Tania Head: The 9/11 Faker
Hers was a tale of tragedy and survival. But it was all a lie.
When two Boeing 767s slammed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, over 2,700 people lost their lives — including over 400 law enforcement officers, paramedics, and firefighters. Along with the 189 people who died in the attack on the Pentagon and the 44 people aboard United Flight 93, this constituted the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
The few who survived the attacks on the World Trade Center had many difficult and complex emotions to deal with. There was relief, of course, along with trauma. There was also grief for their co-workers and friends who had died, and along with that, a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt.
After the horrible events of Sept. 11, some of the survivors came together to form support groups where they could share their feelings with people who could understand what they were going through. One group, the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, was founded by Gerry Bogacz, who had escaped from the North Tower on 9/11.
As word got out, the membership began to swell. Bogacz heard that there was another group online, headed by a woman named Tania Head, who had escaped the South Tower. He reached out to her, and after some e-mail correspondence, the two groups merged under the WTCSN banner in 2003.
Head became a regular fixture at in-person meetings and a frequent poster to the online group, where she shared her experience of that tragic day. While everyone’s story was heartbreaking, Head’s was the worst: she had been working for Merrill Lynch, helping to close a big merger on the 96th floor of the North Tower, when she saw the first plane hit the South Tower, where her fiance, Dave, worked. She described how, when the plane struck the North Tower, she was slammed into the marble wall and set on fire by the explosion; her right arm was covered in scars from the burns. She said that she saw her assistant decapitated in front of her, and as she encountered others who were horribly injured, she attempted to save them. One man who lay dying, she said, gave her a diamond wedding ring and begged her to give it to his fiance.
She only survived, she would later say, because of a man with a red bandanna who put out the fire on her back and helped her get her to safety. She said she woke up in the hospital five days later, in a wheelchair, her right arm barely functional. She would be there until that Thanksgiving, she told them.
It was there in the hospital that she found out that her beloved fiance, Dave, had been killed.
She often spoke about him and how in love they were. She described in detail his romantic proposal and how he had taken her to Hawaii for a small, non-legal commitment ceremony on the beach. They were planning to make it legal in October, she said, and were living together in Manhattan with their Golden Retriever, Elvis.
Her tragic story — of not only surviving, but being badly injured, helping others, and ending up a widow of sorts — brought tears to everyone’s eyes. And while it’s rarely recognized and never condoned, in certain support groups, there does often emerge a kind of hierarchy of trauma: the person with the worst story often becomes the star of the group. This was definitely the case with Head. While she consistently assured others that their stories were just as valid as hers, she also took full advantage of the attention and sympathy. She became a powerhouse for the group, organizing meetings, scheduling speakers, hosting events, and even getting the group recognized as a non-profit and securing funding. She often paid for expenses out of her own pocket.
Within six months of joining, Head was clearly running the group. Its founder, Bogacz, soon found that people were beginning to lose confidence in him as a leader — thanks to a whisper campaign against him, started by Head. At the next board election, he lost his bid for re-election. In his place, Head was voted in and given the new title of president of the WTCSN.
As president, she soon became the face of the survivors’ network, recalling her experience in media interviews and public events. She also worked tirelessly on the survivors’ behalf: at that time, the survivors were not allowed into Ground Zero. So Head, using her newfound fame, arranged for the survivors to finally visit the site and pay their respects. In 2005, she was chosen to lead tours for the Tribute WTC Visitors Center, and in fact led a tour comprising New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former New York Governor George Pataki, along with a large scrum of reporters. She was scheduled to speak at the event, but became overwhelmed with anxiety and had to leave.
However, the more times Head recited her story, some began to notice inconsistencies in it. Bogacz recalled that when he first met Head, he noticed that her arm did not look burned, but rather, like it had had skin grafts. He dismissed his own doubts, feeling it would be callous to question someone who had been through so much.
Other discrepancies began to show up as well: sometimes she would claim that she was working for Merrill Lynch on Sept. 11, other times, that she was working for Morgan Stanley.
