The Fake 9/11 Survivor: The Shocking Lies of Tania Head

This just in. A plane has smashed right dead into the center of the World Trade Center.

The attention turned to searching for the missing, weary rescue worker digging in a desperate search for survivors. Tanya Head, survivor of the World Trade Center attack. She became one of the best-known victims of 9/11. "I was on the South Tower and I lost my fiancé that day."

The story may be a complete fabrication. "Are you a fraud, Tanya?"

"I'm Seri. I'm Hannah. And welcome to Right-Handed." This is a case I've had on my list for a very, very long time, and it's quite unsatisfying because it's like the 24th anniversary this year. I should have held out for next year, but, hey man, we can't do Harambe and Tanya Head in the same year. The world will explode.

It's true. And look, we had to do it this year because if you're listening to this on the day of release, general release, then it is, of course, September the 11th. September the 11th, 2001, specifically, is a date that needs no introduction. At 8:46 a.m. in New York, the first hijacked plane of the 9/11 attacks, American Airlines Flight 11, collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center. As millions of people across the world watched the now rolling news coverage, at 9:03 a.m., a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the South Tower. 9:37 a.m., a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington D.C. And then at 10:03 a.m., a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a field in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania. After heroic attempts by the passengers and crew to try and regain control from the al-Qaeda hijackers, it was the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil in history, killing 2,977 people. And it changed the world forever, setting in motion sweeping changes to U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism practices and launched two major wars. The ripple effect of the attack still impacts our lives to this day. From how we get on airplanes to government surveillance and civil liberties, but this is not an episode about the large-scale global aftermath of 9/11, or even an episode on how jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams. This is the story of just one woman, and her name is Tanya Head. Tanya Head was a woman who made it out of the collapsing South Tower, who had to endure hell, lost the love of her life in the attacks, and yet went on to find the strength to campaign for her fellow survivors as the president of the World Trade Center Survivors Network. She became a beacon of hope for millions, a woman who made miracles seem possible. And her story of survival against the odds was exactly what people needed to hear, to see, to feel after this catastrophe that had left us all feeling more vulnerable than we'd ever felt before.

"The problem was, literally none of it was true. Not a single thing that Seri just said."

"Yeah. You know how they say there's like a kernel of truth in everything?"

"Mhm."

"Nah."

"Not, not this time. Not even the little bit of kernel that's stuck in your teeth does not exist in this story." Tanya Head hadn't even been in the U.S. on 9/11. Tanya Head had never been to the World Trade Center ever, and Tanya Head was not her real name. So why and how did this woman fool the world with the hoax of all hoaxes? Well, let's get back to that nightmare day, 9/11, 2001. As I said, exactly 24 years ago today, if you are listening on the day of release, everyone old enough to know what was going on remembers exactly where they were that day. I was at school.

"Presumably, you were as well."

"I was at school. Yeah."

"And they sent us home."

"Mhm."

"We got sent home. And I remember coming back to my parents' house, and my parents have lived in that house for a very long time. And it's been remodeled multiple times. And the only way I can actually remember what it looked like back in 2001 was because of the vivid memory I have of sitting on the sofa in the living room and watching the TV of rolling news of 9/11 happening."

"It is such a like vivid memory. And we're talking 24 years ago. I'm 35, so like we were young."

"Mhm."

"And I remember us being sent home. And obviously, it was just like this unbelievable thing. My dad used to work for Lehman Brothers at the time, and he had also been sent home. He'd come back, and I have told the story before, I think, on Under the Duvet. But it's just such a crazy, crazy thing that because my dad worked for Lehman Brothers in London, the Lehman Brothers offices in New York were in the World Trade Center, and they were that morning on a call, like a video conference call with New York when the planes hit. So they're talking to the New York office when all of a sudden the video footage just cuts off. They're screaming, shouting, a loud bang, and then it just goes dead. And obviously, when you work in a bank, you've got rolling news going on all the time. And it's when they turned around and looked at the screens to try and figure out what was going on, that they saw a plane had hit that tower that their colleagues were in, that they had been on a video conference call with at the exact time that the planes hit. It's just like unbelievable. It's crazy, crazy, crazy coincidence. And yeah, like I think everybody probably has quite a visceral memory of that day if you are old enough to."

I think we all watched in horror as the towers fell and thousands of people died, sat at their desks for what should have just been an ordinary day at work. Then there were those left still alive after the impact, but stuck inside the burning towers, trying to make their way out of these collapsing buildings. And who can forget the haunting image of the falling man, an unidentified figure who had apparently leapt from a window of one of the towers, who was captured plummeting headfirst to the ground.

"I think there's a documentary about trying to identify him."

"I think it's just called The Falling Man. And the important thing is to understand about the towers and the way in which they came down was that many of the people who managed to escape, because there were lots and lots of people who did escape the towers, most of them had been below the point of impact where the planes had hit. So on the lower floors, among thousands of people who have been in the buildings today, we know that just 19 people, one nine, managed to escape from offices above or at the collision points."

Something I think about when, um, the world gets me down is, uh, that Steve Bashi, the actor, before he was an actor, he was a firefighter, and he went down to the World Trade Center to get people out of the rubble because he had the training.

"Didn't tell anyone. Just went pulling people out."

"Again, very much the opposite of everybody else in this [ __ ] story. Not everybody, obviously. Da, that's not her real name. And, uh, a couple of people will come on too at the end. But yeah, uh, I think it, you'd be hard-pushed to find a bigger incident that shaped everything, quite literally everything that has occurred in this century. And yeah, another thing that, um, I remember reading about 9/11, maybe when I went to Ground Zero, cuz I did go there, um, quite a few years ago, and I was, it sounds weird, I was shocked by how much it moved me emotionally. Obviously, you nearly 3,000 people [ __ ] died, and then the rest of the people who died afterwards as a result of like injuries sustained or like firefighters who, um, you know, died of [ __ ] cancer because they had gone in there and saved people. But yeah, it was, it was really harrowing. And I think the most harrowing exhibit for me was they have, um, these telephones like attached to the wall as part of this installation, and you pick up a telephone, you put it to your ear, and it's the voice messages of people who know they're going to die, trapped inside, that they left their loved ones, and it is just, it's honestly, it's [ __ ] hideous. But one of the reasons apparently, uh, it was so bad, not just because two massive [ __ ] planes crashed into these buildings, was because back then in 2001, so much was just on paper, and paper was just kindling. It was just burning everything even more. And, um, yeah, it, it's just so hard to cast your mind back to a time when that was one of the fundamental problems for why it was so, so horrific. And back then, turn your head, claimed to be one of those 19 people that survived from above the collision points."

"Yeah, cuz just to be clear, at the time they didn't know exactly how many people had survived from above the collision points, but they knew it wasn't a lot. So, uh, immediately saying that made your story even more shocking, even at the time, than if you had been below the point of collision. And so right out the gate, lying about being there is already completely uncomfortable."

"Yeah."

"But being one of the ones who survived in the most difficult part of the building, do you know?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"Really sets the stage for what we're going to learn about Tanya Head and who she claimed to be, but actually who she really is."

"Yes. Absolutely. Because like you said, she could have just said she was in there. Thousands of people were in there. Loads of people [ __ ] got out. She could have easily just said she was one of them. But no."

