the.com/crocodile tears

means A show of sadness or sympathy that's fake, performed by someone who feels nothing but wants credit for feeling.

from From an ancient belief, recorded by medieval writers, that crocodiles wept while devouring their prey — weeping not from grief but as a reflexive by-product of eating, or in the folk version, as a cynical lure to draw in sympathetic victims. The claim is biologically false as drama (crocodiles do secrete tears during feeding, but there's no evidence of deceptive intent), yet the phrase survived its own debunking because the image was too useful to abandon: it had already become English idiom by the 1500s, describing anyone whose sorrow is performance rather than feeling.