Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to Hooked. I'm Rachel, your guide through the perplexing and sometimes deadly world of Internet catfishing. Why do people catfish? And how many lies can they tell.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Before they get caught?
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Stick around to find out.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: In this week's episode of Hooked, Anyone born around 1995 or earlier remembers September 11, 2001. Americans watched the news footage with horror at what was happening to their country. And for the residents of New York City, 911 left an indelible mark on their lives. Over 2,700 people died that day. This number included hundreds of floors of employees working in the World Trade center, paramedics, law enforcement, firefighters and passengers on the two hijacked planes. The tragedy rocked the entire western world and it was hard for Americans to know how to begin to recover. The streets of Manhattan were covered in soot, rubble and loose paper. Only 19 people had made it out of the World Trade center alive. The rest, it was assumed, were buried somewhere in what would soon be termed the Pit. And later, a bit more reverently, ground zero. First responders spent hours, days and weeks rescuing as many people as possible. In the end, just 20 people survived being buried in the rubble and only 291 bodies were found intact. This left survivors of the attack, both those who were in the World Trade center or responded and families of the victims in limbo. There was a list of the missing a mile long and unless one's father or wife or coworker's body was identified, it wasn't known what happens to them. Most likely, of course, they were somewhere under the collapse of steel and concrete. But survivors couldn't help but hope that perhaps their loved one or the person they shared a desk with had somehow made it out of the Towers alive and were just unaccounted for. With no body, how do you decide when to admit defeat and hold a funeral? When do you change your marital status from married to widowed? When there's no proof that your spouse is dead. And for the survivors who personally escaped the attack, how could they comprehend that it was mere chance that they survived? But their co worker didn't. As the 24 hour news cycle looked for fresh angles to cover, they focused on the families who had lost loved ones. These were of course important stories to tell. But survivors wondered why their perspective was being left out. For some reason, no one wanted to hear their stories. Making their grief and trauma even more complicated, they exchanged these grievances on message boards or email for the weeks following 9 11. Finally, in October of 2001, two support groups for survivors were started online. The World Trade Center Survivors Network and a smaller one whose name is lost to history. The leader of the Survivors Network, Gary Bogaz, soon heard about the smaller group and contacted its leader, a 30something woman named Tanya Head. After a few months of emailing back and forth, the two agreed to merge the groups under the Survivor's Network name. Tanya soon became a well known member of the network. Her story, which she was eager to share, was simply horrific, even compared to the dozens of network members who all had their own tragic tale. Tanya told the group how she had been on the 96th floor of the South Tower that morning giving a presentation on behalf of her employer Merrill Lynch. Around 8:30am Tanya's fiance Dave, who worked in the North Tower, called her and asked if she wanted to meet for coffee. Tanya told her that she was sorry but she was too busy. After exchanging I love yous, the call ended. And that was the last time Tanya would speak to her fiance. At 9:46am Flight 11 would be steered into the North Tower along with others on the 96th floor. Tanya quickly went to the stairs of the South Tower and started to descend. She had just reached the 78th floor when Flight 175 hit the South Tower. Between the 77th and 85th floor. Tanya watched her assistant get decapitated right in front of her. Tanya's arm and back were splashed with jet fuel and were now on fire, leaving her to make the rest of the dangerous descent in excruciating pain. Tanya was sure these were her final moments until she felt someone pounding her on the back, smothering the flames. There. A young man with a red bandana tucked in his back pocket began to lead her through the destruction, down the stairs and out to safety. At one point, a dying man handed Tanya an engraved wedding ring and begged her to get it to his wife. Once out of the tower, Tanya was led to safety and quickly lost consciousness. She woke up six days later in the hospital. Her arm was severely burned. Soon after she regained consciousness, she was told that Dave, her fiance, was missing, presumed dead. Life as she had known it was over.