"No. As you will find out with Tanya, that's just not good enough. She wasn't satisfied with being one of the many hundreds of people who did escape."

"I think if I was going to lie, obviously I wouldn't, but I'd be like, 'Yeah, Steve, pull me out.'"

"That's that would be what I would lie about."

"Honestly, if Steve had like made a thing of it, Tanya Head would have said that. She couldn't be normal enough. She had to be not only there, but in the worst possible place it was possible to be on that day. Her story had to be the most bombastic, the most intense, the most everything."

"I'm just going to look up what the word t, what the name Tanya means to see if there's any like..."

"Though it's not her real name."

"I know, but if you choose one, do you know what I mean?"

"Sure. Sure. Sure."

"It means fairy queen. Make believe. Interesting."

And Tanya, the fairy queen, claimed that she worked for Merrill Lynch and that her desk was on the 78th floor of the South Tower. On the morning of September the 11th, 2001, Tanya was waiting for a lift after a meeting when the plane smashed into the side of the building. She saw her assistant actually get decapitated in front of her very eyes, and then her body was thrown across the floor by the impact, and then she passed out. When Tanya came to, she was surrounded by flames and chaos as the building was collapsing. Tanya said she clambered over unconscious, dead, and dying colleagues, trying to find some way out. The scene was the closest thing Tanya could imagine to hell itself, but she said she kept crawling forward. And then she heard the voice of a man. He was talking to her and holding out a ring. He hoarsely whispered two words: "My wife," imploring Tanya to please take his wedding ring to make sure it got to his wife. And they were apparently his final words. As the seconds ticked on, the 78th floor was becoming engulfed by flames. Tanya's right arm was in agony, and she felt like her whole body was on fire. But she was determined to make it out alive. The image she held onto, keeping her going, was that of her wedding dress. Tanya was engaged, and her fiancé Dave also worked in the World Trade Center, so she was determined to make it out and make it back to Dave. That's what kept her going through the horror of all of it that morning. Well, that's what she told the rest of the world.

The city was reeling from what had happened. It needed to clean up the dust and debris filling up the streets of downtown New York. Emergency services were still looking for survivors in the days after the attack. Then it became a recovery mission to find as many bodies as possible. And everyday people, and Steve Bashi alongside the authorities, were trying to do all they could to help those who had suffered unimaginable loss that day. But as you can imagine, a major concern filling everybody's mind was: How had this happened? Who had carried out this attack? And what was the U.S. going to do in retaliation? Slowly, as the weeks passed, thoughts did turn to how the nation could pay their respects to those who had died. But the survivors, well, they just weren't really part of that plan. So, no one in the immediate aftermath was too concerned with Tanya Head or anything she had to say.

"Yeah, I think that is like a fundamental part of the story that you have to understand as to how she managed to get away with it, right? Because there's so many things for everybody to worry about. There's the fact that the Twin Towers have [ __ ] collapsed. Downtown New York is in a state of mess. People are [ __ ] terrified. The U.S. is thinking about foreign policy. What are we going to do to like, uh, you know, we've just got punched in the face. Like, what are we going to do about this? And survivors were really kind of the bottom of the heap. So, Fat Tiny had to creep into that part of this story made it certainly much more easy for her to get away with spinning her web of ice."

It's fair to say that many true survivors, having lived through the most devastating terrorist plot that America has ever seen, felt completely abandoned, disoriented, and at a loss for how to move on.

"For a lot of them, the question that haunted them the most was, 'Why me?' They had no one to to explain the terror and the trauma of what they had lived through and why they had survived. And of course, like, you know, a lot of them in the documentaries that I watch talk about going to therapy, talk about opening up to people, but it's like this feeling of this one significant event was so enormous, so like paradigm-shifting. And I lived through that, and I don't know how. And I saw so many dead bodies, and so many people died, and I saw the devastation it caused, and how much of a massive impact this had, that they still felt like when they went to therapy, nobody could really understand what they had been through because it was such a unique experience. And so they definitely have this very, very intense feeling of survivor's guilt that they feel nobody else can truly understand. And Tanya absorbed all of these feelings and dished them back up to add color to her own story. And we're going to have a listen here to a clip of Tanya talking about her survivor's guilt, which is taken from the documentary The Woman Who Wasn't There. And, uh, we'll talk about it on the other side, but here you go."

"My co-workers had families. They had little kids, and they died, and I didn't. So why, why, why am I special? Why, why was I spared? Why didn't they make it? Why was, why did I make it? Was it God? Was it faith? Is it because we have something to do? Was it because we were shielded by the elevator machinery? It just makes you go crazy."

"We're going to listen to a few more clips throughout this episode of Tanya, um, speaking. But I think there's a little flavor, and if you are watching this rather than just listening to the audio, we are releasing this as a full video recording, which you can watch on the Red-Handed YouTube, uh, channel. So, go check that out. But I think it's the way she's talking, right? The way she's lying. You still like her, right?"

"I know she's lying. I know she's lying, and I know all of the lies she's going to go on and tell."

"But she comes across as very jovial, right?"

"As very engaging, very warm, very upbeat. She's lived through this horrific nightmare atrocity that, you know, other people could only but imagine, but yet look how, look how upbeat she is."

"And I think that definitely plays a part in all of this. I don't know how much of it is intentional, right? But I think Tanya Head, she could have played this straight, like weeping, crying, lower than low, 'I've been through hell' persona, but she doesn't."

"I think that's why she gets away with it for so long."

"100%. And that's why so many of the survivors gravitate towards her because they're like, 'Tanya went through far worse than I did. She lost the love of her life. She was up above the collision point. She saw her assistant get decapitated. But look at her. She's pulling herself together. She's so upbeat. She's so positive. I should be the same.'"

"And I think she does a good job. I honestly think, and we're going to talk about this as we listen to a few more clips of of Tanya Head, but I think in the last 10 years of doing this, she's the best liar I've ever seen."

"Interesting."

"And I will say this before somebody says it in the comments, like she's smiling. She keeps smiling as she's talking. Of course, like, you guys, we can put that down to like duping delight. She knows she's lying, and she can't help but let this little smile creep across her mouth because she's like, 'Oh, they're buying this. They're buying this.' Because although that clip is in The Woman Who Wasn't There documentary, it was obviously filmed way before, and Tanya is like a willing participant in this interview, and she, she loves telling her story. Obviously, don't lie about something so horrific. But if you need to get away with something just in your day-to-day life, being likable is the number one hot tip I'm going to give you. Make people like you, and then it will be easier for you to get what you want. People don't like crocodile tears, and it's easier, I think, to sniff out as well."

