Tania Head: The Woman Who Claimed To Be a 9/11 Survivor But Wasn’t Even There

Aug 31, 2024
7 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Smiling woman in white shirt over 9/11 tower fire; headline says Tania Head claimed survivor but wasn't there

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the name "Tania Head" became widely recognised as that of a remarkable survivor of one of the most devastating events in modern history. She captured the hearts of many with her vivid and emotional accounts of escaping the South Tower of the World Trade Center, surviving against impossible odds, and becoming a figure of strength for other survivors. However, her story was nothing more than an elaborate lie. Alicia Esteve Head, the woman behind the Tania Head persona, fabricated her entire experience of that fateful day.

Alicia Esteve Head's Early Life

Alicia Esteve Head was born on 31st July 1973 in Barcelona, Spain, into a wealthy and prominent family. Her upbringing was marked by privilege, but the family's reputation suffered a serious blow in 1992 when her father and brother were caught laundering 24 million state euros. Both were convicted and served prison terms, tarnishing the family name publicly and leaving a mark on Alicia that she never fully escaped.

Despite these setbacks, Alicia pursued an education at the University of Barcelona, attended a Swiss finishing school, and later worked for Hotel de la Villa Olímpica S.A., a Spanish hotel company. Between 1998 and 2000, she was employed as a management secretary in Barcelona. In 2001, she was enrolled in a master's degree programme at ESADE, a renowned business school in Spain. During this period, when the September 11 attacks took place, she was living and studying in Barcelona, far from the World Trade Center in New York. Her classmates at ESADE knew about the scars on her arm — she'd told them they were from a car accident years earlier. That was true. The 2012 documentary confirmed it: a rollover on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. What wasn't true was the story she'd eventually tell survivors' groups about getting those same scars in the South Tower.

The Rise of Tania Head

In 2003, Alicia Esteve Head travelled to the United States for the first time. She reinvented herself as Tania Head, a survivor of the September 11 attacks. The following year, she made contact with the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, a support group founded by Gerry Bogacz and others to assist survivors of the attacks. Head, claiming to be one of those survivors, eventually merged her own online support group with theirs.

Tania Head quickly rose to prominence within the network. Her harrowing account of the day of the attacks was compelling and rich in detail. She claimed to have been on the 78th floor of the South Tower when United Airlines Flight 175 struck. According to her story, she crawled through smoke and flames, suffering severe burns to her arm, and was one of only nineteen survivors above the point of impact. She further claimed that her fiancé, a man named Dave, perished in the North Tower, and that she had been saved by Welles Crowther, a real-life hero of 9/11, who became known as the "Man in the Red Bandana" for his role in rescuing many survivors.

Head's story captivated the media and the public. She became a spokesperson for the survivors' community, giving interviews, leading tours at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, and even being photographed with prominent figures such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former New York Governor George Pataki.

Michael Bloomberg walks alongside a woman in a light-colored jacket. — Tania Head takes (from left) former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the first guided tour of ground zero, before her story was exposed as a fraud.

The World Trade Center Survivors' Network

Tania Head's involvement with the World Trade Center Survivors' Network was extensive. As one of the organisation's leaders, she was instrumental in helping other survivors cope with the trauma of that day. The network aimed to provide support not just to the families of the victims but also to those who had been present at Ground Zero and were affected in various ways by the tragedy.

Head donated money to the group and was a passionate advocate for its mission. She was seen as a beacon of hope for many who had been overlooked or forgotten in the aftermath of 9/11. Her dedication, combined with her vivid recounting of the horrors of that day, solidified her position as one of the leading voices in the survivor community.

This is the detail that makes the Tania Head story more complicated than a straightforward fraud narrative. Many survivors, when interviewed after her exposure, said that the good she'd done for the network was real, even if her story wasn't. She'd helped bring recognition and support to a group of people who'd been largely forgotten in the public grief that focussed on victims' families and first responders. Robin Gaby Fisher, who co-wrote the book about the case, said survivors continued to say "a great deal of their healing came from Tania helping them." Angelo Guglielmo, who directed the documentary, had become friends with her before discovering the truth. It didn't make the deception acceptable. But it did make it harder to sum up in a single headline.

