Tania Head: The ultimate betrayal of 9/11
TANIA Head had one of the most devastating survival stories of September 11, 2001. But something wasn’t right, and the truth will make you sick to your stomach.
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ON THE morning of September 11 2001, Tania Head was in the south tower of the World Trade Centre, on the 78th floor, where the second plane hit.
She saw the plane so close, she could feel the air being sucked out of her lungs.
When the plane plunged into the 78th floor, by some miracle she survived the impact, but her body was burning from the explosion of flames, her right arm severed, hanging by a thread. She was thrown across the room and passed out.
Waking up, she crawled through the carnage. Her life on the line, she was handed a wedding ring by a man who would never make it down. He asked her to take it and give it to his wife.
Eventually, she spotted a man in a red bandanna, Welles Crowther, who would later become a hero of the 9/11 attacks, giving up his life to lead 12 others to safety. He stretched out his hand and helped her to safety, only to disappear back into the plume of smoke.
She made it down the 78 flights of stairs just in time. When the Towers collapsed around her, she was thrown under a rig.
Six days later, she woke up in a hospital burns unit, a Jane Doe, only to later discover her husband, Dave, had been killed in the north tower.
It was a tale of devastation, of loss, but of ultimate survival.
“Head’s tragedy was different. It was a story of surviving one tower — only to be metaphorically crushed by another,” wrote Time journalist Amanda Ripley in 2007, who had listened to the story with her over coffee in Times Square three years earlier.
Ms Head would later become the driving force as a founding member of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. It was her story that would grip Americans, and it was her story she would tell on tour guides around ground zero. It was her story she would tell New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as they toured the site.
The problem was, it was all a lie.
“Her real name wasn’t Tania Head at all,” author of The Woman Who Wasn’t There and documentary filmmaker Angelo Guglielmo told NPR.
Mr Gugliemo met the woman he thought was a survivor while she was volunteering at ground zero.
“We became friendly right away, she came up to me and told me her story right there,” he said.
“I immediately burst into tears.”
But Ms Head wasn’t even in the United States on September. 11. She was in Barcelona attending business school.
Her web of lies was untangled by the New York Times when they were looking to profile an inspiring survivor on the sixth anniversary of the attacks.
Many would recommend Ms Head to be that survivor. It was this that led to her exposure as a fraud.
“The likelihood of her ever meeting her husband, who was a real person that had died in the towers, was a complete impossibility,” said Mr Guglielmo. In fact, she wasn’t even married.
Suddenly, the flaws in Ms Head’s story began to make sense to survivors. Survivors never questioned her about the small inconsistencies before, like when she would refer to her husband as her fiance, or vice versa, or how she would refuse to share his last name in order to protect his parents’ privacy.
After all, when she visited Dave’s memorial, she would bring a toy yellow taxi to place in the nearby reflection pool, in memoriam of their first meeting. Swept up by in romance, it was just like the movies. Who could ever accuse this woman of lying?
But she was, as the New York Times article exposed.
“They did their normal background checking [and] things started not to check out,” co-author Robin Gaby Fisher said. Ms Head claimed to have gone to Harvard and Stanford, and to have been working at the World Trade Center for Merrill Lynch. None of those institutions had any record of her.
Tania Head’s real name was Alicia Esteve Head. She was from a wealthy Spanish family, and dreamt of fame, her name up in lights. She would never steal from the Survivor’s Network, but hoped her story would drum up interest in a movie deal.
“I went up to her apartment the day that the Times article came out. I wanted to give her another chance to tell her side of the story,” Mr Guglielmo said.
“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.
“She told me she would tell me her story one day, but not that day. And she never did.”
Mr Guglielmo would spot Head on a Manhattan street five years later in 2011, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.
“Don’t come near me, Angelo,” Mr Guglielmo quoted Ms. Head. “Get away from me.”
Mr Guglielmo replied: “How could you show up here during the 10th anniversary? How could you?”
There was a brief confrontation, before he simply walked away.
“I took no pleasure in that encounter. That night, I replayed the video and cringed. I felt sad. And sorry. Did that mean I forgave her? Who the hell knows? I didn’t even know who she was.”
The Woman Who Wasn’t There is available through Simon & Schuster.
— youngma@news.com.au
Originally published as Tania Head: The ultimate betrayal of 9/11
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