"Exactly. It's because it's kind of what's expected. People lie when they're in crisis. You know, obviously lying is negative, but like the negatives like lying of like the sobbing or the the anger or whatever, all of those like negative sad face emotions. We're better at spotting lies in those, I think. And I think you would have to be a ridiculously good actor to pull that off convincingly. We're also, I know we've said this multiple times on Red Handed before, like we're not very good at detecting deception. We think that we are, but we're not actually very good at detecting deception. And people don't have a uniform way in which they behave when they are grieving or in shock or trauma. But if you do a bad job of crying, there's something uncanny valley about it. But if you do have this jovial, upbeat kind of positive, 'I'm a survivor' attitude, as we see with Tanya Head, it's far harder for people to poke holes in it. And I will also say that she was, uh, not lucky, but she is operating within a sphere of a circumstance that people are not going to question as much because who wants to be that [ __ ] who's like, 'Me? Yeah.' It's like the cancer con artists or like, you know, you don't want to accuse anyone of lying about something so horrible. So people wait till they're really sure before getting you. But because of this, this phenomenon, this like extraordinarily unique experience of 9/11 survivors and them feeling like they didn't, there was this communal feeling of being left behind, but also being unable to process what had happened to them. So they turned to each other. The World Trade Center Survivors Network was born out of the need to share their stories and talk freely about what had happened. It started as an open online group, which was pretty quiet and informal at first, but grew as more and more people realized that they needed somewhere to turn. Tanya didn't post right away. At first, she just watched, but after a while, she'd type up a short line or two with a few details from the story that we told you at the top."

"Yeah. Another very important part of the story is that Tanya doesn't come forward with this story for a long time. She's not there like the next day screaming and shouting about how she survived. Well, she's not in the U.S., as you told us. Um, she waits weeks. And initially, on this forum, Tanya keeps things very vague, almost as if she was testing the waters. But she needn't have worried. In a group of survivors, each dealing with their own trauma, they had no reason to doubt her. Everyone welcomed Tanya, as they would with any new member. There was no vetting system. I mean, why would there be?"

"Yeah. It's not like you can on like True Crime podcast Facebook groups where they're like, 'What's the title of episode 307?'"

"You're not going to do that. It was an exclusive club that nobody wanted to be a part of. But this environment gave Tanya Head pretty much carte blanche to weave her deceptive story of immense courage and place herself at the center of this unimaginable tragedy and this vulnerable group of survivors. Soon, the group started to hold in-person meetings of more than 100 people at a time. It was the perfect audience for Tanya Head to tell the full version of her story, which now included the heartbreaking twist of how she'd woken up in hospital almost a week after the attack, only to discover that her fiancé Dave, who had been in the North Tower when the first plane had crashed, Dave, who had kept her going through it all, Dave, the reason she made it out, Dave didn't make it out alive. And we've got another clip for you here of Tanya talking about Dave on the 5-year anniversary of 9/11."

"It's the morning of September 11th, and we're all going to go to the official ceremony at the site, and, uh, we hope to make it there by the first moment of silence at 8:46. It's one of the hardest experiences of my life to go down that ramp every anniversary, but I do it for Dave, cuz I, I knew he, he wants me to be there. But, um, let me show you something. [Music] Um, Dave and I met outside the World Trade Center when he stole my cab. So every year when I go to the site, I bring a New York City cab with me, and I put it in the, um, reflection pool, um, so that he knows that I remember."

"For the audio only of you, it sounds like she's saying 'cup.' She's saying 'cab,' like taxi cab. And so she's invented this meet-cute for her and Dave, which is, as luck would have it, at the World Trade Center. And she's got a little New York yellow taxi like..."

"Model."

"Model toy. God, she's good. She is very, very good. Do you see what I mean though, by like she's such a good liar? The way she's like telling the story about Dave and then just effortlessly slips into, 'Oh, let me show you something.' It's just, if she weren't so [ __ ] sick, it would be admirable how good a liar she is. It's honestly, it's remarkable. And as she told her story in full for the first time, the survivors group wept along with her. And from that point on, she was never going to let that go."

Like we said, Tanya only stepped forward with her story a little bit later, once the reports had already been published in the press and other survivors had already shared their stories. So by this point, Tanya already had a wealth of information that she could mine from. And when she shared what had happened to her, people were horrified, amazed, and yes, in awe that she had come out alive. And she, she just can't stop. Soon she adds in this part of the story about how her right arm had been totally torn off in the impact, right? And that it had been hanging off her body by just like a sinew. And how as she was trying desperately to crawl out of this burning hellscape, this man was like grabbing at her arm and pulling it, and she was terrified that it was going to rip right off. And so she like takes this arm and tucks it into her top to try and save it in the hopes that doctors might be able to reattach it if she makes it out of this building. And look, Tanya had the scars on her arm to prove it. It would be years before anybody discovered that those scars had actually come from a car accident when Tanya had been in her 20s. And it's one thing me telling you guys about her heroic experience. Let's, let's have a listen to the woman herself tell us a bit about it."

"I was, I was in the hospital until Thanksgiving, November 2001. My back was really burned. My arm was burned. I couldn't walk. So, I was in a wheelchair. I couldn't even pull myself, um, the wheelchair, cuz I only had one good arm. So, you know, between the wheelchair, the trauma, the loss, I, I didn't know where to start. It was just too hard. It was like looking at a mountain that was 20,000 feet tall."

"I'm sure a lot of people felt that way, and I'm sure that the visceral feeling that you get from listening to Tanya's story is coming from the fact that she has read actual survivors talking about what they went through."

"If I sat and read a forum in which people were talking about, I don't know, something horrible happening like losing a baby, I too, I'm sure within 24 hours would be able to tell a convincing story. Not as convincing as ting your head, but you're getting all the meat of the story right that you need. You're getting all the feelings that these people naturally felt. And that's exactly what she does. And over time, her confidence and creativity with these stories and her lies only seem to grow. In later versions of her story, Tanya's taxi fiancé Dave suddenly became her husband. Uh, fiancé or husband seemed to be interchangeable depending on who she was talking to. She told some people that they'd been married in a private ceremony, but the proper celebrations were still to come. And to some, she said that she had actually got a judge to marry her and Dave posthumously, which you can't do. No, I checked. You cannot marry a dead person. Maybe Tanya discovered that losing her husband, not just fiancé, got her an ounce more of that delicious sympathy and attention that she craved so much. Also, I think the word fiancé is a word that a lot of people don't like to use. It's a weird word."

"It's a weird word. It just, oh, my fiancé. It just sounds, it sounds pretentious. That's what it sounds. It sounds pretentious. So, no. Maybe she's just like, yeah, I don't like this word. I'm going to start saying husband."

"And just to be clear, Dave, real man, real man who died in 9/11."

"Oh, that's foul. I didn't know that."

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She doesn't just pick a name out of thin air. Well, she does. Um, but she finds a Dave, right?"

"She finds a Dave. So, she's kind of going through all the reports, right, of people who died. And, um, you know, maybe Dave's family had posted about him. I, I don't know exactly where she, she got him from, but she finds out about this guy Dave. She looks at his social media. She learns all about him, and she starts telling herself this story of this love affair that the two of them had. And she like waxes lyrical in in this documentary, which I'd highly recommend people watching, because there's so much footage of Tanya Head talking, uh, of like how he proposed to her, and how he like, you know, got them little Hawaiian shirts, and then cooked a disgusting meal that he didn't know how to cook, but it was like Hawaiian food, and then he whisked her off to Hawaii because she had been so stressed at work, and then how he proposed, and like all of these lies, all of these lies. It's unbelievable. And Dave's family obviously find out about her later, and they're like, 'What the f***?' So, yeah, Dave's a real guy. Don't know whether he was a cap stealer or not. Um, but he was a person who died in 9/11 who she just completely, for one of a better word, hijacks his life and death."

