BORN TO LIE

What science says about ordinary fibbers (MOST OF US) and extreme liars (GEORGE SANTOS)

- DAN HURLEY

TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN VIRONIKA WILDE was 12 years old, she began to lie. A lot. She lied about her age and her weight. She lied about having a speaking role on the hit TV show Degrassi when she had only been an extra. She lied that she had been in a car when a drive-by shooting occurred. Throughout her teen years and into her twenties, she lied constantly and blatantly, with little worry over whether or not her preposterous stories were believable.

"When you're in the habit of doing it, it's hard to stop," Wilde says. "The lies I told as a kid were pretty easy to figure out. But as I got older, I thought my lies were really clever."

Not until she suffered a mental breakdown in 2012 did Wilde decide she had to change. Like a recovering alcoholic, she even went back to old friends and confessed about her lies. "When I finally started telling the truth," she says, "for the first time I got the reactions from people that I always thought I would get from lying."

Now an author and poet living in Toronto, Wilde says the lies slipped away once she began to love and accept her true self.

If only George Santos had learned the same lesson.

Within weeks of winning his first race for Congress in November, Santos was outed as a prolific, outrageous liar. He lied about where he went to high school and college, about being Jewish and having a grandmother who died in the Holocaust (he isn't and she didn't), about working in finance at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, about where his campaign money came from and how he spent it, about starting an animal charity, about his mother dying on 9/11 and about having four employees who died at the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.