Christopher Massimine is attempting to not lie.
He’s attempting to not lie when his spouse asks him whether or not he has sorted the recycling, or when his mother-in-law’s buddy Mary Ann asks whether or not he appreciated the baked appetizers she introduced over.
He’s attempting to not mislead his therapist, who has him on a routine of cognitive behavioral remedy to assist him cease mendacity. And he’s attempting to not mislead me, a reporter who has come to interview him about how a lifetime of mendacity caught up with him.
This effort started round 15 months in the past, when Mr. Massimine resigned from his job as managing director of the Pioneer Theater Firm in Salt Lake Metropolis after a neighborhood journalist reported that he had embellished his résumé with unfaithful claims.
The résumé, it turned out, was the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of a few years, he has since acknowledged, he lied prolifically and elaborately, generally with none discernible function.
He informed associates he had ascended Mount Everest from Tibet (he was truly in a lodge room in Cambodia) and attended Burning Man (on nearer examination, his images proved to have been taken in Queens.)
He informed journalists he was born in Italy. (New Jersey.) He informed college associates his birthday was in September. (Could.) He informed his spouse he was having an affair with Kourtney Kardashian. (Not true.)
When his binge of mendacity was uncovered, it left Mr. Massimine’s life in tatters, threatening his marriage and discrediting his early success on the planet of New York theater.
He spoke to The New York Instances to deal with what he described as a basic misunderstanding: These weren’t the lies of a calculating con artist, however of a mentally unwell one that couldn’t assist himself.
He’s not the primary to counsel that sure sorts of mendacity are a compulsion. In 1891, the German psychiatrist Anton Delbrück coined the time period pseudologia fantastica to explain a bunch of sufferers who, to impress others, concocted outlandish fabrications that solid them as heroes or victims.
That argument is superior in a brand new e-book by the psychologists Drew A. Curtis and Christian L. Hart, who suggest including a brand new prognosis, Pathological Mendacity, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Guide of Psychological Problems.
Psychiatry, they argue, has lengthy misidentified this subset of sufferers. Slightly than “darkish, exploitative, calculating monsters,” they argue, pathological liars are “usually affected by their very own habits and unable to vary on their very own.” These liars, the psychologists argue, may benefit from behavioral therapies which have labored with stuttering, nail-biting and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling dysfunction.
Simply earlier than his fabrications have been uncovered, Mr. Massimine checked right into a psychiatric hospital, the place he was recognized with a cluster B character dysfunction, a syndrome which may characteristic deception and attention-seeking. For most of the individuals near him, a prognosis made all of the distinction.
“He’s not only a liar, he has no management over this,” mentioned his spouse, Maggie, 37, who admitted that, at a number of factors, she had thought of submitting for divorce. “That basically was the turning level for me, once I had an understanding of it as an sickness.”
Since then, she has thrown herself into the challenge of serving to her husband get well. “It’s just like Tourette’s,” she mentioned. “You acknowledge that it’s their sickness that’s inflicting them to do that, and it may be just a little odd and uncomfortable, however you progress previous that.”
A name from Mount Everest
Maggie remembers, with painful readability, the day in 2018 when she realized the breadth and depth of her husband’s drawback.
“I’m in tibet,” his e mail mentioned. “Please don’t be mad.”
He had connected {a photograph} of two males, a Sherpa and a fair-haired alpinist, with Himalayan peaks looming within the background. He had managed to sneak into China with the assistance of sort Buddhist monks, who led him so far as Everest Camp 2, he informed her. “That is Tsomo,” he wrote. “He’s superior and if he involves the USA you’ll love him.”
Maggie stared on the image, which he had additionally posted on Fb; it didn’t make sense. Mr. Massimine, her husband of 5 years, had informed her he was on trip in Cambodia. He had not given himself time to acclimate to the elevation of Everest Base Camp; he had no mountaineering expertise; he didn’t have a Chinese language visa.
“At first, I assumed, Why is he posting this when it may get him killed?” she mentioned. “After which, the crazier his posts acquired, I used to be like, This isn’t actual. None of that is actual.”
