Early this year, millions were gobsmacked by Scamanda, Hulu’s true crime docuseries based on the wildly popular 2023 podcast of the same name. It exposed a Bay Area mom, Amanda Riley, who lied to her friends, church community and readers of her blog that she had suffered multiple, nearly fatal bouts of cancer — and bilked them out of thousands of dollars in donations and gifts.
While Riley served her prison term on a fraud conviction, Charlie Webster, the journalist and producer behind the Scamanda phenomenon, discovered another, much bolder conwoman whose scale of deception dwarfs Riley’s by several magnitudes: Candace Rivera, a single Utah mom and the subject of Webster’s shocking new podcast, “Unicorn Girl,” currently breaking records on Apple Podcasts. (Apple TV+ subscribers can binge all nine episodes at once; for non-subscribers, new episodes premiere every Monday, with the finale dropping October 7.)
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Similar to Riley, Rivera did lie about having stomach and then breast cancer, but that was just one of many, many falsehoods she perpetrated. Posing as a self-made girlboss entrepreneur with multiple businesses and a global philanthropist/humanitarian, Rivera manipulated not just friends and Salt Lake City’s elite, but international aid workers, the Department of Homeland Security, even an elite Black Ops team. She alleged that her now ex-husband was abusive, and that she had lost two twin girls in a car accident. Claiming to be a licensed nurse, she performed procedures and administered drugs to hundreds of sick, injured children in Ukraine and Uganda — all without any medical license of any kind. She lied and wildly exaggerated about rescuing orphans, refugees and sex trafficking victims around the world. She falsely claimed that she had clearance with the Department of Defense, had communicated with Hillary Clinton about an international operation, was an FBI agent, a member of the UN Task Force and had spent time in a Turkish prison.
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Secretly liquidating her husband’s 401K during their marriage without his consent to pay off her own debt, Rivera later embezzled charity money to live lavishly, with a sumptuous home, expensive cars and luxurious hotel stays overseas during humanitarian missions — all without paying rent or mortgage checks, Webster discovered.
On a more intimate level, Rivera coerced her female friends, most of them conservative Mormons or Christians, to take part in “boudoir shoots” in her home — harassing them to don lingerie or strip naked for sexualized photo sessions that left the women feeling violated. This was “all about power, control, exerting herself as this person who pushed boundaries all the time,” Charlie Webster told Us Weekly in a recent interview. Rivera was convicted on nine felony charges last October for fraud, forgery and theft of at least $2 million related to her anti-human-trafficking org, Exitus. (She was initially charged with a whopping 42 felonies.)
Webster was first tipped off about Rivera via, of all things, a women’s fan club / book group on Facebook for Christian author Jen Hatmaker.
“After Scamanda, I was so interested in messy, complex female friendships. I was really wanting to explore that, and then somebody told me about this woman,” Webster recalled. “She was part of this book group, and she said ‘There’s a woman in our book group, and I don’t think she’s right. I think she’s misleading people. I think she’s lying.” Like Riley, Rivera tended to really, really overshare about her challenging personal life, and “was using this book group like a personal diary.”
Before she knew it, Webster spent “a holiday weekend” poring through Rivera’s voluminous posts “so enthralled and engaged in everything she was writing about. It just seemed so extreme and so fantastical … I felt there was so much more.”
Sensing another mindblowing podcast in the making, Webster flew from her native U.K. to Utah “on a whim,” and discovered an entirely different perspective of Rivera from women who didn’t even know about the book group, but were even more enthralled by her — some of them helping her launch and run Exitus.
From there, Webster went to work unpacking Rivera’s elaborate fictions — from her alleged traumas to what she’d actually pulled off as a supposed businesswoman, activist and humanitarian who was “busy saving the world.” One example: She secured a free private plane charter, transporting a Black Ops Team to help extract refugees from Afghanistan … but she never got closer to the war zone than her luxury hotel room in Dubai, despite claiming otherwise.
“A lot of her lies are based in truth, but it was never enough,” Webster told Us. “She could never say ‘I helped rescue one child’ … That is not enough for her.” (Rivera once claimed that she rescued 1,000 children from Afghanistan.) “One was not enough, so everything had to be on a massive scale. She lied on such a self-aggrandizing scale.”
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While Rivera managed to dupe wealthy, powerful people and organizations, her primary targets were the vulnerable, many of whom unwittingly helped her pull off her scams. “Candace preys on people that were going through something, going through trauma … this woman was getting divorced, this man was getting divorced, this one’s going through a custody battle,” Webster said. Rivera also employed, housed, and later deceived a woman who was a survivor of pervasive childhood sexual abuse.
“There were so many victims really traumatized and hurt by her,” said Webster, who bonded with these women during the investigation and ensuing trial. “Some people I met still couldn’t quite understand what was going on, [they] couldn’t figure out what was real and what wasn’t.”
So, is she a sociopath? Rivera has never been diagnosed with any mental disorder. “Mental health wasn’t part of the case,” Webster says. “Her uncle said she was a pathological liar, and there have been conversations around her pathology. She definitely lacks empathy, she’s definitely got narcissistic traits. There’s a disconnection. I think she believes her own lies very much.”
“Everything she did was because [of] a savior complex — that she was more important than anybody, she was special, she could do anything. She said she was untouchable, she could get in any door.”
And, like an addict, the more epic Rivera’s bogus stunts became, the more attention and adulation she craved. “She said she was like Jesus to these people. She compared herself to Mother Teresa. She thought she was better than everyone else.”
Behind bars for almost a year now since her conviction, Rivera, who declined to speak with Webster, will find out the full length of her prison sentence this November. But she’s stayed busy in the meantime: During her confinement, she married another man she met via correspondence named Brad, and firmly maintains her innocence.
“Candace has not taken accountability for what she’s done. She’s saying to some people that it’s a conspiracy theory,” Webster warns. “She’s still lying in prison … She’s that calculated and very clever.”
