From lip-filler to funeral scams, the wildest accusations from the new book about George Santos

George Santos is the politician no one wants but that America probably deserves. And while that seems like a celebratory yas, slay, “embrace the villain edit” quip, it’s more just a (possibly cynical) reading of American pop culture and the post-Trump political landscape. At least that’s the tale that Mark Chiusano spins in The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.

If you don’t know the story, George Anthony Devolder Santos is the unlikely Brazilian-American Queens, New York-native that climbed his way up into the United States Congress. And this isn’t some historical narrative: Santos is sitting in Congress now under indictment after being elected to his post in 2022. (We should note that over the weekend, Santos himself predicted that he will soon be expelled from that governing body.) Shortly after winning his election, the narrative he spun to get there unraveled: He didn’t attend the colleges he said he attended. He absolutely was not on a league-leading volleyball team like he claimed. He, in fact, had been charged with using stolen checks in Brazil. He was actually a working drag queen (though not all that great) under the name Kitara Ravache a decade ago. He did not work in finance at any Wall Street firms. And as far as anyone can find, he is not the descendent of Ukrainian Jews that survived the Holocaust. And to be frank, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In The Fabulist, Chiusano, who previously covered Santos long before he reached national attention, writes about all of these tall tales and the myth that is George Santos. In just over 200 pages, he writes not only about the lies but Santos’s journey to his life of grift, the people he took advantage of, and the political and cultural landscape that made it possible for him to get so far. Here are three parts of the book we just can’t stop thinking about.

George Santos stole from his mother’s funeral fund

Throughout the book, Chiusano writes of Santos’s close relationship with his mother, Fatima Devolder. He loved her deeply and installed her as a leading figure in the lies he conjured up: according to his tales, she was a business woman and political donor who was sitting in her corner office on 9/11, experiencing that act of terrorism first hand. In reality, she cleaned homes for a living to help pay for the small apartment they shared with a rotating roster of roommates. But no matter how strong his love for his mother was, even she wasn’t above his gift of grift — even in death.

According to the book, after Fatima’s passing Santos was the beneficiary of money from the congregation of Saint Rita’s, a church his mother frequented. Parishioners hoped to help Santos bury his mother with dignity, offering to cover the expenses for her wake. But, once the cash was turned over to him, no one knows what happened to the undisclosed sum. “Yet a source familiar with the situation says the funeral home was never paid its debt, as of the spring of 2023,” Chiusano writes. “This was not chump change; similar mortuary workin 2016 used to cost in the $6,000 range and often higher.” But in the grand scheme of his conning, it was mere chump change to Santos.