“Her story was incredible.”

“She gave me a lot of support like nobody else had.”

“I admired her from the very beginning.”

“She was fabulous! Here’s this person who went through so much, that who in the world could possibly survive this?? Yet, here she is – she’s a survivor.”

Those are just some of the comments from World Trade Survivors interviewed in the following documentary about Tania Head, the woman who posed as a fellow victim and became the leader of the World Trade Survivors Network. Even though she was living in Spain at the time and had zero connection to the tragic event, she delivered a dramatic tale that dwarfed real survivor stories and siphoned sympathy for pain she never felt and trauma she never experienced.

“She would recount how her assistant was decapitated how everyone around her was was burnt. She told me that her arm was completely severed that there was just one little piece of skin right here that where it was hanging off and some man started tugging on her arm and she was screaming and crying because she was afraid that this man was going to pull her arm off and she told me that she took her arm and she tucked it into her coat to keep it from falling off her body and she’d start crying harder and harder and she would just she’d be a wreck.

How It Began

As the only daughter in her wealthy Catalonian family, she lived a charmed life riding Arabian horses on polo grounds and attending the best tennis clubs until her father lost it all in a complex and very public financial scandal involving fake payments to a prime minister,

31:55 – “But she was a girl who suffered, because she was heavier than other girls and had a complex. She was sensitive and it hurt her if other people treated her like she was fat or ugly. She suffered as kids were cruel in that regard.”

She had to be the best. Her coworkers said she was “savagely competitive.”

“She surrounded herself only with people who couldn’t compete.”

I can’t help but notice the similarities to Cori Shepherd Stern’s backstory. She also shares a traumatic loss of financial security caused by her father, a persistent complex about her (previously) overweight size, and a propensity to surround herself with traumatized individuals she can exploit.

Infiltrating the Support Group

Survivor: Before I met Tanya, I had talked to a couple of professional people and it really wasn’t helping me. I searched online and I joined the support group that they had for survivors.

Impostor: We started as an online peer support group where you could go into a Yahoo group and connect to other survivors 24 hours a day, So if you were having a bad day and you would post it online, within 30 minutes you get 40 replies of people saying, “I know what you feel you know it’s it’s okay to have those feelings,” “I’m here for you just call me anything you need.’

Survivor: I think it was just just being with other people and talking about this helped.

That sounds remarkably similar to the origins of the Human Line Project.

The Impostor Must Provide a Genuine Service to Establish Their Value

If you want to be successful at preying on fish, you must use good bait. Fisherman don’t put naked hooks in the water and expect a fish to impale themselves. They use bait to trick the fish and get it to do something it wouldn’t otherwise do. The same is true for human predators. That is why con artists and predators appear charming and generous in the beginning. That’s the bait.

“I would call her just an energetic booster for the needs of the Survivor Community.”

“We didn’t have access to the (Ground Zero) site so that initial ability to actually go into the site was a very powerful experience. And it was very much appreciated that Tanya was able to make those arrangements.”

“She genuinely wanted recognition for the Survivor Network and the Survivor Community to recognize not only what they had gone through and attest to that but to provide a venue for them.”

“It was amazing that she survived. So you were just thankful, you know to look at her and see people recover and heal and do amazing stuff with their life “

“She had a tremendous sense of humor and laughed a lot. She always wanted to plan another event and do important things and one couldn’t help but be drawn into that.”

“I think Tanya’s presence made the docent program that we had envisioned possible. Her story kind of fit into that kind of all-encompassing: a Survivor, a hero and you know a widow and everything that kind of came to represent on that day.”

Usurping The OG Leader

An attention whore who goes to these lengths is never content to just be part of the group to which they don’t actually belong. They must lead it. And they must destroy anyone who tries to prevent them.

Gerry: When I first encountered Tania on the internet group, we began having an email conversation. She shared her story with me and I shared my story with her- which is kind of normal for survivors to do. I was struck by how dramatic her story was. It was this idea of this person who has gone through so much and people try to protect her a lot, And I think I probably had a protective feeling right from the start.

I suggested that she come to a meeting of the Survivors Network as a way of bringing bringing these two groups together and that was the first time I had met her in person. We ended up going for coffee. That same day we started to unite forces and we formed the World Trade Center Survivors Network.

