The Boy Who Wanted to Be Warhol

Author: Sofia Pantazi, August 20, 2025 | Source: Sofia Pantazi

Some people don’t just tell lies, they live inside them. This is the story of my roommate Mickaël, a boy who came to Paris with peroxide hair, Hermès bracelets, and a talent for reinvention. He wasn’t just pretending to be an artist: he was pretending to be a person he could never truly be. I thought I’d found a friend, but what I really found was a performance unraveling in slow motion.

Mickaël with his dog, named “White”, October 2023. Photo: Sofia Pantazi

August 2023, The Beginning

I met Mickaël in August 2023, the Parisian summer still warm enough to trick us into thinking the city was softer than it really was. He told me he came from Biarritz. He told me he was a pop-art artist. He told me he was 27, when in reality he was 29. But what’s two years when you’re painting a life in lies?

At first, I was happy. He was gay. Finally, a roommate who wouldn’t see me as a woman to conquer, but as a friend to share everything with. A confidant. He looked like the French version of Andy Warhol: strange, pale, eccentric, and after one night out with the roommates, we were inseparable.

Poison in the Apartment

There was always drama in the colocation. Mickaël whispered that one of the roommates was speaking badly about me. I was 22, eager to believe in loyalty, and I took his side. What I didn’t know was that the poison came from him, that it was Mickaël, not them, who spoke badly about me.

Still, I let him become the center of my life. He pulled me into his world of Louis Vuitton shopping bags, lip fillers, Hermès bracelets. He never cooked, never stayed in. Dinners meant restaurants. Sometimes he paid for me, slipping the bill away with elegance. I thought: this is what a successful artist looks like.

The hallway of the collocation, Jasmin, Paris 2023. Photo: Sofia Pantazi

A Life in Superficial Lights

But I never saw him paint. I never saw him in a gallery, not even once. What I did see was the façade: stories of “important people,” lectures that I needed to toughen up if I wanted to belong in Parisian luxury circles. Slowly, it dawned on me: he was spending more than he could ever afford.

Then came the truth, casual but heavy: he admitted he had a lawsuit. He had stolen money from a gallery in Biarritz. All of it gone. Later, I learned there was more: money taken from his parents after they sold a boat, a car bought under his father’s name only to be repossessed when the truth surfaced.

Dogs came and went too. Three different times, Mickaël brought puppies into the house, only to give them away like forgotten accessories. I think he sold them for twice the price, or worse, but I can’t draw assumptions.

Cracks in the Friendship

By then, the mask was slipping. He stopped paying rent and was kicked out of the colocation. For a week, he stayed with me in my tiny studio in the 15th arrondissement, before moving to a place in Clichy. He hated admitting he lived outside Paris, sneering that Clichy was “for the poor.”

With his new roommates, he recycled the same lies: pretending the apartment was his, playing the role of the glamorous Parisian. But when it came to me, the friendship cracked. He spread rumors: that I had plastic surgery, that I was an opportunist, that he wanted to sleep with my boyfriend at the time. My ex was cruel to me, but Mickaël never defended me. He only added poison. I remember him saying: “well at least, he’s got argent, money”. With the most French-English accent you can imagine.

I began to notice his eyes, stone cold, dead, as if the life inside him had gone missing. Once I asked about the endless medications in his cabinet. He told me they were antidepressants, prescribed by his mother when he was a teenager. But I suspect now they were for something else: the STD he was hiding.

Message from Mickaël, March 2024. Photo: Sofia Pantazi

May 2024: The Revelation

By then, we were no longer friends. I had cut him off, blocked him, removed him from my world. Until May 2024, when on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, his friends added me into a group chat demanding information about him.

That’s when it all came out. Mickaël was working as an escort. We found his profile: his face photoshopped, his name and age changed. His rate was 180 euros for a whole night. A cheap escort, such as his character.

We contacted his brother and parents. They were devastated, but not surprised. His brother, when asked if Mickaël was a psychopath, said yes. His mother had once trusted him to care for her cats. Twice, they died under his watch.

He had told me once his parents were extravagant, Botoxed, coke-sniffing artists. The truth? His mother is a painter, natural and beautiful, and his parents own a construction company. Stable. Loving. He invented cruelty in them to mask the chaos in himself.

A Friend, Not a Scammer

There are scams of money and scams of trust. One empties your bank account. The other empties your heart.

Mickaël didn’t scam me for money. He hurt me in another way. He hurt me as a friend. He broke my trust, my loyalty, my youth’s belief in people. He spun gossip about me, tried to destroy my relationships, and left me with scars not financial, but human. He once asked: “are your parents your biological parents”? to which I replied with a yes and proceeded to asking why. His response: “because they are fat, and you are skinny”.

Eventually, me and some of his friends confronted him over FaceTime (May 2024). He realized we had all spoken to each other, and when he felt them trying to escape the conversation, he tried to be my friend again. During the confrontation, he didn’t admit to any of the lies or manipulations; he just said sorry for hurting us. But his eyes were stone cold, black almost, and I could see the performance behind the apology.

The last message I received from him was a twisted kind of farewell: he said he regretted ruining things with me because I had been his “special friend,” and that he would never forget me, but that he would exit my life so as not to hurt me anymore. It felt like a goodbye, but also like a final act of control, leaving me with the memory of someone who could charm and wound at the same time.

Mickaël’s last message, May 2024. Photo: Sofia Pantazi

August 2025: The Present

Two years later, I still hear his name in Paris. He claims to sell paintings for €20,000, to have an office in Puteaux, to live in the 16th. Maybe it’s true. Maybe this time the mask has become the man. But every time I picture him, I remember those lifeless eyes, those endless lies, and I can’t shake the feeling that the performance never ended. Only the stage changed.

The Confession

Maybe he fooled Paris. Maybe he fooled himself. But he no longer fools me. This is not just my story: it belongs to everyone he’s touched, everyone who’s been poisoned by his need to live inside illusions. If this rings a bell, if you know someone like Mickaël, write to Cosmos & Confessions. Some stories should not stay hidden in whispers. They need the light.

I haven’t seen him in two years, but I could pick him out of a crowd. And somehow, I know this will not be the last I have seen of him.

My first trip with Mickaël, Deauville, France. Photo: Sofia Pantazi