There is a vast herd of scam podcasts in the world. But one where the scammer’s exploits are punctuated by frequent updates to her Facebook book group? That’s what you call a unicorn – or more precisely, Unicorn Girl, the latest podcast from the mind behind cult true crime series Scamanda, Charlie Webster.
Candace Rivera is a mom of two and known as the life and soul of the party. Unicorn Girl begins when Candace becomes one of the five hundred women chosen to help publicize a self-help book, For The Love. The women were in a private Facebook group, and as they pushed the book up the NYT Bestseller List, they grew closer. Candace was one of the most prolific posters, charming the others with her funny stories, and was the center of attention at the house party where many of them met. One of her most popular stunts was when she filmed herself wearing a unicorn mask to order a Starbucks unicorn drink; Candace liked to be known as “Unicorn Girl.”
Candace went on to parlay her online popularity into launching a hugely successful non-profit, Exitus, founded in order to help the victims of human trafficking. That’s where events kick up a notch. Her endeavours spanned continents; from apparently evacuating Afghan citizens after the 2020 US troop withdrawal, through to rescuing Ukrainian orphans at the start of the Russian invasion. All the while, she made sure to keep her book group up to speed.
Many of Candace’s activities are hard to believe, but as Webster says early in the opening episode, “There’s a lot more truth to this story than you might think.”
One of the first things that hits you about Unicorn Girl is the incessant clamour of the backing track. Initially, trying to listen feels like trying to have a conversation with your friend in the middle of a busy casino. The bleeps and bloops and chimes and whirrs sometimes make it difficult to even hear what’s being said.
Though it hardly seems possible, before long you acclimate to the podcast’s relentless over-production. While it remains too much throughout, there’s something about that too muchness, the relentless gloss and cheer, that suits a subject like Candace: a woman who described her ambitions on a self-help podcast as, “to run multiple companies, save the world, and be a killer rock star mom in really high heels.”
There are nine episodes in Unicorn Girl, and the net doesn’t start properly closing in on Candace until episode eight. A lot of the show is simply dedicated to recounting the details of her many schemes. The problem is, it doesn’t take too long for Candace’s various undertakings (including leaping into war zones and missions to save human trafficking victims) to start melting into each other. Again and again, she enters perilous situations comically ill-prepared. Again and again, she prioritises parties and shopping trips above doing the humanitarian work she purports to care so much about. Despite the wild subject matter at hand, sometimes Unicorn Girl can be tedious.
It doesn’t help that, besides Candace, the show is missing a main character. Webster is a warm, likeable narrator. She adds to the listening experience tremendously. Though you hear the voices of many women that Candace conned out of their time and money, like the scams themselves, their stories tend to fade into each other. I can understand why. They were all contending with the same experiences, and yet failure to differentiate between the victims does add to a sense of general narrative sludginess.
Another sour note revolves around the podcast’s treatment of Candace’s pet issue: child trafficking. “There’s a perception that human trafficking doesn’t happen in the US. But it does,” states Webster in the second episode. This is true. Nevertheless, the unwillingness to even mention the fact that human trafficking is an obsession of the right, and is regularly linked to conspiracy theories (remember Pizzagate?) and moral panics, casts a shadow over an otherwise thoroughly reported podcast. It suggests a fear of nuance that isn’t present in the rest of the show.
Because elsewhere, the willingness to embrace nuance is actually the best part of Unicorn Girl. Candace did a lot of bad things and damaged countless lives. But she also helped people. Nowhere near as many as she claimed to have, of course. Only two orphans were rescued thanks to her team, not the three hundred she boasted about. But enough that it’s difficult to entirely discount the work that she put into motion.
Webster acknowledges Candace’s complexity, just as she does the bravery, kindness and vulnerability of the victims who, not having had the advantage of listening to nine episodes detailing her misdeeds, were taken in by a woman festooned with red flags. Even when the storytelling gets a little overstretched and muddled, the warmth Webster clearly feels towards those who were damaged by Candace keeps her podcast on the right tonal track.
People are complicated. Hindsight is 20/20. And rarely has there been a more vivid podcasting example of there being so much more to someone than on their social media than Unicorn Girl.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.