All of the 911 survivors in the network had harrowing tales of devastation and loss. But but their stories only had a few. They had lost their spouse or they had a terrible injury, or they'd seen their co worker die, or they'd been miraculously rescued, or they'd been given a message for a now dead victim's loved one. Tanya's story had it all. And the more she shared with fellow network members about her life, the more remarkable Tanya herself seemed. Before working for Merrill lynch, she'd gotten her undergraduate degree from Harvard and her business degree from Stanford. Once she moved to New York, she met fiance Dave. The two lived happily in a Manhattan apartment with their golden retriever puppy, Elvis. Their wedding was set for October 2001. And when Tanya slipped up and called Dave her husband, she explained that a few months earlier, the couple had had an unofficial commitment ceremony in Maui. Tanya was a widow. There shouldn't be a hierarchy of pain, especially when it comes to something like 9 11. All of the victims and survivors faced trauma that no one should ever experience. And all of the survivors will carry that trauma with them for life. But even in support groups, the person who faced the most horror often has elevated status. And that's what happened in Tanya's case. But Tanya reminded those with less dramatic stories that their experiences were just as valid as hers. Admittedly said then Survivors Network president Gary Bogaz, some members noticed a few holes in Tanya's story. Sometimes it just seemed like she misspoke, like when she called Dave her husband instead of her fiance. But other times, she seemed to forget major details, like that she was an employee of Morgan Stanley instead of Merrill Lynch. Network members also realized that Tonya's claims of being rescued by the man with the red bandana only began after she heard a few other survivors talking about him. And while Tanya's injured arm was undeniably covered in skin grafts. But Bogaz noticed that the injury beneath them looked more like torn skin than burned skin. But who was going to be the asshole who told this traumatized and grieving woman that they thought she was lying? If not about all of her story, at least some of it no one dared, especially since Tanya had done so much for all of them. Members may have thought that Tanya seemed to be the least traumatized of the group, but to call her out on it was to be ungrateful. For the campaign she started and paid for out of her own pocket. The trauma therapist she'd hired to work with the group, the state funding she had secured. Who could reproach a woman who gave moving speeches about being a survivorspeeches that finally brought attention to the group of people who felt forgotten by America. Many survivors felt they couldn't get closure without returning to the site of the attack and saying goodbye to their friends and co workers. But even years after 9 11, access was denied. The closest they could get was a gate hundreds of feet away from where the tragedy had occurred. And as they stood there trying to get some kind of peace, tourists would rubberneck around them, taking pictures of the still demolished land and buying tacky never forget souvenirs. It was enough to make a survivor sick, so most of them avoided the place. But on March 17, 2004, Tanya sent an email to the Survivors Network telling them that she had finally gotten permission for the group to have a private walkthrough of ground Zero. A few weeks later, a small group of the network were led onto the site, and many finally took a step toward healing that they needed healing that Tanya helped bring them. And so Tanya's story remained unquestioned as the years went on. In 2006, Tanya decided that she wanted Gary Bogaz position as president of the Survivors Network. A carefully placed rumor about Bogaz to the network gossip. And soon the group decided to oust him and voted Tanya in as president. She'd done so much for the group, after all, and she continued to do so much through her efforts. The Survivors Network was interviewed for the news, and Tanya represented the group by speaking at university conference conferences and leading tours for the tribute to the World Trade Center Visitor Center. She led a group that included then mayor Michael Bloomberg, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former New York governor George Pataki. During the tour, she told her story in vivid detail. The day of the tour, she was also slated to give a speech at the welcome center, but in the end was too overcome with anxiety and asked another survivor to speak in her place. And no one blamed her. She'd been pushing her trauma down for years to focus on the network. The more admired Tanya became in the support group, the more vulnerable she allowed herself to be. For the first few years, she'd provided just the highlights of her story. Working in the South Tower, dead fiance injured, arm saved by the man with the red bandana. But when a writing group was started within the Network, Tanya had finally found an outlet for her pain. It's still all so raw, she wrote. It hurts as much now as then, and I still cannot understand why, why, why? I talked to Dave and I told him I was sorry, but he didn't answer back. Our photos together are now only ghosts of a life I once had and desperately want back. My other half is missing, ripped away from us by human missiles. After writing these pieces, she'd email them out to the 500 network members, using the opportunity to show just how humble and giving she was, even in the face of her grief. Today I got a promotion at work, and I still don't know why. Most of the time, my mind is miles away. I relive over and over the moments I shared with Dave. After I heard about this promotion, I had this urge. I called the store where the wedding dress I never got to wear is being stored and told them to go ahead and donate it to charity. This is a big step for me. It's been accumulating dust for two and a half years, and it's time. Opening up like this was the beginning of the end for Tanya, though she'd been sharing her story long before the writing group was established, but to fewer people and in less detail. Now that 500 people were being sent the minutiae of Tanya's 911 experience and grief, it became clear that things weren't lining up. Still, no one from the network dared to confront her. In Late August of 2007, the New York Daily News interviewed Tanya for an anniversary article about the survivors of 9 11. Tanya had become the unofficial spokesperson for the network, and while some people from the group were doubting her story, many of them still weren't ready to tell their own stories. So who else was going to publicize the network? The article came out in the first week of September in 2007, when the new York Times was working on their own anniversary article. Of course, the Times reporter felt they had to talk to Tanya as well if she was the number one survivor of the tragedy. But when it comes to fact checking, the Times goes deep. Reporters David Dunlap and Sergei Kovalesky, authors of the New York Times article, smelled something fishy the closer they looked at Tanya. Or make that several fishy things. First, there was the most obvious oversight. Shortly after 9 11, the New York Times themselves had interviewed every survivor who had been in the towers. It was only 19 people. They'd spoken to each of them, and Tanya wasn't one of them. The Times also called up Tanya's alleged alma maters, Harvard and Stanford. Neither of them had any record of an alumna named Tanya head. Merrill lynch didn't have a record of an employee by that name either. And what's more, they had never had an office in either of the Twin towers. They contacted the family of Dave. Easy enough to do, because Dave and a short biography of him were featured in a list of the dead. The snippet didn't mention a fiance or a recent trip to Maui. And Dave's family had never met or even heard of Tanya.
