Danish Deception
Here’s why it’s hard to empathize with Onyeka
My name is Chinyere Osuji and I am the author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race. It was based on over 100 interviews with people in black-white interracial marriages. I am an associate professor and teach classes on race and blackness in the United States, Brazil, and around the world.
I recently came across Onyeka Ehie’s “Danish deception” story. Like Onyeka, I am also Igbo and an American Nigerian who grew up on cheeseburgers and okra soup. I love traveling abroad. I’ve lived in Spain as a Fulbright Scholar and did research for my doctorate in Brazil.
I will not offer a summary or rehash the way that Martin Fredsgaard Andersen of Denmark financially abused his wife, Onyeka Ehie as well as her friends and family due to his gambling addiction. You can go watch the whole story with it’s 25+ parts on TikTok. Or you can do what I did and listen to a really good summary by Bethel on YouTube:
There are a lot of cultural nuances that I think that a lot of people in the United States aren’t going to pick up on. I also think that there are a lot of dimensions that Nigerians in Nigeria and in other countries are not going to understandn. I keep seeing comparisons with Asian Americans, but I think there's some important dynamics people have not been discussing.
Like Onyeka and thousands of Americans, I have deep roots in Nigeria. My parents are from Igboland too, near Owerri, a city founded in the 1300s. I had the privilege and pleasure of going to Nigeria last December. But I am also from Chicago, so I love my deep dish from Giordano’s and jollof rice with goat meat. Onyeka is from Texas, a very red state with a ton of Nigerians.
Mind you, I don’t know Onyeka’s personal motivations. Starring in a new “The Bachelorette?” Stardom? Ressa Teesa wannabe? Also, who knows if Onyeka is a “Russian espía” or working with the “Shaudis” or the Blue and White flag state. Given our current political context, I do not trust everyone’s story on the internet.
What I do know is that there are a lot of structural reasons why Onyeka rubs so many the wrong way. Too many people are thinking about her situation through purely a racial lens. But we need a more intersectional approach to understand how something like the Danish Deception could happen.
I’ll go through these now.
1. She’s not a white woman.
If she were a blonde woman with blue eyes, everybody-white, Black, Mexican, Pakistani-- would feel more sorry for her. We have all heard white women gush over men with blue eyes and blonde eyes. In her videos, she was looking at her man the way Kevin Spacey looks at Bill Clinton. Even white gay men gush over white men with blue eyes.
But white women get so much empathy and sympathy when they make the dumbest decisions. They’ll say, “She was blinded by LOOOVE! She was in love!”
When it comes to seeing Black women, especially African women, as human beings, our society tries to silence us. We cannot make mistakes without being thrown through the ringer. If we give in to the man we love, we are called fools who should have known better.
Was Onyeka the smartest giving her man all that money? No. If she were a white woman, people would say that she’s trying to live out some “Prince and Me” Julia Stiles BS with a Danish prince named Martin Fredsgaard Andersen.
People are calling her out for centering whiteness as a black woman. It’s probably true, but many Americans do. Living in a Eurocentric, white dominant society means that a lot of of us have a lot of unlearning to do, including white people. But let’s be real. Even Dr. Umar is married to one of the most white proximate Black woman I have ever seen!
Centering whiteness also affects white peope. There are millions of white women who worship white men. Being the wife or mother of a white man, a person at the top of status structures, gives them proximity to power. It’s why it’s so devastating for many straight women when they get divorced or their white kids marry a person who is BIPOC. For too many, the lies of white supremacy and patriarchy drive them crazy when they are debunked.
But Onyeka is NOT a white women. She is an Igbo-Nigerian-dark-skinned Black woman. Black women are supposed to be too smart for the BS she went through. And I have to say, as a Nigerian woman, I was horrified, HORRIFIED that she would fall for a Danish prince scam. We’re supposed to be immune to those things! In fact, we have a global reputation for being the scammers ourselves! We saw it recently with a lot of the MAGA Twitter users being exposed as living in Nigeria, South Asia, and Russia. But Onyeka should be extended the same grace we would give someone who looked like Emily Blunt or Cameron Diaz.
If she had been a white woman, I would’ve felt no shane. But she’s not, which leads me into my next point.
The reality is that as a WIFE, women are EXPECTED to give large sums of money to their husbands.
Money is a way to support our partners. People do it all the time, including white people. The problem is that Martin Fredsgaard Andersen is a fraudster. In fact, just a week after posting her story, he is already done the same thing to other women in Mexico, claiming his wife is Nigerian royalty! Unfortunately, Onyeka did not have the discernment to recognize that this man was defrauding her. He is a predator who purposefully seeks out women as marks.
