An Admission of Lies: The Man Who Fooled Princeton

Chameleon

Audiochuck | Campside Media

True Crime, Documentary, Tv & Film, Society & Culture

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A gifted, mysterious young man with a tragic past and talent for long-distance running is admitted to Princeton. He dazzles everyone from admissions officers to elite dinner clubs. But behind the alias “Alexi Santana” was James Hogue, a serial imposter who had left a long trail of lies in his wake. This week, the extraordinary story of the man who scammed his way into the Ivy League—and kept going.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Campsite Media.
0:05.2	Hello?
0:06.2	What is, so, what do you want me to say?
0:08.6	Oh, it's just my.
0:10.4	Camillion.
0:11.3	Camillion Weekly.
0:12.8	Oh.
0:15.0	A couple years ago, I got a flurry of DMs from an industry friend.
0:19.7	If you're a fan of true crime podcasts, you probably know her.
0:23.6	Rebecca Lavoie of the weekly True Crime Review podcast, Crime Writers On,
0:28.5	which she hosts with her husband Kevin and their opinionated pals, Toby Ball, and Laura Bricker.
0:34.7	Rebecca was writing to say that she had an idea I should look into as a possible
0:38.2	chameleon story. It was about a guy named James Arthur Hogue who'd faked his way into Princeton
0:43.8	as an adult. For podcasting purposes, I asked her to put that lovely voice of hers to work
0:49.0	and read those old DMs into a mic. It's an amazing dinner party story, my friend Louisa tells.
0:55.4	He was in her class at Princeton.
0:57.7	He got accepted by the most fancy dinner club there with his BS fake ID story.
1:03.4	He ran that sub four-minute race, which is what led him to being caught, et cetera.
1:08.2	Years later, she had a friend who worked at Harvard in the gemology lab or whatever.
1:13.5	Her friend calls her and says, I work with this guy who went to Princeton and I'm interested in
1:18.2	dating him. Do you know him? It was that guy. So Louisa tells her friend that Hogue is a
1:25.5	total fraud and she tells her friend the story.
	...

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