Frederic Bourdin Goes Boy George

I ran across this article on Friday and was completely fascinated. I'm so lazy on the weekends (read, drunk) that I didn't get around posting it until today. I spent all weekend researching it, to find that Gawker's team of about 30 bloggers must also be lazy on the weekend (read, high and drunk) because they didn't get around to posting it until this morning. The summary of the article from the New Yorker (it's 14 pages, highly factual and a little difficult to follow due to the jumping back and forth between dates and real ages to purported ages) is this:

A crazy French-fucker with a really shitty childhood doesn't want to grow up so he travels all around Europe and finally America pretending to be a child just for the fuck of it (he didn't do it for a financial or sexual purposes). Even when he's like 30 years old. No one catches on. They call him the chameleon because after studying someone he can emulate everything about them. So much so he has no personality of his own. It reminded me a lot of the story in Perfume without all the killing and shit.

Hard to find (current) video of him and his wife after the jump... [EDITOR'S NOTE: VIDEO REMOVED, STILL HAVE SCREENSHOT AND VIDEO OF BOURDIN IMPRESSION OF A CRAZY MAN]



So he keeps pretending. A typical set-up would involve him stumbling into a town, he spoke like 4 languages, and would pretend to have amnesia, or be mute or deaf or all three. He would then ingratiate himself with some church, orphanage or become a ward of the state or courts and start attending school. He would make a lot of friends and basically be having a party until the gym coach notices that this 12 year old boy has more hair on his balls than he does and a dick bigger than everyone in his class. Damn that devil dick! Gives you away every time! So then he would get kicked out and go on the run to a new town. Well this happened in one town in Spain and he had to prove he was a child or they were gonna put him in jail, (I don't know why, probably broke that law about making a fool of someone who is older than you), unless he could prove he was a child.

Now I would have shaved my balls and say, "See, I have hairless balls," but not Frederic, he called the American Embassy, told them he ran a home for runaways, said they had an American child here and described himself. When they gave him the closest match, he said to fax the description to where authorities were waiting. Once seeing fax, they called American embassy in Barcelona. The sister of missing child was notified and she was on a plane to Spain to bring her baby brother home. An emergency passport was issued and he was then on a plane to Texas.

Oh yeah, he was like 24, pretending to be twelve or something. And no one noticed. Not even his fucking sister, or the rest of his whole fucking family!

He finally goes bat-shit crazy pretending to be someone he's not and turns himself in (after he cuts his face up with razorblades). Oh yeah and their was some Johnny Hard-on private investigator wannabe that decides he's gonna get down to the bottom of this. He didn't think Frederic was the boy, for obvious fucking reasons, but thought it was more strange that the mother and brother didn't see what he saw. Or that they did, but they played along.

Basically the family killed the fucking kid and Frederic's arrival served as constant reminder of what they did and drove the family crazy, brother kills himself, mom turns into drug addict, again.

Frederic goes to jail for 6 years.

Upon his deportation to France, he runs around and tries some other tomfoolery, achieves a bit of fame due to the ridiculousness of his story and essentially his life, and some young broad tracks him down and says she loves him and they get married and have a kid. Well she doesn't want to be in the public eye. But here she is. I found a video of him and her. {EDITOR'S NOTE: VIDEO REMOVED BY BOURDIN] He basically proves he is fucking crazy. Mutha loves Michael Jackson. Fast forward to 7:40 to see how he talks to cats.




NewYorker