But this is a common phenomenon. Plenty of us know a woman who has given their boyfriend/husbands a car to use, are the only ones paying the mortgage/rent on the home where they live, and giving them money when they ask for it. People are pretending like Onyeka is the first wife in the history of the world to get tricked into supporting their spouse’s gambling addiction. How many wives and girlfriends have taken out a personal or home equity loan to support their husband’s dreams, only to find out they were actually a nightmare?
When you’re dealing with a good man, investing in your husband is an investment in the entire family. However, when women are not working from a spirit of discernment, it can be too easy to cast our pearls before swine like Martin Fredsgaard Andersen.
Black women have been financially supporting their families and their men for centuries. Despite the lie of the 1950s traditional family, poor and working class white women have always worked and earned money in the United States. In addition, those "traditional" families relied on the underpaid labor of US black women working as domestic throughout the country.
As Nigerians and as Igbo women, we have a long history of women selling in and running markets, fighting a war against colonizer resstrictions, and being powerful village elders. The same is true in Yorubaland, where Oyewumi argues age was a more important status marker than gender before British colonialism. Whether as willing participants or experiencing financial abuse, women have always had economic power that they used as they pleased, including giving money to the men in their lives. Unfortunately, this means being exposed to financial abuse from partners. Even back in medieval France, there were poems written about drunkard men taking their wives’ money to spend at the tavern.
Financial abuse is not new.
Nigerian women have always had collectives in which they gather money, including family networks to help one another. We still practice this in the United States. When you enter a family, you’re never by yourself. You’re part of a larger collective. Unfortunately, this can be exploitable by bad actors, as seen in Martin’s gambling addiction. He took infiltrated and take advantage of Onyeka’s Nigerian financial kin networks.
Is Martin Fredsgaard Andersen husband the first man to have his wife fund his gambling addiction? Is he the first person to swindle family members out of money?
Onyeka’s husband did not invent a gambling addiction. We need to stop pretending like this isn’t something that happens all the time. We also need to stop acting like none of our aunties, mothers, or your sisters have never financially supported a bad news bear. We’ve all known people like that. Many of us had been that woman. Many of us are still that woman today.
3. Colonial mindset also matters. I remember seeing a post on Facebook in which a woman said “the global minority has imposed this idea on the rest of the world that they are in charge and we are all blessed to have the honor to exist with them on this planet.”
Humans have existed for tens of thousands of years on this planet. There have always been tensions and wars along ethnic lines made up of large kin networks and clans. However, Spaniards and Portuguese invented modern race in the 1400s to get West African gold and free labor by kidnapping Africans. It is only in the last 600 years that we have been taught that white is right— 100 years after the founding of Owerri in Imo State.
There are now entire populations of people who were created in the last 600 years through European enslavement of Africans and their descendants. It is central to the identities of millions of Black Americans, Afro-Cubans, and Afro-Brazilians. These peoples would not have existed if it had not been for the horrific maltreatment of their African ancestors.
If that were not bad enough, Europeans went all around the world, carving it up to create new markets of capitalism by fear or by force. Even when these countries threw off the yoke of colonization, Europeans still dominate countries all across Africa in this post colonial moment. One of the repercussions has been that people in countries where they are the majority still believe and act like white people have more status than their own kind. Ask any Nigerian living in Nigeria how they see the oyinbo—Lebanese, Chinese, Europeans or anyone with paler skin. They are the “white “people who get more respect, better jobs, and positive racial discrimination. It’s to the point where even though African girls have to cut their hair to go to school in West Africa, Indian, European, and Lebanese girls do not.
From Mumbai to Seoul to Cape Town to Abuja, people have been very proud of their national origins while still using beauty treatments and plastic surgery to whiten their appearance. While they may not want to be white or European per se, they certainly aspire to Eurocentrisc aesthetics. They treat oyinbo who are foreigners better than their own people. Even though they are the minority make that make sense!
So yeah, we see Onyeka showing off her white husband like he’s some prize. In her country of origin, he is seen as a prize. In his country, he is seen as a prize in a nation of fellow prizes. Europeans created and perpetuated modern race. There is no racism without race. Until we eliminate this idea of race, white people will continue to be seen as more desirable no matter where you go
.
Even in the United States, I have heard in person black men tell other black men, “you got yourself a white girl” as if she is something so desirable. We have all heard Black athletes disparage Black women with their white and non-black girlfriends, wives, and baby mamas.