Sometimes she would refer to Dave as her husband, and other times, as her fiance — an understandable enough discrepancy, since she probably felt as though they were already married. But one member was a little suspicious about her story about Dave; Head never shared any pictures of him, and his family was never present at any meetings or public events. When he asked her Dave’s last name, she gave it to him. He looked it up and saw that indeed, a man by that name had died in the 9/11 attack. However, as he read Dave’s obituaries and newspaper articles, he saw no mention of his engagement with Head — or anyone else. There was also no mention of his supposedly recent trip to Hawaii, either. This made the group member suspicious, but like Bogacz, he felt it would be cruel to question her about these details, and so kept his doubts to himself.
Since she was now the face of the survivors’ network, The New York Daily News ran her story in 2006, right before the fifth anniversary of the attacks. But reporters at The New York Times were very puzzled by this story. Not long after 9/11, they had interviewed everyone who had been in the towers during the attacks — 19 people in all — and Tania Head was not one of those people. So reporters Dave Dunlap and Serge Kovaleski began digging into Head’s account. They questioned other members of the survivors’ network about her and her story; in response, Head emailed the members, frantically telling them not to speak to the reporters. When Dunlap and Kovaleski would try to meet with her, she would repeatedly cancel scheduled meetings until finally she simply refused to take their calls. At the same time, she was constantly emailing and calling the other members, noticeably upset, telling them that these reporters were making up lies about her and begging them not to speak with them.
Her friends in the group did not understand why she was so upset. They told her she needed to speak to the reporters to set the record straight. One friend encouraged her to get a lawyer if she was so afraid of being libeled. Head did so, and the friend went with her for moral support. However, upon speaking with the lawyer, the friend realized Head was telling the lawyer a very different story than she had been telling to the survivors group and the media. Now, Head and Dave were not in fact married or even engaged, but had only known each other for a few weeks. Now Head wasn’t actually working for Merrill Lynch, but was only in the building applying for an internship.
A week after the flattering New York Daily News profile, The New York Times ran a piece exposing Head’s lies. No one in Dave’s family or circle of friends had ever heard of her. Merrill Lynch had no record of her as an employee, and the colleges she claimed she had degrees from — Yale and Stanford — had no record of her as a student, let alone granting her a degree. Her name was not even Tania Head; it was Alicia Esteve Head.
In fact, she had not even been in the country on Sept. 11. She had been in Barcelona, attending business school.
While she was caught lying about everything, no evidence emerged that she had committed any sort of financial fraud — quite the opposite: she had given the survivors group quite a bit of her own money. So it was difficult for many to understand why she would lie about such a thing.
The answer seems clear: she simply wanted the attention and adoration. A childhood friend from her native Barcelona said that as a child, Alicia had always needed to be the center of attention. Born to a wealthy Barcelonan family, she was the youngest of five children, and the only girl, so she was lavished with attention and considered the apple of her parents’ eyes.
She also showed a propensity for stretching the truth in order to gain sympathy or admiration. For example, her scarred right arm had actually been the result of a car accident while riding along the Spanish coast with some friends. It had been nearly severed, but doctors were able to reattach it and patch it with skin grafts. However, in later years, the story about her arm would change: she would sometimes say that she was with her boyfriend and had a car accident; other times, it was the result of a horseback riding accident. She also would tell her childhood friend tall tales about wealthy, handsome boyfriends who somehow never appeared in real life.
The friend also said that one important thing about Head was that she was absolutely in love with America and all things American. When she was younger, her family sent her to the US to study, and she absolutely fell in love with the country.
Although Head had not done anything illegal, it was still a painful betrayal to many of the survivors who had opened their hearts and trusted her. She had been their leader and spokesperson, and all the while, she had been lying to them and to everyone.
After the exposé hit the newsstands, Head simply disappeared. No one knew where she was or where she had gone. Some time later, in 2008, members of the survivors’ group received an email from a Spanish account claiming that Head had committed suicide.
That, too, was a lie. She was spotted on Sept. 14, 2011, on the streets of New York City, suspiciously close to the 10th anniversary commemoration.
As of this writing, no one knows where Head is. While many are relieved to be done with her, others worry that she may well be involved in yet another scam.
Sources:
“9/11 Woman Who Wasn’t There,The,” CNN.
Dunlap, David and Serge Kovaleski, “In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit,” The New York Times, Sept. 27, 2007.
“Great 9/11 Hoax, The,” Real Stories.
“September 11 Attacks,” History.com
Woman Who Wasn’t There, The, ID Films. Streamed on Amazon Prime.