Event Footage 33:15 – “Welcome everyone….the walk has been organized by the World Trade Center Survivors Network it’s an amazing organization in that there’s no real hierarchy to it. Everybody just gets together and does the work and I do want to recognize the coordinators of this Tanya Head.”

Gerry: Tanya began to tell me that people in the network were saying that they had had some concerns with things that I was doing. They were people who had told her that I was not representing survivors aggressively enough. Then the board of the of the network basically called me in and told me what their concerns were. Tanya who was basically running this meeting.

Survivor: Tanya was frightened of Jerry, That he was a hard worker and he started the survivors Network and I think she knew that she couldn’t manipulate him, so she kind of manipulated everybody else to go against him so that she could get him out. She had me thinking that Jerry was bad for the organization yet in my heart I adore Jerry I still to this day I adore and love Jerry he’s such a good person.

Gerry: We were having our annual election board and the night. Before the election meeting Tanya called me and started to talk to me about, “You don’t really want to come to this meeting now do you?” You know, that type of thing. Then I realized through the conversation, that what was she was really saying is that I wasn’t going to be elected to the board or reelected to the board. And I even said that to her, I said “You’re telling me I’m not going to be reelected?” And she was kind of quiet. “And I said well I’m still going to be there.”

The next I went to ths meeting and in fact I wasn’t reelected to the board and I left at that point. I remember standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus home and you know having a physical reaction to it, just feeling shaken, totally shaken. But not in a in a psychological way – in a physical way actually shaking and just wondering how I managed to alienate all those people you know?

And part of me was sort of beginning to rebel against said there was some anger there too like what, what just happened?

But it was mostly self-doubt. It was mostly like, “What did I do here? How how did this happen?”

The next day they came out with a press release which described the new board with Tanya as the president – offices we didn’t have before. Wo there was this mysterious quality to it too I just couldn’t put all these pieces together and figure out why it had come out this way. And I haven’t really been active with the network since.

She did not hesitate to traumatize an actual survivor simply because she could not control him. The indignity and unfairness of pushing him out of the very group that he created and alienating him from the very community that he was depending on for healing is a shocking and grotesque betrayal. And its exactly the same thing Cori Shepherd Stern did to me when she manipulated the cast members from the Recovering Alumni community (that I founded) to go against me, so that she could get me out.

Feeling The Fallout

Discovering a betrayal like this is disorienting. Here’s how some of the survivors initially reacted:

“I’m like oh my God, I can’t believe I’m seeing this! Needless to say I didn’t get any sleep that night but I sat on this information. These people were so important in my life. They brought me back you know, they made me into a human being again. I don’t know what would have happened if I never met them and I did not want to lose that, you know. I I just could see her making all these people go away. And I just I couldn’t do it. I knew deep down that I was going to tell eventually you know, I just knew. But I didn’t want to do it, I mean I was just too scared, Because I knew the power that she had over people.

“I wanted to hang up the phone. I wanted to yell at Linda and say how could you say that? How could you say that she a fraud?”

“I still miss her.”

“I was shocked you know, I couldn’t believe it what happened here. Why? Why did she do this? and why did none of us question her?

“The person that we saw, that we believed in – never existed. This was totally shocking, totally shocking. Because of all the things I would ever think about somebody – that’s just not something I would think about. You’re looking at everyone with suspicion. If Tanya can lie, anybody could lie.”

“Perhaps she’s evil. Perhaps there’s some threat of evil in there. I don’t know.”

“It would have been actually cruel for any one of us to question her on anything. It would have been downright cruel.”

Compare Notes or Learn from Hindsight

“She didn’t hurt anyone physically. She didn’t sign any documents. She did not do anything what we would say is “illegal.”

“It is true that Tanya never stole any money. She never made any money from this involvement. I don’t think money was her objective, frankly. Why she’s done this? Everybody wonders that.”

“The best liar I’ve ever met. I mean she was so good at staying on her story that I really didn’t notice any inconsistencies until I knew her for a couple of years. Had we actually compared notes like we do now, we would have realized something was wrong.”

There had to be some sort of recognition that she was doing something wrong and she was deviant in in in that way. But that is only something that we see now. That’s something that we couldn’t see then.“