Catching Up With the Hipster Grifter

Her sensational Internet fame over, Kari Ferrell—now in a Utah jail for fraud and forgery—displays her reflective side in a wide-ranging chat with The Daily Beast about the realities of jail (food, masturbation, and the guards' nickname for her), how she will change when her sentence ends—and why Steve Jobs should send her a check.

Kari Ferrell, the 22-year-old Internet sensation, is serving out a six-month jail sentence plexiglass pod in Utah for mail fraud and forgery.

In April, Doree Shafrir wrote in The New York Observer about Ferrell’s felonious escapades in Brooklyn. In the story, she was christened “The Hipster Grifter,” because she preyed upon skinny-jeaned Williamsburg sorts. It chronicled Ferrell’s seduction of some eager boys in Brooklyn, whom she allegedly swindled out of money, her stint as a check forger in Utah, and her unsuccessful bamboozlement of her employers at Vice.

The story catapulted Ferrell into unlikely media infamy that has been kept at a steady pitch ever since. Just recently, in Manhattan dives and L.A. night clubs you could see dozens of girls dressed up like the Hipster Grifter for Halloween: The costume only required American Apparel leggings, and black top mop, and a sharpie to transpose Ferrell’s giant chest tattoo onto your sternum.

“Sleep is, at this point, a foreign concept.”

Ferrell has been in a snail-mail correspondence with Animal New York’s Bucky Turco. Throughout her writing, she’s reflected on her bizarre folk-hero fame (she credits it to her being “charming and smart”) and what cell life has been like with a tough-looking blonde named Jerzy. Willingly, perhaps, Ferrell has come off as flip, insincere, and too intentionally ironic. This of course is the self-prescribed social disposition of a hipster, an aloof—but meaningless—swagger.

Nevertheless, Ferrell is a young woman in a savage system and we felt the need to overcome the most tired trend of the year: hipster bashing. The aim here was to penetrate through that too-cool-for-school facade that she's embraced (or self-stylized?). While the jail population is by no means monolithic, Kari is clearly an outsider. The details of life in a system that is so alienating—particularly for a girl who is from a sunny and safe suburb—are compelling. Added bonus: She's famous. All those elements together are a pretty intriguing mixture.

The Daily Beast: What has been the most surprising part of prison?

Kari Ferrell: The most surprising part of jail (contrary to popular belief, I am in jail, not prison. Big difference) has to be the wide variety of people that come in. As with most of society, I assumed that the only people incarcerated were individuals who R Kelly’d little boys, and those who like freebasing crack cocaine out of human skulls. There have been girls in here for such things as unpaid parking tickets, driving without insurance, jay walking (seriously! And it was her only charge—spent four days in here) and giving a blowjob to her partner (by marriage) at a park. (Hello, who hasn’t done that?) Obviously there are those in here for more serious crimes, and that is unsurprising, but jay walking? Come on. Maybe it’s a Utah thing?

The Daily Beast: What is just like you imagined it to be? The food? The beds?

Ferrell: On the opposite side of the spectrum; the most unsurprising thing is that it’s exactly how I thought it would be: It’s the Orwellian nature of jail itself. We are housed in cells that resemble fish bowls, [with] large plexiglass windows, so that the guards are able to look in at any time; no privacy whatsoever. I also expected boredom to be exactly how it is: mind-numbingly unproductive. You can only work out, read, attempt to educate a cellmate on metaphysics, masturbate, and draw so much y’know?

Though they’re not as I expected, I’ll say the food and beds for you. The food is comprised of complex carbohydrates and starches. I try to eat only lunch—I found out that the breakfast and dinners have about 1,000 calories each. It’s like they want us to have to drag our bloated bodies out of here.

The beds are…well, let’s just say that sleeping in the mountains with an 18-year-old Spider-Man sleeping bag that you bought at Goodwill in a state of drunken decision-making is more comfortable than the Styrofoam mats and paper sheets we have here. Though I am advocate of animal rights, a down comforter sounds pretty fantastic right now.