Desperate or daft – why would any woman log on to find a sugar daddy?
By Jan Moir
PUBLISHED:01:17 GMT, 29 March 2013| UPDATED: 01:17 GMT, 29 March 2013
Down in the dark bazaar of online dating, where every desire is only a mouse click away, sugar babes are the paid-for companions of rich, older men seeking glamorous dates, no strings attached, sex optional.
They find each other on sites such as sugardaddie.com, or variations thereof, where attractive women meet time-poor, cash-rich ‘gentlemen callers’ who want the same kind of flirty, emotionally low-maintenance relationships that they do. And who are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege.
That is the theory. The practice comes in the dubious form of sugar daddies such as penniless Jonathan Price, a serial conman who advertised himself on the dating website as someone seeking a wife — then fleeced a string of women who fell for his story.
This week, Price awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to fraud totalling £180,000 — leaving three women and their parents without their life savings.
Yes, what a heartless brute — but come on. Just look at him, ladies. What would you do if an oafish, unshaven block of lard like him came into your life claiming to be an ex-SAS millionaire from Darlington, complete with speedboat, offshore bank accounts, friendships with Russian oligarchs, a lovely Knightsbridge flat and oh, here’s the crunch, terminal cancer, too?
Would your eyes whorl into dollar signs as you contemplated getting close to someone fabulously rich and about to fabulously die? Would you be channelling Joan Rivers, who once said that the perfect husband is a 96-year-old billionaire with a bad cough? Would you lie back and think of England — an England carpeted with riches and rubies beyond compare?
Or would you think, hang on a nit-picking minute. There’s something a bit dodgy about this geezer. Something that does not quite add up. Especially about the way he keeps asking you for money.
He shows you printouts of his accounts, revealing yummy millions in the bank. However, there is a problem. He cannot get access to these funds right now — so how about a short- term loan in the meantime, doll?
Would you see him coming? Would you run a mile? Or would you cough up — a Cinderella without a pair of glass slippers to her name, a singleton so desperate for luxury that she blinded herself to reality?
Oddly enough, a friend of mine met Price when he was pretending he wanted to buy an expensive house in Sandbanks, Poole. ‘He practically had CON MAN tattooed in neon on his forehead,’ she said. ‘And he wore terrible shorts.’
Yet not everyone saw through him, more is the pity. Sadly, far too many of the women who came across Jonathan Price appeared to be stuck fast in the land of the cloud and the cuckoo. They fell for him hook, line and stinker.
His victims included a 32-year old who runs a florist business in Bournemouth and a 39-year-old who worked as a manager at a gun retailer’s in London. His third victim, a successful businesswoman in her 30s, even married him. She was pregnant with his child when he was arrested in May last year.
It is terrible, it is awful for these lovelorn hopefuls with their dashed dreams and very public humiliation — but are they entirely deserving of everyone’s sympathy?
After all, they were the sugar babes looking online not just for any man, but for a rich man, if you please. It is perfectly clear what the deal is on that particular website. And it is inexcusable to rope your poor parents into giving your lover boy money, too — even if he has just announced a handy brain cancer that means he cannot pay you back any time soon.
However, I do feel for them. Is there a more vulnerable creature on the planet than a single thirtysomething woman in desperate need of a date? Yes, a single fortysomething in the same rocky boat. Especially when they notice that these men want sugarbabes who are about ten years younger than them.
All this makes them too needy. Too desperate. Too emotionally reckless.
These women dream of a life far away from the dreary men they know; those dates with the sour beer breath, the crummy dinners of chain restaurant tapas, the insistence on split bills. They want to be shown a nice time. They want to move on from cheap chardonnay to sugar daddy champagne — for they believe that is what will make them happy.
They do not understand that they are far more likely to find happiness with that kind, ordinary bloke down the road than some buffoon pretending to be a playboy.
The awful thing is, this is the third time Price has gone to prison for similar offences. This suggests there are a lot of gullible women out there desperate to find their millionaire Prince Charming, even if he looks and acts like Fred Flintstone.
Really, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the meantime, a word of advice to Cinderellas everywhere. In future, just yabba dabba don’t.
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