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After an unexpected scheduling delay this past fall, Scamanda, ABC’s four-part docuseries that takes on the most popular and talked-about podcast of 2023, finally premieres on Thursday, January 30.
The show brings to the screen the shocking true story of Amanda Riley, a charismatic wife and mom from an affluent Bay Area, California, community who elaborately faked a brutal, protracted cancer battle for money, in-kind gifts and sympathy from thousands of followers, including members of her megachurch.
Riley documented her supposed illness with photos and emotional passages on her personal blog, where she solicited donations in the form of cash and goods for medical treatment, gifts, trips, concerts, celebrity meet-and-greets (including one with LeAnn Rimes) and other perks. The blog would be her undoing: after investigative producer Nancy Moscatiello received an anonymous tip, she and authorities began poking at glaring holes in Riley’s story, and she was ultimately convicted of wire fraud in 2021. She’s now serving a five-year prison sentence.
But as listeners of the podcast and viewers of the show may notice, in retrospect, Riley’s scam seems a bit obvious, if not sloppy. In hospital photos we now know were staged, she appears glowing and healthy — not at all like someone undergoing chemotherapy or healing from surgery and other grueling cancer treatments. At one point on her blog, she claimed that an oncology doctor allowed her to self-administer clinical-trial chemo drugs at home in order to enjoy the holidays. When contacted, nationally renowned cancer centers where Riley said she was a patient had no records of her, the shows reveal. Similarly, charities that provided her money and/or services did not require documentation of her illness before paying her.
Why were so many people and institutions so easily fooled? “I don’t think she necessarily was your stereotype of a scam artist,” Charlie Webster, creator of the Scamanda podcast and a producer of the show, tells Us Weekly in an exclusive interview. “I don’t think these people were gullible or naive.”
“We don’t question people that have cancer and nor should we,” Webster says of Riley, who spoke of her alleged battle and spiritual faith to the congregation at her church, where during at least one service they threw literal cash at her feet. “She showed a miracle. She got cancer, but she was surviving. She’d collapse in church, wet herself in church, had an ambulance take her in church,” Webster recounts. “She stood on stage and offered people hope, which all of us in life need sometimes.”
“This was a woman in their community that was suffering that had two children. People rallied around to support her, and she was utterly convincing,” Webster adds. “Everything’s in hindsight. How would you have questioned that? You know you’d be the meanie, the horrible critical person in the back of the room.”
Webster, whose conversation with Riley herself is teased for a later episode of the show, also has complex feelings about her real-life protagonist’s motivations for the scam. “I’m 100 percent convinced it wasn’t for the money,” Webster argues. “I think it was an addiction. I looked at everything from an emotional, psychological, evidential [perspective]. She realized that this attention came — if you look at social media now, so many people crave ‘likes.’ They give us an endorphin boost. I think it was that on steroids, 10 times more. Even though she did harm people emotionally and financially, in that moment of time she did help people and created hope for people. It was very much about this validation, about people adoring her. She had this amazing group of people that saw her as this anointed one. They really did.”
As for Riley’s psychology and mental health struggles, including the possibility that she exhibits the traits of a narcissist or someone with Munchausen syndrome? “A lot of people have questioned me on why I didn’t mention Munchausen or mental health in the podcast; it’s mentioned briefly in the documentary,” she says. “The reason why I didn’t mention it and why I have been quite persistent on not going down that route is because, one, I feel like it minimizes victims’ experiences, and two, she’s not been diagnosed with anything.”
Scamanda premieres on ABC Thursday, January 30, at 9 p.m. ET. Episodes will stream the next day on Hulu.