Before long, Tanya heard that the Times was sniffing around, and she frantically emailed the network members telling them to not talk to any reporters about her because they were running a smear campaign, you know, like newspapers are known to do, about 911 survivors, especially in an anniversary article. She herself backed out of three scheduled interviews with a Times reporter and eventually refused to speak to anyone who wanted to tell her story. One network friend told Tanya that if she truly thought the article would be slanderous, she should hire a lawyer. Tanya did, and the friend went along with her to the consultation. She was shocked when Tanya started telling the lawyer a completely different story than the friend had been hearing for the last six years. Tanya said that she wasn't engaged or married to Dave. She had just known him for a few months at the time of his death. Also, she wasn't working for Merrill lynch at the time. She was only in the south tower to apply for an internship with them. She tweaked nearly every detail she'd been sharing with the network and the public alike since 2001. Just a week after the pro Tanya Daily News story came out, the Times ran their article. No longer was it a contemplative look back at the most tragic day in American history, but an on a woman who had been pretending to be a victim of the most tragic day in American history. The article coming out was the straw that broke the camel's back for the members of the Survivors Network. They'd had their own doubts for years, but the Times had gone the extra mile, and now their suspicions had been confirmed. Tanya's story, called by one member, the most tragic but most triumphant, was a bunch of bullshit. By the end of the month, Tanya had been ousted as the World Trade Center Survivors Network president and barred from the group altogether. And then Tanya disappeared.
Where did Tonya go after being ousted as a big fat faker in 2007? No one knows. The first anyone heard about her after that was when, in February 2008, an email blast was sent to the Survivors Network from an anonymous Spanish email address, telling the group that Tanya Head had killed herself. But I'm sure we both know this wasn't true. As years passed, information about who Tanya really was started to trickle in from various sources. Robyn, Gabby Fisher, and Angelo Guglielmo banded together to write a book and a documentary about Tanya called the Woman who Wasn't There. In pursuit of that, they discovered the Tanya's real name was Alicia Esteve Head. She was a Spanish woman born in 1973 in Barcelona. She was the youngest of five children and the only girl, so she was absolutely doted on. Her family was very wealthy and her childhood was full of horseback riding. And country clubs. At one point, she was sent to finishing school in Switzerland and also spent some of her childhood at an American school. While in the US she fell in love with the country. At university, which was not Harvard or Stanford, she would tell her classmates about her dream to live in America. Back in Barcelona, an American flag hung on her wall. Her dream was put on hold, however, when she returned to Spain and her life kind of fell apart. If you'll remember, Tanya, we're going to keep calling her that, had an injured arm, claiming in 2001 it was from being on fire while trapped in the south tower on 9 11. In Fisher and Guglielmo's research, however, they heard two potential stories about how her arm may have actually been injured. Tanya had told some people that she had gotten into a Ferrari accident with an old boyfriend and told others it was from a horseback riding accident. Why two stories when she clearly knew how it happened? Because from the beginning, Tanya was a compulsive liar. According to childhood classmates, young Alicia Head would tell tales about how many boyfriends she had. And she had trouble telling reality from the imaginary. If a truth didn't suit her, she made up something that did. When Tanya was 21, her family was part of a national financial scandal. Her father and brother were both convicted of embezzlement, and her family fell apart. After the two men were sent to jail, Tanya's parents got divorced and Tonya and her mother were estranged from her father and four brothers. According to a friend who was in Tonya's life from childhood through their 20s, this incident really ramped up Tanya's lying. She refused to talk about what her father and brother had done or the toll it took on the Head family as a whole. Instead, she made up her own reality. The incident also changed her personality. Even after the accident that injured her arm, Tanya had been pretty happy. Go lucky. She had truly wanted for nothing. But after the embezzlement, she became determined to win at any cost. Win what? Anything and everything. She pitted co workers against each other so she could get ahead and she'd flaunt her family's wealth. She was a story topper, and everyone hates a story Topper. The newly fierce Tanya earned a bachelor's degree from the European University in Barcelona and in 1998 started working at a real estate development company. She was an executive assistant, but believed the job was far beneath her. So when her boss moved to Japan, Tanya quit her job and began her MBA studies at Asade College, which is a very prestigious international school. She eventually graduated with her degree in 2002. 2002? Yes. Not only was Tonya not at the World Trade center during 9 11, she wasn't even in the United States. She hadn't been on American soil since she was a child. On December 2, 2001, she went online and started a support group for her fellow survivors of 9 11. In 2003 she arrived in America and started to spread her impressive tragic lie.