White supremacy is global now. Martin “Danish deception” took advantage of this and it enabled him to gamble away thousands and thousands of dollars to her and her family and her friends disadvantage. He is currently in Tulum, Mexico, trying to do the same thing.
4. We are not in her financial shoes.
Years ago, I worked on a project with Brandeis University’s Tom Shapiro in which I interviewed people in Los Angeles about their finances. I found out so much information about people’s home equity, how much their grandparents paid for their down payment on their home, funded their children’s education, who has massive loans and debt, and who is barely making it. I interviewed people from South LA to Manhattan Beach.
That process taught me that we are all not working from the same starting line. This is especially true for most white Americans who, even if they are poor or lower middle class, have a lot more backup financially than their Black or brown counterparts. Most of us are playing financial checkers while she, like other upper middle class Americans, is playing chess.
In the United States, we like to pretend like class does not matter and that everybody is middle class except for the billionaires and millionaires in our country. It’s not true. A person with a household income of $200,000 is not living the same life as a person in a household earning $70,000. Yet we are all supposed to be middle class!
In 2025, the mean personal income in the United States is $63,214. But when you take out all the billionaires and millionaires who skew our average income higher, we see that the median income across the country is $44,225. Now, I don’t know how much Onyeka earns for a living and but she said in the videos that she verified that her husband made $400,000 a year.
Class/economic social boundaries are real and they prevent us from being able to empathize with people who have a lot more or a lot less than us. Birds of a feather flock together, so if you are lower middle class, it’s less likely for you to have a ton of friends who are upper middle class.
So, her parents giving her husband $100,000 or her giving him $7000 at a time is a lot of money. And I’m sure it’s very painful for them. At the same time, I cannot relate because that is not my financial reality, like most Americans.
We have to acknowledge that this is a very real difference, a class boundary between most Americans and Onyeka. Most of us do not have thousands of dollars to give people we love. So no, most of us cannot relate to an upper class lifestyle.
Most of us are playing financial checkers while she, like other upper middle class Americans, is playing chess. So, her parents giving her husband $100,000 or her giving him $7000 at a time is a lot of money. And I’m sure it’s very painful for them. At the same time, I cannot relate because that is not my financial reality, like most Americans.
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Overall, I think it is important to recognize these structural factors that are beyond her tone of voice or her presentation of self that make it difficult for Americans to identify with her.
To summarize:
1. Only white women get to be so in love that they miss red flags. This makes it difficult for us to see her as somebody worthy of victimhood-just like the long history of African and Black women in the United States. It’s the implicit bias of living in the United States that we all need to overcome. Black women, especially Naija women, are supposed to be smarter than that.
2. Many women are and are expected to be financially responsible for their household and their husbands. Unfortunately, that can really leave us vulnerable when it comes to bad apples seeking to take advantage of us.
3. Europeans and their descendants imposed and continue to impose this idea of white supremacy on the global majority. This affects people in other parts of the world in which they are the majority, yet still aspire to whiteness and it’s promises of modernity and success. Martin allowed her to approximate whiteness.
1. We are not all in the same tax bracket. Giving tens of thousands of dollars to somebody that married to is beyond my comprehension at this point in my life. I hope that one day I will have this as something to even consider, but as of right now it is difficult for any of us to empathize with”rich kids problems.” Not my circus not my monkeys.
In conclusion, I feel for Onyeka. But at the end of the day, I don’t know if she’s trying to get people to put her in another reality TV show. I don’t know if she’s a Russian/Middle Easterm asset paid to create dissent in US communities. But I do care about how we perpetuate Ideologies of white supremacy, anti-black racism, and disenfranchise Black/African women specifically and women of color around the world.
There are a whole host of other things that I could’ve talked about. For example, Nigerian is an extremely sexist country in which women have no worth without a husband or child. I have literally had at my mother's tell me that I am not a woman because I do not have a husband. Onyeka not leaving her husband immediately. It's probably a part due to the stigma of not being a married woman in our culture.
I could've talked about how a lot of black influencers have discussed her lack of black friends on Instagram, as though her parents’ decision to live in a predominantly white neighborhood would not affect her future friendships. US segregation has normalized Black people only existing in neighborhoods in order to experience community. It can be problematic because our American apartheid system cannot account for our extensive kin networks that are typical for Nigerians. I could’ve also discussed how this was her FIRST serious romantic relationship and the racial, cultural, and social aspects of that. I know very few people whose first romantic relationships were very successful in terms of leading to marriage.
Believe Onyeka or not, she has really been through the wringer and I wish her well.