Jonathan Palmer impersonator - the tricked women were simply naive?

[mr_go...@yahoo.co.uk]

I remember this story at the time, and remember it splitting opinion amongst my F1 friends - some were sympathetic to the women and some weren't.

in the 1990's a British fraudster (Jonathan Kern) toured places (the US and France etc) pretending to be the ex racing driver Jonathan Palmer, and would then fleece women and disappear etc!

see a short video from one of his US victims here, near the end she holds up a pic of him, and he looks nothing like Jonathan Palmer at all - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJfeQsEJH8Y

so how was she fooled by him?

was she just very naïve?

or given that US coverage of F1 at the time tended to consist only of stuff where the driver's had their helmets on (no press conferences etc) and Palmer never finished on the podium to be widely photographed without his helmet that way, does that explain how he conned her?

even in the 1980's in Britain it was hard to know what drivers looked like just from the TV coverage, which tended to consist of only 40 minutes a fortnight.