The slippery swindler who conned her way into Ivy League schools using false identities told people close to her that she was “a genius” who suffered from a crippling anxiety disorder, and used it to explain away holes in her phony life story.
In letters and e-mails, Esther Elizabeth Reed, 28, attributed her erratic behavior to a phobia of social situations that, she claimed, was so severe she often couldn’t leave her Upper East Side apartment.
The writings were provided to The Post by a former boyfriend she met on the dating site Match.com who knew her as Brooke Henson – the identity she stole from a girl who vanished in South Carolina in 1999 and which she used to attend Columbia University.
The pair saw each other on and off for 1½ years, during which she frequently pointed to her illness as the reason for her constantly shifting story.
“She’d come up with random excuses for random things,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “She’d call out of nowhere and say, ‘I’m dying to see you,’ and then say she had the disorder and couldn’t.”
The ex said they met in person for the first time in 2005 at The Falls bar in SoHo.
“I thought she was cute. We had some drinks. I thought she had crazy eyes. She told me she was home-schooled and from a town in the Midwest,” he said. “She told me she made money from chess tournaments.”
In reality, Reed was a high-school dropout from Townsend, Mont., who was last seen by her family in 1999. Since then, she has developed a sophisticated method of stealing identities, which she used to attend California State University at Fullerton and Harvard University before arriving at Columbia in 2004.
She never revealed much about her past, the boyfriend recalled, and she didn’t seem to have too many friends. Her aloofness soon caused him to drift away.
“These last six months have been a f- – -ing ridiculous amount of work, and I am not willing to throw it all away so I can kiss you and f- – – you right this minute, although that’s really what I’d like to do,” Reed wrote just weeks before disappearing in early July, when investigators discovered her scams.
At one point, she attempted to tantalize her straying beau by discussing engaging in a ménage à trois with him and another woman.
“I would love nothing more than to be able to go crawl into my bed and find you there. I have so many sex toys on my nightstand it’s pathetic, it would be much sweeter to tie you up and use you,” she wrote.
But with the discontinuities in her story piling up, the boyfriend began to question her. This prompted Reed to go to great lengths to back up her story, angrily providing him with medical records detailing her diagnosis and treatment in an effort to keep him close.
“I am a student at Columbia, I’m supposed to be full of f- – -ing potential, and I can’t get one of the people who’s most important to me to understand what’s going on in my life, and to just believe me. That’s bulls- – -, I’m a genius, so here . . . this is the best I can do,” she wrote in an attached letter.
Although the records indicate Reed had, in fact, been diagnosed with and was receiving treatment for the disorder, some details she gave doctors were false.
Her older half-sister, Lori Devaney, said Reed never exhibited any symptoms of a psychological disorder growing up.
“She was just a very pleasant, precocious kid . . . She was happy. She was very curious about things. She was very intelligent and always has been,” she said.
Teachers in her hometown have painted a darker picture, saying Reed suffered abuse at the hands of at least one boyfriend and her relatives.