That weekend, with assist from her buddy Vanessa, she started a “deep dive,” reviewing all of his Fb posts and e mail accounts. She found elaborate deceptions — voice impersonators, dummy e mail accounts, cast correspondences. She was terrified, she mentioned. “Who is that this individual?” she recollects considering. “Who did I marry?”
Mr. Massimine is tall, good-looking and wanting to please. He grew up on a cul-de-sac in Somerset, N.J., the one youngster of a nurse and an auditor. His aptitude for theater emerged early — at 10, he wrangled the members of his Cub Scout troop into performing “A Knight’s Story,” a play he wrote and scored. Household photographs present him in costume, a fair-haired boy with fangs, a knight’s armor, a watch patch.
The mendacity began early, too. He says it started within the second grade, when, nervous about bringing dwelling a B plus in math, he informed his dad and mom that he had been invited onto the stage in school to sing a duet with an actor from “The Lion King.”
Mendacity turned a “protection mechanism,” one thing he did to calm his anxiousness, often with out pausing to think about whether or not he could be believed. “It was simply one thing the place I form of pulled the set off and hoped for one of the best,” he mentioned.
In interviews, associates recalled this habits, which they described as “tall tales” or “elaborations” or “campfire tales.” It by no means appeared malicious, mentioned Jessica Hollan, 35, who was solid reverse him in a center college manufacturing of “A Midsummer Evening’s Dream.”
“It was extra similar to, you caught a minnow, after which it turned a swordfish,” she mentioned.
Nobody known as him out on it, mentioned Lauren Migliore, 34, who acquired to know him in school. She recalled him as a loyal, affectionate buddy however delicate and needy, “like just a little pet.” “I at all times thought it got here from a spot of insecurity,” she mentioned. “I by no means thought it was worthy of mentioning. It was an consideration factor.”
By the point he met Maggie, Mr. Massimine was a profitable theater producer with a bent to excessive workaholism. Co-workers recalled his pulling all-nighters as productions approached, generally forgetting to bathe or change garments.
This depth propelled him upward by the business; at 29, he was named chief government of the Nationwide Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the place he laid the groundwork for a runaway hit, a manufacturing of “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish.
However it hadn’t been good for the wedding. Now, Maggie understood that her husband’s work habits weren’t her solely drawback. They separated for a number of months. Then she softened — perhaps, she informed herself, he was mendacity as a result of she made him really feel insufficient — they usually acquired again collectively. He began remedy and went on an antidepressant remedy.
They spent months sifting by the whole lot he had ever informed her about his life, “simply determining reality from fiction,” she mentioned.
A small group of prolific liars
In 2010, when researchers from Michigan State College got down to calculate how usually Individuals lied, they discovered that the distribution was extraordinarily skewed.
Sixty % of respondents reported telling no lies in any respect within the previous 24 hours; one other 24 % reported telling one or two. However the general common was 1.65 as a result of, it turned out, a small group of individuals lied lots.
This “small group of prolific liars,” because the researchers termed it, constituted round 5.3 % of the inhabitants however informed half the reported lies, a mean of 15 per day. Some have been in professions, like retail or politics, that compelled them to lie. However others lied in a approach that had no clear rationale.
This was the group that Dr. Curtis and Dr. Hart. In contrast to earlier researchers, who had gathered knowledge from a legal inhabitants, the 2 psychologists set about discovering liars in most people, recruiting from on-line psychological well being boards. From this group — discovered “in mundane, on a regular basis corners of life,” as Dr. Hart put it — they pieced collectively a psychological profile.
These liars have been, as an entire, needy and longing for social approval. When their lies have been found, they misplaced associates or jobs, which was painful. One factor they didn’t have, for probably the most half, was legal historical past or authorized issues. Quite the opposite, many have been suffering from guilt and regret. “I do know my mendacity is poisonous, and I’m attempting to get assist,” one mentioned.
This profile didn’t line up with the same old psychiatric view of liars, who are sometimes recognized with Delinquent Persona Dysfunction, a bunch seen as manipulative and calculating. This misidentification, the authors argue, has led to a scarcity of analysis into therapies and a common pessimism that routine liars are able to change.