And whenever Tanya told the story of the poor, dying man with the wedding ring, people reacted with horror. Nobody stopped to ask who he was or whether Tanya had bothered to get that ring to his wife. Everyone just felt such sympathy for what she had gone through. No one was going to even gently probe a survivor. You would come across as an abominable [ __ ] wouldn't you? Be like, "What floor did you say it was again? Who was it? Did you get the ring back?"

"I mean, she'd have had an answer anyway."

"But there's, there's no real deep digging."

"No."

"And again, I, I'm not criticizing the people who believed her."

"They are just doing the correct humane thing, which is when a person tells you a story like this to say, 'Oh my god, that is awful. You poor person.' And Tanya Head realized quite quickly that she could make all of that work for her. She played on everyone's understanding that some things were just too traumatic and too personal to want to relive. In fact, Tanya's story was so extreme that it quickly seemed to outshine everybody else's. Many of the 500 members of the Survivors Network became good friends of hers. When they had nobody to turn to, when some days seemed harder to carry on than others, they saw how well she was doing, and this inspired some of them to heal. Tanya seemed to them to be coping with her loss remarkably well, recovering in a way that many of them were struggling to even imagine. She became an inspiration, and soon Tanya began to become a little bit more vocal within the group. Her confidence and involvement grew by the day. She helped to set up fundraisers and find speakers for meetings. She donated her time and even her money. She appeared to be truly dedicated to the survivors. And soon enough, she upped the ante, and she started at Ground Zero. In the months after the attack, some groups, including the families of the victims, were given permission to go onto Ground Zero, which, if you don't know, is where the towers used to be, to pay their respects. But even two years after the attack, not a single survivor had been allowed in. And I think that's just further proof, right, of the fact that, like we said earlier in the episode, how the survivors kind of felt a bit sidelined. It wasn't just a feeling. Like there is real evidence of the fact that people bizarrely weren't that bothered about them. And I don't want to be unfair. Maybe not that they weren't bothered, but they were certainly at the bottom of the pile. So a lot of survivors did feel completely overlooked by being denied entry to the site of Ground Zero. A lot of them said that they thought it might help bring them a bit of closure or at least help a little bit in healing their trauma. But the authorities weren't budging. It was the perfect opportunity for Tanya Head to come to the rescue. And somehow, Tanya Head worked her magic. And I really don't know much more than that, how she actually managed it."

"That toy car."

"Yeah. I genu, she comes across as very credible, very believable. She's a really good talker. And Tanya worked her magic and got the authorities to agree. Got them to agree to allow the survivors to go onto Ground Zero for the very first time in years since the attack. We've played you guys like three clips from that documentary, and I think it's fair to say she is very engaging. She's very confident. She's a very good storyteller."

"Brings her own props."

"Absolutely. And I think you'd have to be to manage everything she managed to pull off. And so in April 2004, the first group of survivors were able to enter the site. It was a huge win, and Tanya massively impressed everyone at the Survivors Network with her dedication and her ability to get things done. And the attention she got only grew from there. And what's so interesting, I think, about this story is if Tanya had known when to stop, she could have continued this facade forever to this day. She would have cemented her legacy as a 9/11 survivor and she would have got ample love and attention from those in the group and those outside. Every anniversary, she could have got another little like article in the press. She could have got another little like, uh, ceremony she goes to to cut a ribbon or something. She, she could have absolutely made that her life story if she had known when to stop. She could have even met someone, romantically convinced him or her of that story, and then dined out on it for the rest of her life. Every time they have an argument, 'I'm traumatized. I'm a 9/11 survivor above the point of collision.' She could have, if she wanted to, but Tanya Head could not get enough. And she didn't know how or when to [ __ ] quit. She played up her heartbreak, telling people how she had finally at last come to terms with Dave's death, and how she had bravely given her wedding dress to charity. And I think she realizes quite quickly that what makes her stand out is not only that she's pretending to have been in the worst possible situation, like above the point of collision or at the point of collision, cuz remember her assistant got decapitated by that plane, but I think she realizes that story of lost love of trying to get out of there to be with Dave only to find out that he's died clearly worked in that attention-grabbing arena."

"Well, she's playing both sides, isn't she? Because she's like, 'Yeah, I'm a survivor, so I understand you, but I also lost someone, so I understand you too.'"

"Absolutely. She's got it all. She's got it all. And so realizing this, Tanya turned the notch up on that as well."

"When she first told her tale of escape, she'd casually mentioned seeing a man in a red bandana during her efforts to get out of the building. At the time, Jerry Bogatch, co-founder of the Survivor Network, asked her a bit more about this red bandana man. And Tanya told Jerry that she'd only seen this man. That was it. There was no more to the story than that. So, they moved on. But after making tsunami-sized waves in the Survivors Network, Tanya suddenly found herself elaborating a little bit more. And now, Bandana Man had a name: Wells Crowther. And this is why I said if Tanya had even had a whiff of the fact that Steve Bushi was there, she would have brought him into it. Because Wells Crowther was a very real 24-year-old trader and volunteer firefighter who had given his life in order to help others escape the towers on 9/11. His incredibly brave story by this point had already been told in the press. And after his sacrifice, he became the first citizen ever to be made an honorary member of the New York Fire Department. And Tanya knew goddamn well how beloved Wells's story was, a young man like that to save people and sacrifice himself. She knew that Wells had been in the South Tower as well and had helped rescue people, and that he had saved lives. So why couldn't Wells have helped her, too? What harm would it do to put Wells into her story? As you can see, this is very much the evolution of Tanya Head. As her confidence grew and she tricked more and more people, including top officials. By the way, I'm sure she felt like there was nothing she couldn't do and nothing she couldn't say. And as for attaching herself to Wells's story, it's so parasitic. Her feeding off the adoration and recognition of an actual genuine hero, just pulling him into her story to give hers another boost. And this is the vivid detail that Tanya added to her story. Her new scene happened as she was clambering over the dismembered bodies and all of the gore, which she does not hold back on, by the way. And all of a sudden, she felt something. She was on fire. She could smell her own skin burning, and was helpless to put it out with her arm hanging off, and she couldn't move. But then she felt someone patting out the flames on her back. Whoever it was had saved her, because it was only after this fire had been put out that Tanya was able to escape. And wouldn't you know it, that guardian angel that patted out the flames on Tanya Head was only the emblem of New York bravery himself, Wells Crowther. What a perfect person to pick to feature in your story, a known hero who everybody already loves. Why not ride on those coattails as well and make your own story even more touching? And since everyone from Tanya's survival tale was dead, no one could challenge her."

"All her colleagues are dead, as she well [ __ ] knows."

"And this extra element of the story even got back to Wells Crowther's family, and they were thrilled to learn that their hero relative had saved yet another life. It's so sick. In, in the documentary, there's an interview with Wells's mother, and she's talking about how happy she was to hear from people in the network saying, 'Oh, you should know Wells saved another woman. Here's her name, Tanya.' And then Wells Crowther's mother is like, 'Oh, I would love to meet her. I would love to speak to her just to understand a bit more about what my son did.' And Tanya's really reluctant. She's really, really reluctant to do it. She's like, 'No, no, no, no, no.' And she twists it even more to blame other people for why she doesn't want to do it. And she says it's because she's met with other family members of people who died in 9/11, and how they had been horrible to her. Probably, you know, they're traumatized, but they were awful to her because they were angry she had survived and their loved one had died. And that's why she was scared to meet Wells Cro's mother. Again, do you know what I mean? She's like blaming innocent people, cuz I can't imagine anybody really did that. And if they did, of course, they're not in their right minds if they did. But to use that as the reason, cuz again, you're a victim. You're a victim, Tanya. You're being bullied by these people because you survived. She's such a [ __ ] piece of [ __ ]."