Dr. Jean Kim is a Manhattan based psychiatrist who was a young trainee when 911 happened. As you can imagine, she came across quite a few patients who had lost someone in the World Trade Center. Or did they? Many patients who had made such a claim admitted later that they lied. They hadn't lost a loved one that day. Dr. Kim says that some 911 liars may be engaged in conscious lying, also known as malingering. Conscious lying is exactly what it sounds like, and the purpose of it is to gain something, often money or notoriety. One example Dr. Kim gives of this is comedian and actor Steve Ranzieski lying about narrowly escaping death in New York that fateful day when Ranazziski began spreading his lie. He was a new transplant to Los Angeles, and having such a harrowing story to tell helped bolster his fledgling career. If only, Kim writes, by setting him apart.
But Dr. Kim doesn't think Tanya was in this category. Instead, she believes Tanya was an unconscious liar. These people, Kim writes, are liars suffering from factitious disorders in which people feign symptoms either mental or physical in order to play the sick role. Likely your mind immediately jumped to Munchausen's or Munchausen's by proxy. But not all people play sick in that way. Quoted from an article by Dr. Kim Milder forms of factitious disorder include people who develop pseudoseizures, paralyzed limbs or other somatic issues often manifesting from underlying hidden trauma or unspeakable emotions. There is also pseudologia fantastica, literally fake fantasy words where people feel compelled to rattle off extremely detailed fantastical stories about themselves that are untrue. Dr. Kim suggests that these stories may stem from neglect or abuse in childhood, which makes a person crave attention and affection and makes them willing to say whatever they need to get it. While Tanya grew up wanting for nothing material, that doesn't mean that her home life was good. And while we don't know much about her childhood, emotionally, Tanya's life was undeniably shaken by both her accident that caused the scars on her arm and her father and brother being imprisoned for embezzling.
So she created a new Life. One that placed her in the epicenter of a tragedy 3,800 miles away from her home.
But it wasn't enough for her to pretend to be a survivor. She had to be the best survivor. Her story had all the layers to create the perfect tragic story. Attack, recovery, grief, loneliness, and strength. And she had the personality to sell that story. What's most mystifying about Tanya's hoax, though, is how many things she needed to lie about. For example, by the time Tanya created the support group, she had two degrees, one from a prestigious college. But despite its good reputation, most Americans have never heard of Asade College. So Tanya said she went to Harvard and Stanford. Never mind that if she had claimed to get her degree from a small no name college in Idaho or something, probably no one would have felt the need to look into her education. But Tanya wasn't worried about being caught. She was worried about being impressive.
Even after finding out that Tanya had been lying, it took time for some Survivors Network's members to see her in a bad light. They, of course, felt betrayed by her. But Guglielmo writes in the Woman who Wasn't There, even though we knew she wasn't the person she said she was, that didn't change our attachment to her. It took a while for that to happen. On September 14, 2011, Tanya was spotted in New York City with her mother. Another survivor, or I should say a real survivor, saw her on the street but didn't confront her. Following that, the only thing we know about Tanya's life to this day is that in July 2012, her employer in Spain found out about her lies in America and fired her. In 2013, a Spanish newspaper published the story of her swindle. Since then, her whereabouts are not publicly known.
Tanya fooled everyone. Even the trauma therapist she'd hired for the Survivors Network says he was completely taken by her story. She had private audiences with the family of Wells Crowther, the real name of the man with the red bandana. He'd only been 24 when he'd given his life to save others in the World Trade Center. And Tanya told his parents that she kept a picture of Wells in every room of her house because she found his face comforting. Without Tanya's story, Wells Crowther was still a hero. But his parents were crushed by the lies when Tanya was exposed. What kind of person lies about something like that?
Looking back at Tanya's tall tales, one survivor, Linda, says that she sees Tanya as nothing more than another terrorist from September 11. Despite the emotional devastation, Tanya left. She has never been penalized, and she has never apologized or shown remorse. The latter might be expected, but it's shocking to know that what Tanya did wasn't a crime. There is no American law that says you can't lie about being the victim of a national tragedy or start a support group for survivors. And speaking of the support group, Tanya never stole a single cent from the network. In fact, she dedicated hundreds, if not thousands of volunteer hours and in fact paid for many expenses out of her own pocket. The accolades of her survivorhood, it seems, were the kind of payment she was looking for. Tanya was not a citizen when she was living in America for four years, but she was never penalized for living with an expired visa. So she must have kept her visa current in the midst of all the work she was doing to share her story with the world.
If you've been around since last season, you know that it's uncommon for a catfisher of any kind to be punished for what they do. Lying isn't illegal, no matter how many people it hurts. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we find out Tanya has gone back to catfishing.
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