For Vironika Wilde, 34, a author whose first-person account is referenced within the e-book, it was doable to cease. She began mendacity as a teen, a “chubby immigrant lady who spoke with an accent,” hoping to win sympathy with over-the-top tales of a drive-by taking pictures or a fall from a roof. Over time, although, retaining monitor of the lies turned anxious and complex. And as she developed deeper relationships, associates started calling her bluff.
In her 20s, she stopped by imposing a inflexible self-discipline on herself, meticulously correcting herself each time she informed a lie. She regarded for brand new methods to obtain empathy, writing and performing poetry about traumatic experiences in her previous. Telling the reality felt good. “You continue to have these inner mechanisms saying one thing is off,” mentioned Ms. Wilde, who lives in Toronto. “That’s what makes it so relieving to cease. These pangs of guilt, they go away.”
However she was by no means in a position to coach different compulsive liars by the method. A number of approached her, however she couldn’t get previous a number of periods and was by no means satisfied that they have been prepared to vary. “I had the impression,” she mentioned, “that they have been attempting to keep away from damaging penalties.”
This was a typical remark amongst researchers who’ve hung out with prolific liars: That it was tough to construct functioning relationships.
“You may’t belief them, however you end up getting sucked into trusting them as a result of, in any other case, you possibly can’t speak to them,” mentioned Timothy R. Levine, a professor on the College of Alabama Birmingham who has revealed broadly on deception.
“As soon as you possibly can’t take individuals at their phrase, communication loses all its performance, and also you get caught on this horrible place,” he mentioned. “It places you on this untenable state of affairs.”
Backsliding
In October 2019, the 12 months after the Tibet lie fell aside, Mr. Massimine known as Maggie in a state of breathless pleasure. There was information: He had received a Humanitarian of the 12 months Award, from a bunch known as the Nationwide Performing Arts Motion Affiliation.
The couple had simply moved to Salt Lake Metropolis, the place he had been named managing director of the Pioneer Theater Firm on the College of Utah. Issues weren’t going effectively at work, the place, as he put it, “the individuals who have been purported to be listening to me weren’t listening to me.” As soon as once more, he discovered himself pulling all-nighters, lashing out at interruptions from Maggie, who was pregnant.
Aggrieved and uncooked, he reached for an outdated resolution. It was a deception that went past what he had executed previously, and he wanted Maggie to again him up. “I felt like, you realize, this was a really massive lie, and I need to be certain that I acquired everybody on board, in order that it feels prefer it’s an actual factor,” he mentioned.
Maggie was, frankly, doubtful. However then he flew to Washington for 2 days, coming again with a medal and photographs that appeared to indicate him at a White Home podium. “I used to be like, OK, I assume he actually did get this award,” she mentioned. “Like, he got here again, and he’s acquired an award.”
His new co-workers have been retaining nearer monitor. In his first month on the job, he requested colleagues to safe him a last-minute observer cross to a U.N. convention, then claimed that he had been a keynote presenter, mentioned Kirsten Park, then the theater’s director of selling. It appeared like an “monumental exaggeration,” however then once more, it was theater, she mentioned: “Everyone expects just a little little bit of fluff.”
She watched him giving interviews to reporters and describing a profession of dazzling breadth and achievement. When he introduced Ms. Park a information launch asserting his Humanitarian Award, she looked for the group, then the award, on-line, and located nothing.
“I completely thought it was a lie,” she mentioned, however hesitated to report her doubts to superiors. When he flew to Washington to gather the award on the college’s expense, she doubted herself. “Possibly the one worse factor than mendacity is accusing somebody of mendacity who hasn’t.”
Mr. Massimine’s habits turned more durable to disregard in 2021. He started posting amateurishly written articles — he now admits paying for them — that described him in much more grandiose phrases: He had been a vice chair of MENSA Worldwide, a guide to Aretha Franklin and a minority proprietor of a diamond firm. Even associates, watching from a distance, puzzled what was happening.
“I didn’t suppose half the stuff in it was actual,” recalled Jill Goldstein, who labored with Mr. Massimine on the Folksbiene.
