspected that Anna was hiding something. I think at that point I was a little weary because I was just like, why do these things keep happening to her? But it's not in me to question people having bad things happen to them. I don't want to question people when they say something bad is happening to them. Like, I just want to be like, oh, shit, I'm sorry, something bad is happening to you. Levin told me Anna's emails were full of strange punctuation, letters in all caps with lots of typos.

20:01She said merely looking at Anna's emails was anxiety inducing. They looked like they were typed out in this furious stream of consciousness. This is very annoying to read this like chaotic email that some of it is in bold, it's in different colors, it's disorganized. And then it could work on a sense of empathy too. It's like anybody who writes something like this, you know, they must not be very smart. Or they must not be very good at what it is that they're doing. And so maybe I should take it easy on them. And then there was the issue of writers getting paid. It was a founding principle of Roar that they paid their writers and they paid on time.

20:37But Luthen was starting to get notified by writers that they weren't getting paid for their articles. When she asked Anna about it, Anna was vague and blamed PayPal for the delays. And then, in the summer of 2017, Luthen's paychecks stopped coming through. She confronted Anna. I just was like, bro, you're not paying me, you're not paying other people, and we now have a problem with each other if you're, you know, not able to explain yourself. At one point, Anna told Lothan that she couldn't talk because she was busy buying a car. And then it was that she was busy buying a new phone. I'm not trying to have this back and forth with you.

21:15I was like, what are you, like P. Diddy or something? You're out here running around like Rehibeth Beach, like buying cars and shit. Do what you're supposed to do and reply to people's emails. And so it just got zanier and zanier like that. When Lothan did get a hold of Anna, she could never get a straight answer about why she and the other employees and writers were not being paid. Anna just continued to blame PayPal. So Levin called PayPal to get to the bottom of it. PayPal, whoever I'd spoken to there, was just like, I literally don't know what it is that you're talking about. There's not any reason in the world that money cannot be distributed around the world in seconds if it's actually in the account, period.

21:54And there would not be any reason short of somebody just doing serious fraud. After hearing this, Lothan had had enough. She knew that Anna was lying, and she demanded answers. I just asked her what it was that she was doing, and that if she had something shady going on, and that she was ripping off writers, especially, you know, predominantly writers of color, that I was going to drag her all over the internet. I was like, I'm obviously going to tell everybody if that's what it is that you have going on here, and it's not just that the typical thing of everybody gets paid late for their creative material, sadly.

22:29Even though Luthun confronted Anna, she said she didn't have a lot of recourse, something that Anna was probably aware of. There's not some kind of, like, oversight in these kinds of artistic and literary spaces. There's not some place where you can report this kind of thing to and they'll at least apply pressure or something like that. Thousands of dollars were now owed to Roar's writers and editors, people who were already struggling to make their living at writing. If Anna was really a champion of underrepresented voices, why wasn't she paying people for their work? And where was all the money going?

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23:41And I love the clothing. My long sleeve shirts still hold up after countless washes and they look great. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash opportunist. Get free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's quince.com slash opportunist. By 2017, Ashley and Seth's relationship with Anna March had taken a bit of a downturn because of Roar magazine. But they were still friends with her, and they said that it's important to remember that Anna could be a real cheerleader when she wanted to be, offering praise and encouragement for their writing.

24:25After all, Anna was getting published, and she told them soon they would be too. I think there was also a way that she just made you feel really good about yourself and not question these gifts, you know, like, oh, you deserve this, you do so much for the community, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of us are very exhausted. So to have someone come in and appreciate us really felt good. And then Anna announced that she was throwing a writer's retreat in Positano, Italy. She called up Ashley and offered Ashley a writer of color scholarship to attend the retreat for free. Ashley just had to buy the plane ticket.

25:05So that meant that I didn't have to pay the tuition for the, I had to pay to get there. But once we got there, everything was supposed to be included, like the lodging and food. So all I had to do was buy the plane ticket. Ashley was hoping that Seth could join her on the retreat. But at first, Seth figured it would be too expensive. But then Anna told him not to worry. She would offer Seth a deal so that he could also attend. $1 ,200 for two weeks on the Amalfi Coast, food, lodging, and rider workshops included. It was a steal. Ashley and Seth checked in with Anna before buying their non-refundable plane tickets.