In the end, though, in 2006, Tanya was invited to an annual memorial concert that was held in Wells's honor, and she did go, but she was too emotional to speak. She couldn't possibly. And if you think that this was Tanya showing restraint, possibly even humility, you're wrong. You're absolutely wrong, because she didn't shy away from having her story told at this memorial. She got her mate to do it for her. So, she just doesn't want anyone to see the whites of her eyes.

"I think I think it's also kind of the perfect situation, right? It's like Wells isn't there to speak for himself. This whole memorial is there for him and the lives that he saved. I almost think in a weird, perverse way, Tanya was like, 'If I stand out there, it kind of slightly weakens my legacy because I'm still here and people will feel less sorry for me because I am still alive. I am still walking. The closest I can come to what Wells has lost, which is his [ __ ] life in the in the attempt to save other people, is I'll send my friend up there who can also say much more heroic and nice things about me and how I've made her better.' Because the, the woman, the friend that goes up there is this lady called Linda, who is absolutely, seems like a very, very nice lady, a long-suffering friend of Tanya's. Goes up there and, you know, she says, 'Tanya saved me because she had been through far worse than I had.' She certainly can't say that about herself, and she knows that."

"It would be distasteful to say it at this moment."

"Oh, you're so right. I hadn't thought of that."

"It's perfect."

"What a [ __ ] piece of work."

So, yes, with little stunts like this over the years, Tanya Head grew in respect, stature, and crucially, sympathy. With every lie, she moved from within the Survivors Network. Whenever there were instances of Tanya not wanting to answer a question or perhaps when her answers changed with each retelling, nobody really batted an eyelid. Most people put it down to trauma and all the chaos that they had all lived through. Tanya would also explain away her reluctance to sometimes speak by saying, you know, like I said, she'd had these negative experiences with people who had been angry at her for surviving, so she should just keep to herself and just stay within the Survivors Network. Or she'd say, this is another one that I, I just found so despicable. Um, when Wells Crowther's mother wants to speak to her, she also says, "Oh, well, I just, I don't want to put any more horrible images in your head of what your son went through." She's a mother. Do you not think all the horrible images that are possible to exist in her head are already there? She's honestly, it's just, it's so gross. And again, you see the manipulation to make herself the martyr. 'I don't want to speak to you, even though that's what you're asking me as a woman who lost her son in there, because I don't want to make it worse for you. I've got your best interests at heart. I will keep these images in my head. It's my burden to suffer with them.' And yeah, I just think that besmirching of victim's families as well by saying they have been cruel to her, it's just, it's another like horrible, rotten cherry on the cake. But yeah, I think in that comment, you can see that Tanya Head is willing to say just about anything about just about anyone to keep getting what she wanted. And as her fame grew, there was one member of the Survivors Network who really wanted to speak to her. Cynthia Shepard, a local postal worker, had heard Tanya's story and felt a sense of connection. Cynthia had lost her fiancé in the North Tower, just like Tanya had claimed to. And while Cynthia hadn't been in the buildings herself, she had been delivering post in the area when the planes hit, and she had suffered the immense trauma of witnessing people jumping out of the burning buildings and knowing that her fiancé was inside. And I think for those who can't remember it, I think what is quite often not retold is that in the however many minutes between the first and second plane, everyone thought it was an accident. That's what was being reported. But when the second plane happens, they're like, 'Oh, no. This is on purpose.' And the narrative completely changed in that second."

"There's really weird collections of photos of when the first plane goes, and loads of people are taking pictures of it because they don't really know what they're looking at. And then it's the second plane, and then everything changes."

"Absolutely. Because you're right. You're completely right. It's such a, a shift in mentality. The first thing, the first plane hits, of course, it's it's nightmarish what you're witnessing. Second plane hits, and now it is you're under attack. It's like apocalyptic on a biblical scale, like planes falling out of the sky, but being targeted into downtown New York. So, absolutely, I think it's not just the people who were inside. It's not just the people who lost their families or lost their lost their loved ones. It is people like Cynthia who were witnessing the absolute destruction of safety and security, everything that we in the West believe that we had had. And Cynthia thought that Tanya would understand her and what she had been through. They had so much in common. They had both lost the loves of their lives inside the North Tower. But Tanya seemed to dodge all of Cynthia's requests to chat. Time and time again, Cynthia would try to connect, but Tanya seemed to actively avoid her. And Cynthia was left feeling rejected and..."

completely confused. And I just think this is really sad because tragically Cynthia basically figured that she wasn't worthy of a survivor's time or attention. She hadn't actually been inside the towers after all. She hadn't had to climb over dead colleagues and nearly burned to death. And so poor Cynthia was left feeling convinced that she had been bothering this poor woman Tanya had someone who had actually survived the attack and lost her fiancé.

And this is a sentiment that wasn't isolated to Cynthia. We absolutely recommend that you guys go and watch the woman who wasn't there. It's on YouTube. It's full of clips from all of these people, not just Tanya, but other survivors as well. And there is this repeated theme that survivors really felt like their stories were insignificant compared to Tanya and what she had been through and the horrors she had seen and the enormity of her loss. So what she's done is gaslight them into thinking that their trauma is not particularly valid, actually. And they do sort of add that Tanya told them actively not to feel like that, but it's a pretty unavoidable side effect of what she's done there.

There's so many of them just saying like, I felt like such a charlatan and a fraud for feeling down for not being able to get out of bed in the morning because I was like, I was okay. I was way below the collision point, you know? Look at what Tanya's been through. Why am I complaining? It is such a head [ __ ] what she did to these people. And they do say, and all the text messages that you see and the messages that you see posted on the forum by Tanya, is her telling people not to feel that way, that everybody's trauma is equal.

But Linda, the friend that we mentioned earlier, who she made read her like living eulogy at Wells Crother's um memorial, she does say that Tanya would do this thing that she said she had been told to do in therapy, right? Tanya told Linda um that she had to practice these flooding exercises where she had to talk and talk and talk and talk about her trauma in front of another survivor. And she chose Linda to do this. And Linda was like, "We did this for so long. We did this so many times." And at some point I told her, "I can't cope with this anymore. I'm so sorry, Tanya. I feel like a terrible friend, but I can't do this anymore." And Tanya apparently, according to Linda, who I absolutely believe, said that she turned to her and say, "How dare you say that to me? What I went through was so much worse than what you went through." Mhm. So, I don't believe that that was what she was saying when she knew there wouldn't be evidence of it.

So yeah, it's all pretty gross, but it has to be said that amongst all this deception, Tanya Head was living the lie to the absolute full and getting some pretty good results for the survivors. She worked tirelessly to get the survivors recognition, campaign for more resources and more support. And she was really bloody good at it, much better, unfortunately, than everybody else in the group. Probably because they were [ __ ] traumatized. And she's not. In fact, it was thanks to Tanya Head that the survivors got their own display in the visitor center at the World Trade Center. That's [ __ ] wild. Something they had wanted for so long. A full 4 years after the attacks, Tanya had brought their narrative into the official fold.

