The Footnote
History remembers the famous. It tends to lose the people in the margins — the swindlers, the hoaxers, the spectacular liars who, for a few months or a few years, mattered far more than they should have, and then didn't matter at all.
This is a show about them. Every episode digs one forgotten fraud out of the old newspapers — the ones nobody reads anymore, in archives nobody visits — and asks the question the courtroom usually skipped: not how did they pull it off, but who on earth fell for it, and why did they so badly want to?
I'm Wendell Marchant. I read the papers so you don't have to. The stories are true, the quotes are real, and the people are worse than you'd think.
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The Footnote
Latest Episodes
The Pigott Forgeries: How 'Hesitency' Sank a Scandal
The Times ran letters framing Ireland's biggest politician for murder. One misspelled word on the witness stand collapsed the whole thing inside a week. In 1887 a broke Dublin hack named Richard Pigott sold The Time...
Cassie Chadwick: Carnegie's Fake Daughter
She whispered she was Andrew Carnegie's secret daughter, waved a forged $2 million note, and Ohio's bankers were too polite to call and check. Elizabeth Bigley of Ontario reinvented herself as Cassie Chadwick a...
Lord Gordon-Gordon: The Erie Swindle That Almost Started a
A fake Scottish lord conned Jay Gould out of nearly a million in Erie stock, then Minnesota sent a posse over the Canadian border to grab him back. Horace Greeley vouched for him. Jay Gould handed him $40,000 as pocket-m...