A con artist-turned-doctor works as an obstetrician-gynecologist in New Jersey, but she's been exposed as a habitual catfish con artist in one of the most talked-about beach books of the summer.
A Sociologist's Guide to Ethan Shuman Anna Akbari“Ethan Is Not Here” is actually Dr. Emily MarantsThe book's authors told The Post about a 39-year-old woman from Livingston, New Jersey, who works at Jersey City Medical Center, which is owned by RWJBarnabas Health.
This non-fiction book, part memoir, tells the story of how three highly educated, accomplished women, including Akbari, a former New York University psychology professor, banded together to track down and expose an online predator who used the anonymity of the internet to carry out a perverse plan and cruelly toyed with their emotions for years.
“There are 10 victims that we know of and this case has been going on for nearly 10 years,” Akbari told the Post.
Marants has been in the medical profession for 11 years and uses her married name professionally, but Akbari readers know her by her maiden name, Emily Slutsky.
In 2010, Marants created a profile on the dating site OKCupid in which she believed herself to be an attractive, 6-foot-tall, Jewish financial analyst who graduated from Columbia and MIT, drove a BMW, had a dog named Harvey and lived on the Upper West Side.
Money wasn't what she was after. Instead, Marants manipulated her victims into falling in love with Ethan through seductive, alluring messages, some of which were sent from Ireland, where she studied medicine. What motivated the doctor's bizarre behavior? In the book, her victims say she simply wanted to destroy and degrade the emotions of attractive, successful women.
But the three women – Akbari, the woman known as “British Anna” and Gina D'Arago, an architect who studied at Harvard and Princeton – noticed something was wrong when he was never available over video chat and would regularly cancel dates at the last minute.
That's when the women found each other online and tried to stop Ethan.
Soon after the two first began talking, and despite the strong bond they had already formed, Marants led Akbari to believe that Ethan had esophageal cancer and needed immediate surgery — one of the most heinous forms of emotional abuse Akbari said she had ever suffered.
“Emily knew that I had lost someone close to me, my grandmother, to lung cancer 'a month prior,' so she had Ethan fake cancer so he could be diagnosed while we were talking,” she said.
“Of course, she knew I wasn't going to abandon someone who said that to me, because by that time the intimacy and closeness had been well established.”
The book contains most of the conversations Akbari had with Fake Romeo, who always seemed to know just what to say and would often start petty dramas that would provoke major fights and then punish Akbari with uncharacteristic periods of silence or the resurrection of his dating profile.
“Emotional abuse was a character choice she made,” Akbari said. “Why? I don't know. But she was starting to make us question ourselves.”
In her book, she describes the experience as feeling “like stepping into a blender of emotions.”
Marants showered D'Arago with compliments and was eager to get to know her better, but each time he brought up her Catholic background, something his own mother would never approve of, and would make travel plans only to cancel them a few days before without explanation.
Because Marants never actually broke any laws, she faced no retribution for her actions.
“Will someone who is chronically misbehaving and not receiving any punishment stop doing so?” Akbari asked. “That's an interesting question.”
Marants refused to open his door Friday evening and did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
“Jersey City Medical Center is confident that Dr. Marantz will continue to provide the highest quality of care to our patients,” a hospital spokesperson told The Post. “The incidents from more than 10 years ago have been investigated and addressed to the medical center's satisfaction.”
A promotional video for Jersey City Medical Center featuring Marants was removed from YouTube on Friday.
As detailed in her book, Akbari says there were numerous instances when people in positions of power, including university officials, were aware of her egregious behavior but chose to ignore it.
“I'm not in a position to judge what constitutes a breach of medical ethics or the Hippocratic Oath, but I would be shocked if this wasn't the case,” Akbari said. “It raises a lot of questions, like, should we be held as accountable for our digital actions as we are for our physical actions? In a culture where it's so easy to cancel anyone, this is a remarkable case.”
Akbari added: “This raises many other questions, such as why can someone commit such acts with impunity and are we OK with that?”