Then all of it blew up. In a painful dialog with college officers, Mr. Massimine realized {that a} group of workers members from the theater had filed a grievance about him, alleging mismanagement and absenteeism, and {that a} reporter from the native FOX affiliate was making ready an exposé on his fabrications.
Trying again at this era, Mr. Massimine didn’t sound notably remorseful, however as a substitute indignant towards his co-workers: “The audacity that, you realize, these staff who’ve simply been preventing me and preventing and preventing and preventing and preventing. And I’ve been attempting to work with them as a result of I had no different selections.” That realization, he mentioned, “despatched me into a whole breakdown spiral.”
Maggie recollects today because the scariest she has ever lived by. She was so afraid he would harm himself, she mentioned, that she stood within the door when he used the bathroom. Lastly, she drove Mr. Massimine to the college hospital’s psychiatric institute, the place he checked in for the primary of three transient stays.
As soon as once more, she discovered herself at dwelling alone, reviewing 1000’s of her husband’s emails.
“I known as my greatest buddy, Vanessa, and I used to be similar to, ‘He did it once more,’” she mentioned.
A Smaller Life
Dr. Jordan W. Merrill, a psychiatrist who handled Mr. Massimine in Utah that 12 months, recalled him as exceptionally fragile through the weeks that adopted.
“There are occasions, as a psychiatrist, now we have sufferers the place we actually fear we’re going to get a cellphone name the subsequent morning that they’re useless,” he mentioned. “There was a interval that he was that individual.”
Mendacity had not beforehand been a spotlight of Mr. Massimine’s psychiatric remedy, however now, the medical doctors swung their consideration to it. Dr. Merrill described Mr. Massimine’s fabrications as “benign mendacity,” which functioned primarily as “a safety of his inner fragility.”
“It’s not looking for to take one thing from you, it’s about simply attempting to manage,” Dr. Merrill mentioned. “I don’t know in the event that they know they’re doing it. It turns into bolstered so many occasions that that is simply the way in which one navigates the world.”
For Maggie, the prognosis made all of the distinction. Mr. Massimine’s medical doctors, she recalled, “despatched me to psychology web sites and actually walked me by it so I may have a greater understanding.” As she got here to see his actions as signs of an sickness, her anger at him drained away.
The prognosis additionally mattered to his employer. Mr. Massimine negotiated a $175,000 settlement with the College of Utah by which neither get together acknowledged wrongdoing, in accordance with The Salt Lake Tribune, which acquired the settlement by a data request. Christopher Nelson, a college spokesman, confirmed Mr. Massimine’s resignation however declined to remark additional.
The Massimines bought their massive Victorian home in Salt Lake Metropolis and moved in with Maggie’s dad and mom in Queens.
Lately, Mr. Massimine meets weekly with a therapist, unpacking the moments when he felt a robust urge to manufacture. He says he quiets the urges by writing, posting usually on social media. When he finds himself on the sting of a bunch of individuals swapping tales, he steels himself, takes deep breaths and tries to remain silent.
Now that a while has handed, he and Maggie can chortle concerning the extra ridiculous episodes — “I known as my common supervisor and I used to be like, I can’t speak very lengthy, I’m on Mount Everest” — and that could be a reduction. The trouble of retaining monitor of lies had develop into a psychological pressure, “1,000,000 various things in my mind that didn’t must be there.”
“I need to change,” he mentioned. “I don’t need to be doing this for the remainder of my life. It’s taken a toll on my reminiscence. It’s taken a toll on my character.”
Lately, the Massimines closed on a modest three-bedroom home in Hamilton Seaside, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens overlooking Jamaica Bay. It’s a good distance from the world of theater and the life that they had envisioned once they went on their first date, at Sardi’s.
Maggie is OK with that. Given his drawback with fabrication, sending him again into the world of present enterprise could be “like telling an alcoholic to develop into a bartender.”
Early this month, as he watched their 20-month-old son, Bowie, kick a soccer ball throughout their slim again yard, Mr. Massimine appeared impossibly removed from that outdated world. He spoke, just a little wistfully, concerning the fictional Chris, the one he has needed to relinquish.
