The True Story Behind Apple TV+’s ‘Hollywood Con Queen’ Doc

The new documentary Hollywood Cheating Queenreleased May 8 on Apple, details a scam in which a man is believed to have impersonated several Hollywood executives and lured freelancers in the entertainment industry with fake projects and phone sex for more than a decade, from 2010 to 2020.

Hollywood Cheating Queen reveals how Hargobind Tahilramani caused at least 500 victims to lose around US$2 million, including makeup artists, chefs, martial artists, stuntmen and former military personnel who provided private security for high-net-worth individuals. The documentary series is based on reports by Scott Johnson, whose articles for The Hollywood Reporter since 2018, it has increased public awareness of the scam and prompted hundreds of victims to come forward. The show is also based on his 2023 book The Hollywood Con Artist: The Hunt for an Evil Genius.

O Hollywood Cheating Queen the filmmakers had a lot of evidence to work with: interviews with victims, email exchanges that victims saved with fake producers, and phone calls to the scammer that victims started recording when they realized things were getting suspicious. Nicoletta Kotsianas, a corporate investigator initially hired by Hollywood executive and former Sony Pictures director Amy Pascal, who was one of the people Tahilramani impersonated, said tracking email domains was like a game of whack-a-mole; every time she closed one, a new one appeared. Additionally, the scammer used different names for different people. Kotsianas spent six months analyzing what people called him in social media comments and comparing them with Indonesian name constructions before discovering that the impersonator must be Hargobind Tahilramani. In the documentary, he is better known as Harvey, his childhood nickname.

How “Hollywood Con Queen” worked

One of the reasons so many people have fallen for the scam for so long is that for self-employed people, it’s relatively normal to be called out of the blue with an opportunity. And the people thought to be behind the calls but who were actually being impersonated were easy to Google.

In 2017, filmmaker Will Strathmann received an email from someone he thought was Pascal, asking him to go to Indonesia to find characters to storyboard a pilot they could pitch to Netflix. As is common in the freelance industry to be reimbursed later, he didn’t think twice about footing the bill for the interpreters and travel costs. The person Strathmann thought was Pascal could never meet him in person – despite always calling him at 2am to talk business. The documentary features recordings of some of the most erratic calls. But he began to grow suspicious when he was asked to go to Indonesia and Bali, depleting his savings. Overall, he says, he lost $54,452.

Some of the victims fell for the scam during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. With productions at a standstill, the prospect of something underway gave freelancers hope. An actor who goes by the pseudonym John Taylor in the document said he thought he was paying for martial arts posture classes and to be able to appear in a film directed by Doug Liman, who makes a lot of action films. He received text messages with a list of films to watch and assignments to write character analysis essays for each of them. “I was bored and this was a weird, exciting thing happening in my life,” as he describes what it was like to do homework. “This served as a very welcome distraction.”

But the most disturbing part of the scam is the phone sex. One night, Taylor received a midnight phone call from someone claiming to be Barbara Ellison, ex-wife of Oracle mogul Larry Ellison. She must have a property with a gym where he could train and wanted to meet him. Next, Taylor was asked to pretend to lick her and then listen to the person orgasm over the phone. In what he thought was a network Skype meeting with Donna Langley, head of Universal Pictures, the fake executive asked him to kiss the camera, take off his clothes and touch himself (which he didn’t).

Confronting the “Con Queen”

It’s rare to watch a true crime documentary where the perpetrator is interviewed, so the most surprising part Hollywood Cheating Queen are the conversations Johnson recorded for his book with Harvey – a window into which his identity was exposed, but before his arrest in 2020. Johnson even had someone film him confronting Harvey in Manchester, after pretending he was in London on social media. Rather than avoiding Johnson, Harvey welcomed Zoom interviews and called him regularly.

“Imagine if something big happened to me after that,” Harvey told Johnson at one point. In a particularly revealing conversation, he recites his favorite movie characters, like Ursula, the villain in The Little MermaidMeryl Streep and all her different accents in Sofia’s Choiceand Glenn Close, who plays a con artist in Dangerous connections. “There’s only so much you can do as an actor, huh?” he told Johnson.

Of course, Harvey always wanted to be famous, always wanted to be a Hollywood writer or director, so these fake movie projects were his way of trying to bring that dream to life. Johnson tells TIME that it’s still an open question what exactly led him to deceive so many people, but says one theory is that it’s based on “resentment” over “his own failed attempts to become a big deal in Hollywood in a previous point. in his life.”

Harvey’s fate has not yet been determined. Since he was arrested in November 2020, he has remained in the UK. On June 6, 2023, a British judge ruled that he be extradited to the US where he could be put on trial for his crimes, which is why he is currently fighting extradition. Harvey is believed to be the only person impersonating Hollywood executives in this case; no other actors were associated with these schemes.

To avoid falling for these schemes, Kotsianas emphasizes that people should be suspicious if they receive constant calls, especially about urgent tasks. It’s important to pay attention to email domains and be able to call a person back, rather than always having to be called by a person. The “Hollywood Con Queen” scam “is a very extreme version of what is happening every day on the Internet for millions and millions of people involved in these scams,” as she puts it. “It could happen to anyone.”