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Of Real Estate Agents, Con Men and Other F-Boyz

Of Real Estate Agents, Con Men and Other F-Boyz

Moonchild Sanelly F-Boyz (2020)

“Run from F-Boyz!” urges South Africa’s pop princess Moonchild Sanelly. In her sharp-tongued, driving Kwaito track, she tells the tale of one particular fuck boy who proposes that he and the female narrator of the song go back to his house after an evening out – only for her to find out that the nice place he pulls up to is not his but a show house, because he is a real estate agent. Damn!

But that behavior is peanuts compared to Christophe Rocancourt, who truly deserves the gold medal of History’s Biggest Fuckboying Conman:

Born in France in the 1960s, he made his first million by selling a property in Paris he didn’t own. Then, he strove for bigger and brighter things than Europe could offer at the time and left for Hollywood, where he posed as a movie producer, an investor, Sophia Loren’s nephew and a former boxing champion.

And it worked: Although nothing ever came of his projects, Rocancourt talked Jean-Claude Van Damme into “producing his next movie,” planned to release a line of perfumes based on Michael Jackson’s songs, and was cast in a film alongside Naomi Campbell.

Things were also looking up romantically: In 1996, he married Playboy model Pia Reyes, and together they had a son named Zeus. Aww! Never mind that Rocancourt lived with another Playboy model for six months while he was already married. Haha.

In 2000, he was then finally arrested in New York state. But way before Alicia Keys told the world, Rocancourt already knew that “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”, so he made bail and then chose to make it in Canada next, where he posed as Grand Prix driver Michael van Hoven (yes, his wife Pia went with him).

Rocancourt continued conning and scamming north of the U.S. for quite a while, but he was eventually arrested and served a few years in prison in Canada and the U.S.. No worries, though: After his release in 2005, Rocancourt returned to his home country, married a former Miss France and had a daughter with her (this second child, most disappointingly, was not named after another Greek deity. Her name is Tess).

Although Rocancourt is not as present in the media as he once was, he still makes an appearance here and there: In 2014, for example, he was arrested because he was selling fake passports for extortionate sums of money. And in January of 2024, a movie about his life hit the screen: “Rocancourt, Le Film”, narrated by and most prominently featuring, yup, you guessed it, the man himself.

Gold medal, right?

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