TikTok Teen Maddie Russo Pleads Guilty to Theft After GoFundMe Cancer Scam
"I feel like I’ve been rocked to my soul," Russo told the press when she was promoting her fake pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
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Madison “Maddie” Russo pled guilty to felony theft on Wednesday in Iowa after she was accused of stealing more than $37,000 from GoFundMe donors who thought they were giving it to her for pancreatic cancer treatment.
Her (what we now know to be fake) story, which she shared with North Scott Press, was harrowing. In February 2022, Russo was in her college accounting class when she got the news she’d be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 19. “Life has been crazy,” Russo told the local paper who covered her diagnosis and fundraising in October 2022. “It’s like a Catch-22. I can’t win for losing. I feel like I’ve been rocked to my soul, and right now, everything is kind of uncertain. I just want to know my game plan, and right now, I don’t know what that is.”
But it wasn’t just her pancreas. Three months later, after rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, Russo said that pancreatic tumor was shrinking but that she had been diagnosed with leukemia, a blood cancer, as well. “What’s really tough is that I thought I was making pretty good progress on the other cancer, and now it seems like everything has gone haywire again,” she said in October. “Right now, everything is kind of uncertain.”
Russo then had the gall to say cancer “just happens to people” when she was, as we know she was faking, a cancer diagnosis. ““Of course, every day can’t be sunshine and rainbows, but you can’t just choose to be mad at the cancer. It just happens to people,” Russo told the local paper in October. “If you stay depressed, and in a dark space, I feel like your body will never get better.”