But with every positive, seemingly selfless step forward for the survivors being no mistake, Tanya got something for herself, too. Recognition, which was always really, I think, her ultimate goal. I don't see how it can have been anything else. No, we'll talk about her motive like motives later because we'll have a little look at like her childhood and things like that. But yeah, she's very good at it. She does a very good job and some of the survivors even say even after we found out she had been lying about everything. I wasn't that mad because she did so much for us as a cause, so much for us as a as a community, as a group of people.

So, as the tribute center was opened on the 4th anniversary of the attack, Tanya was invited along with the other survivors to be a part of the big day. As she was, after all, the person who had got them their exhibit. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, New York Governor George Pataki, and the mayor at the time of the attacks, Rudy Giuliani. Boo were all there. And there was Tanya. In all the videos, all the pictures, you can see her standing there right alongside all of them, front and bloody center.

After that, along with the other survivors from the network, Tanya began to lead tours at the World Trade Center. She talked of the unimaginable horror and total destruction of that day and how she'd survived in the face of immense adversity. She spoke about her grief and her loss, how much the city had suffered, but she always maintained that New Yorkers could all come together to find hope and to move on. And this gained her a lot of respect, a respect that Tanya absolutely reveled in. I think what she's done obviously if you take the ethics out of it what she's done there is quite clever because after 9/11 the surge of patriotism was enormous understandably specifically being a New Yorker. Yeah. So now she's got that in her bag as well. Absolutely. She is she's a lying genius. She really really is. It's like she's studied for this cuz you're right after after terrorist attacks you do have that feeling after the horrible horrible disgusting despicable London bridge attacks that happened here in London after 77 there was this feeling of as Londoners we're not going to be scared there was all these things of like because the the the [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] that had gone in and killed all those people in bars in London Bridge people like oh maybe London people in London will be scared to go out maybe this will hurt the night life maybe this will destroy these parts of London. And People made a point. Yeah, we're not scared. Of next weekend. No, we're going. We're not scared. And she capitalizes on that. She pulls every little string and she's so bloody good at it.

But there was one thing that Tanya loved more than anything else. Attention from the media. All along, Tanya had manipulated her story for her own notoriety. And like we said, she was really, really good at it. spinning her dramatic narrative to journalists, all the while ensuring that her story was the most tragic above all others. And this ensured Tanya a place in the history books. She even bragged to the other survivors when her picture appeared in the papers. And soon Tanya Head would hit the limelight jackpot when on the 7th of September 2006, her incredible escape from the towers was written up as a heroic story and a long form feel good piece in the New York Daily News. It was the 5-year anniversary of the attacks, and people wanted to see how a survivor had put her broken life back together. But like Icarus, Tanya would soon find herself with some pretty melty wings because this article sparked the interest of another publication, the New York Times.

The New York Times had been hearing the name Tanya Head for quite a while. The members of the Survivor Network kept mentioning that she'd be the perfect person to also focus their anniversary piece on. And this is really sad because the New York Times had reached out to people within the Survivors Network and all of them had declined the offer to be the person that they focused their profile on because they said Tanya's story is better. Tanya's been through worse. You have to speak to her. Don't speak to me. So over and over again, the journalists at the New York Times heard the same thing. Speak to Tanya. Survivors insisted that the New York Times wouldn't be able to tell the full story without contacting Tanya Head directly. It was almost as if nobody else thought that their story matched up to Tanya's because that is what she had made them believe. No story was quite as dramatic or had quite so many, let's face it, paper shifting details. The man with the ring who's dying. Wells, the hero that everybody knows about. Her fiancé not making it out alive. It's got it all. But despite all of that, probably because of I think in some cuz it's too good. It's too good. Something didn't sit right with the New York Times journalists.

And look, I don't want to take anything away from the journalist that broke this story. Like all it needed was the tiniest little scratch. She wasn't even in the [ __ ] country. Well, you know, in the advent of caliphate, I think we can agree that the New York Times do miss some things sometimes. Yeah. And this was back when they were actually doing proper journalism. Rrookmany, I still love you. Anyway, it turned out that back in 2002, the New York Times had interviewed all 19 people who were on or above the floors where the planes actually hit. And Tanya Head's name was not on that list. Actually, there was no trace of her from 2001 at all. Nope.

So they got in touch with the woman herself and at first Tanya appeared more than happy to talk to them. But the Times found that they really struggled to lock down any actual concrete information with Tanya. So the journalists continue to research and fact check her story independently. They contacted the other survivors to understand exactly what Tanya had told them. And immediately they could see that there was a total lack of consistency. Her story had morphed again and again with each retelling. From person to person, the details shifted and nothing added up. There were just too many holes. Though the survivors had no idea why at the time, it was clear that Tanya was petrified of what the New York Times would write. She would cry and she would say that she didn't understand why they were asking her so many questions. And many survivors sympathized. They were outraged on Tanya's behalf. But they softly encouraged her to keep talking. Angelo Gugglimo is a documentary filmmaker and author who was quite close to Tanya at the time and we've got him here for you speaking to NPR about how the revelations spilled out.

Well, we had known before the Times article came out um because what was going on behind the scenes was significant for all of us and eye opening. You know, it went from why is the Times harassing her? Why is this reporter repeatedly asking her questions around the anniversary when she doesn't want to talk to him? To why isn't she answering these questions? These It's not like he's asking her questions that haven't been asked of her before. That's the moment the penny drops for a lot of people. But before it dropped, Tanya Head had got away with lying. Totally unchecked, unchallenged, encouraged for six long years. But finally, the jig was up and the New York Times broke the story. The headline read, "In a 9/11 survival tale, the pieces just don't fit." The truth was finally out.

But I have to say the best headline I've seen on this is Skies of Lies. That is good. That's very good. Very good. So, all right, let's get to the truth, shall we? Mhm. Here's what we do know. Tanya's real name is Alysia Estette. Not Tanya Head. And on September the 11th, 2001, Alysia was not in the World Trade Center. As we told you at the start, she wasn't even in the United States. She was some 4,000 miles away in Barcelona, Spain. Alysia came from a very wealthy Spanish family and was attending a Barcelona business school at the time. As soon as the time started digging, the House of Cards almost instantly came tumbling down. Because what I cannot stress enough is that all of the things about Alysia's life were just so extremely easy to verify. It's just that no one had done it before because why would they?

Exactly. That's it. She's disgusting. But like who would you like if if you even had a niggle of doubt? I think what I would do if I had that feeling of like, oh, actually, I would be like, shut up, you horrible piece of [ __ ] How dare you think that of someone who has been through so much. Absolutely. The newspaper also contacted Meil Lynch, a great place to start, cuz remember that's the company Alysia said she had been working for at the time. But surprise, surprise, there was no record of a Tanya Head or an Alysia head ever having worked there. The company was completely unable to verify any part of her story. So, what about Dave? Her fiancé, as I told you, he was indeed a real person and he did indeed die on September 11th. But everything else was again very much a lie. The Times contacted Dave's family who said they had absolutely no idea who this Tanya Alysia person was, and they said that Dave wasn't in a relationship with anyone, let alone with her. Yeah, awkward. Just to hammer this home. It's not like Tanya happened to be in New York and saw the devastation and then sort of attached herself to it. She lived in Spain. So to even begin this mind-boggling hose, she had to board a plane to New York with the express intent of starting a new life in the United States of America specifically as a 9/11 survivor.