“There was this glorious character of me, and he did issues no one else may do,” he mentioned. “In some methods, I’m unhappy to see him go.”
‘Why would we count on any of this to be true?’
This fall, Mr. Massimine made his first tentative re-entry into the general public eye, publishing a column in Newsweek that tried to elucidate his mendacity.
“As a part of my prognosis, when I’m in psychological misery, I create fabrications to assist construct myself up, since that shallowness by itself doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “I compensated in the one approach I knew learn how to: I created my very own actuality, and ultimately that spilled into my work.”
The column, which ran below the headline “I Was Canceled, It Turned My Life Upside Down,” portrayed him as a sufferer of workplace politics and on-line trolls. Judging by the feedback written anonymously, it didn’t win him the sympathy of many readers.
“He made up and accepted a humanitarian award that DOES NOT EXIST,” one wrote. One other requested: “As a confirmed liar writing about the way you lied, why would we count on any of this to be true?”
Ms. Goldstein, a buddy, mentioned she admired Mr. Massimine for pushing the restrict of the sorts of psychological diseases which can be mentioned publicly.
“A few of them are nonetheless within the closet, and that is one in all them,” she mentioned. “Compulsive mendacity, that’s not one thing that’s out and open. That’s not acceptable. That’s thought of improper.”
Different associates have been much less forgiving. Ms. Park, who labored for Mr. Massimine in Utah, was one of many few former co-workers keen to touch upon the file.
“I’ve little doubt that Chris struggles with psychological well being,” she mentioned. “Practically everybody did in 2020. However mendacity continues to be a alternative. The urge to lie doesn’t imply you must. Furthermore, realizing this about your self, persevering with to lie after which not disclosing it is usually a alternative.”
She famous that he had secured a aggressive, well-paid place in Salt Lake Metropolis with a résumé that falsely claimed that he had a grasp’s diploma and that he was a two-time Tony Award nominee, amongst different issues.
“If it is a attribute of his sickness as he has mentioned, he has clearly been in a position to make use of it to his benefit to achieve status, place and pay,” she mentioned.
Even associates puzzled whether or not his public dialogue of his psychological sickness was disingenuous, a type of popularity administration. “A redemption arc,” as Ms. Hollan, his buddy from center college, put it.
“I would like him to get higher,” she mentioned. “I really like him to loss of life. However on the identical time I don’t know the way a lot of what he’s saying is definitely true.”
The prognosis is not going to resolve this drawback. For a lot of recorded historical past, mendacity has been counted among the many gravest of human acts.
This isn’t due to the injury executed by explicit lies, however due to what mendacity does to relationships. To rely on a liar units you on queasy, unsure floor, like placing weight on an ankle you realize is damaged. “You might be at all times hurting one other individual with that form of habits,” Ms. Wilde mentioned.
As I reported this text, Mr. Massimine often checked in with me to report his progress at avoiding lies, a streak that ultimately prolonged to 9 weeks. He felt good about sharing his story, reasoning, “If there are 100 individuals who suppose I’m stuffed with shit, however one individual it does assist, that’s sufficient.”
However on my final go to, when Mr. Massimine had stepped out for a stroll, Maggie sat with me on the kitchen counter and listed issues within the Newsweek column that she thought he had exaggerated to make himself look higher.
“Gildings,” she known as them, like saying he was doing “townwide building work” when he had truly helped his father-in-law dig a gap for a neighbor’s cesspool.
“I fear about his dialog along with his therapist,” she informed me. “I’m like, are you being trustworthy along with your therapist? Are you telling them the whole lot?”
She tries to maintain up with the whole lot he has been posting on social media, however she has a job, and he writes a lot. Maggie sounded drained.
“I’m not assured that he has completely stopped,” she mentioned. “I can clearly not watch him on a regular basis.”
Whereas we have been speaking, Mr. Massimine returned dwelling from his stroll and settled on the sofa, listening.
“I disagree,” he mentioned. “I feel I’ve been good.”
Rebecca Ritzel and Alain Delaqueriere contributed reporting.