Tania Head’s bizarre 9/11 story: the Spanish woman who fabricated an entire life around the Twin Towers attack

9/11. One of the most dramatic and shocking terrorist attacks in history. A tragedy broadcast live on television that produced some of the most extraordinary images of the modern era. Ultimately, it was an event that left its mark on people around the world.

The attacks took place on September 11, 2001, in several US cities. A group of 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial flights carrying hundreds of passengers:

The extraordinary story of the Spanish impostor

Among the many stories to emerge from the tragedy, one of the most bizarre was that of Tania Head, the Spanish woman who falsely claimed to have survived the attacks and maintained her deception for six years. In 2007, several journalists finally uncovered the truth.

Not only had she never personally experienced the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she had not graduated from either Harvard or Stanford and had never worked for the famous firm Merrill Lynch, which no longer had offices in either of the Twin Towers when the attacks took place.

More details

The man named Dave, whom she claimed was her fiancé, did appear on the list of those killed in the attacks, but the two had never even met. Tania was not her real name either: she was actually Alicia Esteve Head, a woman from Barcelona, and everything she knew about the attack on the Twin Towers had come from the internet and the media.

Head told her story in vivid detail. It included her engagement to Dave, the horror of seeing her secretary decapitated by part of the building’s structure and her struggle to survive with the help of her guardian angel, as well as an act of compassion toward a dying man in love and a serious injury to her arm.

What else to know

She went on to become president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network and was one of the most prominent supposed survivors of the attacks. Yet she never profited financially from the victims’ association or received a salary, and she even donated money to the cause.

Eventually, The New York Times published an article exposing Tania’s fabricated story. An investigation by David Dunlap and Serge Kovaleski found that the Barcelona native had not even been in New York on the day of the attacks and that much of her life story was false.

The aftermath

Days after several international media outlets revealed the truth about the Spanish woman who had falsely claimed to be a 9/11 survivor, La Vanguardia published an article explaining who she really was. She had been 28 years old at the time of the attacks.

Her real name was Alicia Esteve Head, and she was from Barcelona. She also belonged to a well-known family of Catalan business owners that came under public scrutiny in 1992 over a scandal involving fraudulent promissory notes.

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