I think that is just such an important part of the story to understand. She wasn't there. She just saw it on the news thousands and thousands of miles away and like a moth to a flame. Got on a plane and flew to the US to to make up this [ __ ] lie. It's bonkers. So when and why personally did Tanya Alysia whatever when did the fairy queen hatch this plan? Did she write her first comments in the online group from her flat in Barcelona? And how did it feel when she did that? Did she just want to see what would happen? I can't imagine even having that beginning of a thought process. Whatever her reasoning, why she did it doesn't not doesn't matter. But the story was out. That's the key thing. She done got caught.

She did very much. very much so. And the New York Times obviously did some digging into her background. And again, this is what we do know about Alyssia's childhood and her sort of formative years. She had grown up, like I said, very rich um as part of a very wealthy and very well-connected family in Spain. She was also the youngest and the only girl, and friends say she was absolutely spoiled, rotten, and doted on by her parents. She went to the very best country clubs. She had her pick of thoroughbred horses. There was nothing the little Alysia couldn't have, except maybe what she really truly craved. Perhaps what a lot of teenage girls maybe crave, romantic attention from the boys. Alysia's friends say that she'd always been a bit heavy and sometimes the kids had been cruel when she'd been growing up. They say it definitely hurt Alysia, but that she was always still a fun and positive person to be around. Though in interviews they do admit that she did lie a lot as a teenager, mainly about secret boyfriends in other towns and other cities that none of them had ever met. And then in 1992, Alysia's sort of gilded life took a bad turn because the Times also found out that her brother and her father had both been sent to prison back in Spain for fraud.

Amazing. when Alysia was still a teenager and this situation had, as you can imagine, significantly hurt the family financially and reputationally. It's interesting that like I I accept that, you know, she wasn't getting attention from boys and stuff and that is really painful and like being bullied for being fat, etc., etc. A lot of people can identify with those experiences. Um, and a lot of people have done bad things because of things like that. But it's interesting that she's not a nobody in Spain. So, as she gets more and more famous, she's really banking on nobody in Spain turning on the TV. Honestly. Yeah. This is one of the things that is so bizarre about it because Yeah, you're completely right. She's like in the upper upper like echelons of Spanish society. And her friends are like they only found out what she'd been up to when they saw her [ __ ] New York Times article.

But yeah, Jerry Bogat, the co-founder of the Survivors Network, and Richard Zimba, an active advocate, were both left after the article was published feeling totally betrayed because there were hundreds of actual survivors, but there were still those who had a strange sense of loyalty to the woman that they had known to be Tanya Head. A lot of survivors had mixed feelings, and some of them even wanted to protect her. They were connected to her. They've grieved and grown alongside her. They'd bonded over the years. It would be impossible not to. Not only thinking that you have this shared trauma, but you know, traveling together, touring together, working towards the same thing, serving a purpose higher than yourself, healing, peace, patriotism, being a New Yorker, moving on, healing the nation. So Tanya had done like tangibly good things. She'd helped survivors get access to ground zero. She'd given money to the network. She'd raised funds and she never took a penny for herself.

No. And Jerry Bogatch is a good person to speak to this because I think some people will be skeptical and be like, "Well, how do you know she never took any money?" But she's very very intimately involved in this network. They're the ones getting the funding and then allocating these resources that is coming in. And Jerry Bogatch, he [ __ ] hates Tanya because she tries to oust him. Um she tries to say that he's not like working in the best interest of the survivors. He's not aggressive enough. if he's not getting them the recognition and the support that they need. She basically gets him kicked out. It's his [ __ ] network. He founded it. And but Jerry still says, "I can tell you she never took any money from the network." And I think for some people that might be like confusing as well because they might think there is a more straightforward motive. I don't think the money ever played into it. She doesn't need money. No, she needs to be affirmed.

Only those who were physically injured or the family members of those who had died could make claims from the federal victim compensation fund for 9/11. And Tanya never got a penny of that either because she she says the story about her arm being blown off but she can't prove that. So she doesn't get she even if she had applied she wouldn't have got the money but she never applies and she never applies on behalf of Dave either because she is bererieved in her you know so technically if she wasn't a big fat [ __ ] liar she would be entitled to compensation from that fund. Yeah. So there is this feeling amongst some not all some survivors that whatever Tanya had lied about which is everything she'd still done a lot of good for them.

Absolutely. And just to hammer home the fact that I don't think it's about money is that although she was completely lying about Dave and he wasn't her fiancé/husband or whatever, there were people who I came across during the research for this who defrauded the victim's compensation fund. Oh, I'm sure. Who pretended that they had a loved one who had died in there and scammed the fund out of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if Tanya had wanted to do it, she probably could have. Oh, I have no doubt that she would have she would have been able to write a cracking application. Mhm. but she didn't care to because it was never really about that. So yes, Tanya, let's accept that she did good things for the Survivors Network, but ultimately it had all been a total fuss. Her hoax had lasted for years, and she had taken up so much space, spinning her lies and feeding her insatiable appetite for attention. But as she said in a phone call to the New York Times after the expose, "I've done nothing illegal."

And look, I didn't write this in the notes, but I I was thinking about it when I was when I was doing this. She reminds me a bit of Rachel Do, right? The woman, if you can't remember, if you guys don't know, she was, of course, the white woman who pretended to be a black woman who then becomes like head of the NAACP and all of this stuff. And she does a lot of good things, but she's lying. I find this worse. I find this worse personally than Rachel Dol. And I know people have mixed feelings on that, but a lot of people were like, she did good things, but people were like, she took up space that someone who was actually a black woman should have been doing. And I guess that's how people might feel about Tanya doing here. But the survivors don't really feel that way. They feel lied to and they feel manipulated and they feel used by her. But it's a tricky one, isn't it? I think it is true. She didn't do anything illegal, but it is very difficult. or maybe not very difficult, but it is hard to pinpoint exactly what Tanya Head or Alysia Head would have done that warranted some form of punishment like legal retribution. You know, it's immoral. It's unethical, but it's not illegal.

Yeah, being a piece of [ __ ] isn't illegal, and that's something we just have to deal with, unfortunately. And because she hadn't done anything illegal, like defrauding people out of money or something like that, for many people, it was really, really difficult to understand her motive. Why try to involve yourself in such a tragic event? For the attention, to feel loved, to feel part of something, to feel special. You hear the other survivors say in interviews, "Why would she want to be us?" But that's the thing. She didn't want to be one of them. No one would. Alysia Head wanted all of the trappings of being a 9/11 survivor. The empathy, the care, the attention, the victimhood, the status, and the reverence that comes through victimhood, all without the trauma. ends justify the means for her. And this did just come into my head and I have to say it and I'm really sorry, but it's like a really really twisted version of people who go on Love Island because they want to be famous.