Unraveling the Lies

In September 2007, six years after the attacks, suspicions about Tania Head's story began to surface. The New York Times had already interviewed all of the survivors from the 78th floor sky lobby in 2002, and Tania's name hadn't appeared. When the paper sought to verify the key details of her account for an anniversary piece, things started falling apart quickly.

Head had claimed to have degrees from both Harvard University and Stanford University, but neither institution had any record of her attendance. She also stated that she had been working at Merrill Lynch in the South Tower at the time of the attacks, but Merrill Lynch had no record of her employment and didn't even have offices in the World Trade Center.

"Dave," the man she claimed was her fiancé, was a real person, David S. Suarez, a consultant who really did die in the North Tower on September 11, 2001. But his family had never heard of Tania Head. None of his emails mentioned her. There was no evidence of any connection between them. His name had been used without his family's knowledge to make her story more specific, more verifiable, and more emotionally devastating. When the Times contacted them, they were hearing her name for the first time.

The Crowther family discovered that their son Welles's heroism, which had already become one of the most celebrated stories of human courage to emerge from that day, had been woven into a fabricated account as a prop. Welles Crowther is now credited with saving as many as twelve lives before the tower fell. He was posthumously made an honorary member of the New York City Fire Department. The use of his name and story without any connection to the real events was felt deeply by his family.

When pressed for clarification, Head began backing out of interviews and refused to engage with reporters. The Survivors' Network conducted its own investigation, and she was removed as president by the end of September 2007. La Vanguardia in Barcelona then confirmed what her classmates had known all along: she'd been at ESADE on September 11, 2001, enrolled in the same programme she'd left New York without finishing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfYQfeLuSrQ

The Aftermath of Deception

After her lies were exposed, Tania Head, or rather Alicia Esteve Head, abruptly left New York and returned to Spain. She declined all further interviews and retreated from the public eye. In 2008, an anonymous email circulated among members of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, claiming that Head had died by suicide. This turned out to be yet another fabrication.

In 2012, the full extent of Head's deception was chronicled in both a book, The Woman Who Wasn't There, written by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo Guglielmo, and a feature documentary of the same name directed by Guglielmo. These works delved deep into her story, with interviews from members of the Survivors' Network before and after the revelation of her lies. The documentary also noted that Head had been spotted with her mother in New York on 14th September 2011, a clear indication that she was still alive. The documentary received a Special Jury Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Back in Barcelona, Head continued to live quietly. In 2012, she lost her job at Inter Partner Assistance, an insurance company, when her employers discovered her fraudulent past. By 2021, she had reportedly started a renovation company in her home city and was seen in Terrassa, a city in the province of Barcelona.

Why Did She Do It?

That question has never been definitively answered because Alicia Esteve Head has never answered it. Speculation has ranged from a bid for sympathy in the wake of her family's public disgrace, to a search for connection and identity in a new country, to something more clinical about compulsive lying and the need for a self that feels more significant than the one you've actually got. What's clear is that the persona she constructed was extraordinarily detailed: she learned survivor testimony, memorised floor plans, researched real victims, and maintained the performance for years in front of people who had actually lived through the event. Whatever drove it, it wasn't casual.

Tania Head's story is one of the most shocking cases of identity fraud in recent memory. Her falsehoods not only betrayed the trust of thousands of people, particularly those in the survivors' community, but they also used the names of real victims like David Suarez and real heroes like Welles Crowther without permission or acknowledgement. The brazenness of her deception puts her in a specific category of fraudster, alongside cases like Jeffrey Manchester, who maintained a double life across years in plain sight of people who trusted him.

Despite the deception, the World Trade Center Survivors' Network continues to operate today. The survivors whose healing was genuinely helped by their time in it didn't lose that. What they lost was trust in a story they'd believed, and the knowledge that someone had used their worst experience as a costume.