Netflix’s documentary The Tinder Swindler became the streaming platform’s latest must-see true crime story when it dropped at the start of February. But this compelling account of conman Simon Leviev’s manipulations is not just a cautionary tale about the dangers of online dating—according to clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula, it’s also a pretty effective case study of a narcissistic personality, and how people can become entangled in narcissistic relationships.
“This is actually Narcissism 101,” she says in a recent YouTube video, highlighting the love-bombing technique that Leviev used to garner women’s affection and trust, including saying that he would fly for an hour to meet one of them for coffee—an extravagant kind of gesture which Durvasula characterizes as typical of a grandiose narcissist which many people are socialized to see as romantic rather than impulsive and irresponsible.
“One of the ways this Tinder swindler was able to combine love-bombing strategies was he put himself out there as someone who might need to be rescued,” she continues. “That pulling for rescuing in the love-bombing phase creates more of a glue between two people. It really puts skin in the game.”
The climactic scenes of the film, in which Leviev sent a series of voice notes alternating between threatening and appeasing his target, captured something Durvasula sees in a lot of narcissistic relationships. “It wasn’t even the shady money stuff, it was how the anger escalated in him, and then it was really him taking off the mask,” she says, speculating that Leviev had become so confident in his scheme that he started to believe he wouldn’t get caught—but all it took was one woman calling out his gaslighting to lead to his downfall.
“One thing that jumped out at me was the sort of ‘too good to be true,’ and how people fall for that,” she says, pointing out that Leviev’s early victims didn’t ask any questions which might puncture the fairytale narrative they wanted to believe. However, she notes that it is important that the blame remains with Leviev, not these women, for the narcissistic abuse continuing.
“The responsible party here is this grifter guy, who had no problem shaking down people,” she says. “The fact is, the world continues to enable these people… The one thing we can set our clocks by is that narcissistic people will always find a new victim.”
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