Evelyn Knight
English con artist and socialite
Evelyn Dawn Knight (born 5 November 1942) is an English woman known for her involvement in the Abscam sting operation of the 1970s, with her then-husband Mel Weinberg. A character inspired by her was portrayed on film by Amy Adams in American Hustle (2013) for which Adams was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. The story of Abscam was depicted as well in the 1981 book The Sting Man by Robert Greene.
Personal life
Knight was born in Watford, England, the daughter of Peggy (née Wilson) and Bob Knight. Her father was a postman.
Knight emigrated to the United States in 1967, when she was in her late twenties. At a party on Long Island sponsored by the British government, she met Mel Weinberg, a Jewish businessman 17 years her senior, and the two began a long love affair. Weinberg was married to his second wife, Marie, at the time. Marie died by suicide in 1982 at age 58. She had confronted Knight about the affair after she learned that Knight was living nearby in a house being paid for by Weinberg.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Evelyn Knight” is english con artist and socialite. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Evelyn, Knight and English, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19666641. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 2013, 1981 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Evelyn Knight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.