Yeah. Cuz there you're exploiting your strengths, right? Right. Yes. Yeah. Like that's the only difference I would say. It's all I really want a Sheen brand deal and I'm fit. and I'm fit and I'm gonna [ __ ] get all the plastic surgery and I'm gonna starve myself and I'm gonna hit the gym and I'm gonna do all those things and I'm gonna get on there and I'm gonna work I'm gonna [ __ ] graft to get those deals but I'm going to play to my strengths here exploits the victimhood that comes from this and that's why I compare to Rachel Doazol because that's what Rachel Doles wanted to do. She wanted to put her position in a place where she felt society would view her as a victim or view her as somebody to be empathized with, to be to view her as somebody who was like fighting through adversity to get to this position because she didn't feel like she could do that as a white woman. And that's why she puts herself in a position where she thinks this is what society sees as a victim and that's what I'm going to push myself as. And that's what Tanya Head does because Tanya Head is clearly a very capable, intelligent, uh, wellspoken, articulate woman who could probably, if she had set her mind to something that was productive, could have probably achieved a hell of a lot in life. But she doesn't cuz what motivates her is the attention and it's the it's the being part of something. And I also think it is not just wanting to be a part of like the single biggest event that happened in the western world in the [ __ ] 21st century. It is also that she is the hero. She's not only a survivor, but from within this network, she's also saving all these people and she's virtuous and she's overcome and she's she's a part of something bigger than herself. She's a part of this enormous thing and some small role she plays makes her significant.

Yes. I think when I first read about Tanya, Alysia, whatever, I thought it was a bit munchousy, right? A little bit munchousy. And typically we see with people who have munchousin that typically they were ignored as children. There was maybe like a deficit of attention from a parental figure and that's why they seek it out in in the ways that they do. That's not the case with Alysia. She got all the attention in the world when she was growing up from her parents at least. Right? So I don't know if it was just about the attention. I think it was in a way to feel powerful. If you if you read about narcissists and again not not uh diagnosing Alysia head as one but I think you know it probably wouldn't be a million miles off but it's that feeling to feel like I am important I am relevant and something I have done is changed the course of history has shifted reality in some way. The world is different because I was here. Yes. And I think that is what motivates Tanya. Sorry. Alysia head.

And can I name an actual survivor? No, I can't. No. No. Do I know who the head of the NAACP is now? Nope. Nope. It's like when people say, "Well, nobody knows the victims of these serial killers. They only know the victims." Because Tanya had made they only know the killers. It's because Tanya made herself the most interesting person in the [ __ ] survivors network. And also because other survivors weren't trying to make their names big. No, I I I So that's why we wouldn't know them. She tried to She's also not the only one who lied. No. Another notable liar is stand-up comedian and actor Steve Raner Zizi. He too claimed that he worked for Meil Lynch on the 54th floor of the North Tower. So few floors down from from Tanya. But actually he worked 40 blocks away from the World Trade Center. And in 2015, his story was too debunked by the New York Times.

And I think it's probably pretty clear that that guy uh lied to boost his career. God. While other 9/11 scammers absolutely did it for money. Like I said, there were people who were absolutely conning the victim's compensation fund for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. But with Alysia, we know it wasn't about the money. It fed something much more primal in her and need to belong to feel important and like we said to have that mark left upon the world. Elysia has always kept quiet with regards to her reasoning. So we can only speculate that's the only avenue we have available. Her friend from the time Angelo Gumo co-wrote a book all about Alyssa's deception. He described how he went to her apartment after the Times article had come out because they had been so close. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt or maybe a chance to explain. And she told him that she would tell him her story one day, but she never has. Instead, she disappeared. Never seen in New York again. No explanation, no apology, just a trail of lies in her wake. And because what she had done wasn't a crime, there was essentially no repercussions for Alysia Head. She was swiftly replaced as the president of the survivors network. She disappeared from the group and from all of their lives. 6 years after the attack, the exposing of Alysia's betrayal reopened old wounds and deepened the trauma for many of the survivors.

That's the extra disgusting bit, isn't it? She's not just a liar. She is exploiting the emotions of deeply traumatized people. Absolutely. And it's also putting in place a question mark that never would have existed before. So, oh, of who else is lying? Yeah, you're now a 9/11 survivor, but are you really? Are you another one of her? [ __ ] As far as we know, Elysia is back in Spain. And there were reports that in 2012 she was sacked from her job at an insurance company because they found out who she was. And some people were like, well, that's not fair. But I was like, I think you have to have a pretty above board like credibility rating as a insurance company. Well, yeah, someone who's working the idea, someone who's working there who like defrauded the world with our lives. And in 2021, Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that she is in Spain living in Barcelona with her mom who's called Acacia Head and in the process of refurbishing a shop premises. That's what they were getting up to is a little mommy daughter project in 2021. Yeah. And you know that was just in 2012. So I don't know what she's doing now. um presumably running a shop in Barcelona. So, I don't know. Don't know. If you're in Barcelona, go and have a look.

I cannot imagine having to look my mother in the face and say that I had lied about being in 911 and I was famous because of it. I know. To be a fly on the wall of that conversation. At least she had to do that. That is a small mercy. I mean, obviously her mom made her, so she's not going to be normal, but it's like when you're at school and you get in trouble, not you obviously, but like normal people who do get in trouble at school. Um, I would always be so much more worried about telling my mom. Oh, yeah. Sit me in detention all day long, mate. Please don't tell my mom. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, the reports of what Tanya has been Sorry, Alysia has been up to since all that, we don't know. There was some like reports I saw of the fact that she might have been involved in like sanitation services for COVID 19 which like was full of [ __ ] scammers. So like makes sense that she would have. Yeah. Um you can wear a mask. No one knows who you are. So yeah, don't know. The the details are pretty sketchy about that. So don't know. Oh, I bet she's doing something. I'm sure she is. I would love to know.

But really, as quickly as Alysia had seemed to propel herself to the front and center of the 9/11 survivor stories, she melted away again just as fast. With no consequences, no public trial, she was able to enter herself into the story of the most consequential event of the 21st century and then disappear into the smoke. Poof. That's what she did. Poofed back to Spain. It is a remarkable story that has been in my head for so long that I'm so glad we have done it now. No, me too. A bit of me is like if I was the Spanish government, I'd be like, do you want to come and be a spy because you are really [ __ ] good at this. Truly. Truly. And again, I don't know. I don't want to give her too much credit. Right. I think when you do watch those clips, the difference between her and other liars we've come across during the course of making this show um is that she is more likable. And like you said, I think that helps her. But I I don't want to give her too much credit because like the New York Times fan, like her story is full of [ __ ] holes. It's the fact that she was able to hide within an environment in which nobody was scrutinizing her. Yeah. Yeah. No one was looking for the holes. Yeah. Because why would you? No. You're distracted by all the trauma and the pain.

So that's it, guys. That is the story of Tanya head, Alysia head and I would say one of the biggest hoaxes of all time because it was attached to like we said one of the most consequential events in living memory and yeah basically how she was able to pull it off why we think she did it and as for where she is now don't know but that's it. If you listened to this podcast uh wherever you get your podcasts then that's lovely. Thank you very much. But if you would like to watch the video version so that you can see the clips that we played um and all the other sort of images and video clips and audio clips that we incorporated then head on over to the Red-Handed YouTube channel where you can do that and uh you know also look at our lovely places while we talk about yeah and in the meantime what would Steve Bush Shammy do quite and we will see you next time for another episode of Red-Handed. Goodbye.