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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
No way. Holy mofo, what is that though? Mom, it's like, maybe it was just an explosion or something? Did you hear what I said about it maybe not being a bomb? Cause like, it's up high, mom. It's unbelievable it woke us up. We're freaking videotaping it. I have no clue what it is. There's just black smoke.
And what looks like paper, but... Oh my god, don't be a person. Where? Oh my god. Where? That right there? What are those big heavy things falling at a rate that a piece of paper would not fall? Oh my god! No way. Like that, Caroline. Do you see that? Yeah, I see it. I see it. I just, I mean, who's to say it's not like a chair?
Regardless, it's gonna be so dangerous at that base. Obviously. Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! What? Oh my god! It's terrorist acts! What do we do? Oh my god!
Everybody knows what happened on September 11th, 2001. Four American airliners were hijacked by members of the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda and crashed into preselected targets including the twin towers of the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan.
Those towers collapsed, almost 3,000 people were killed, another 6,000 were injured, and the United States of America has found itself in a constant state of fear, emergency, and war ever since. While the facts and motives of the attack are still being debated and questioned by some world leaders and guys that watched a documentary about it on YouTube once, there's no denying that the geopolitical fabric of the world was changed forever that day. On some level, we were all affected.
but not like the people who experienced it first hand. Imagine being there, at ground zero, watching the New York skyline change in real time as bodies rained down onto the streets from 100 stories above. There was no time to think about what or why this was happening. There was no time to think about anything at all. It was sensory overload. The sights, the sounds, the smells. It was hell on earth that the survivors would have to live with forever. Now imagine not being there.
and then lying that you had been, because that's exactly what a man named Fred Parisi did. Fred created the 9/11 Rescue Workers Foundation to help first responders like him who had fallen ill from being exposed to the toxic elements at Ground Zero. According to Officer Parisi, on the morning of the attacks, he had been dispatched to assist in the rescue and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center, just in time to watch the second plane hit.
Officer Parisi ran into the south tower as it burned. He would come rushing back out with the body over his shoulder and then run back in to do it over and over and over again, clearing the lower floors of handicapped civilians and dragging them to safety. It is estimated that Officer Fred Parisi saved thousands of lives that day, but it still haunts him to think about all of the ones he had to leave behind when the building crumbled. Fred Parisi was a hero.
But the experience left him sickened, physically and emotionally, and he resigned from the force a few months later in November 2001. In the years after, Fred used that heroic story to raise thousands of dollars for his foundation, and he traveled to Washington, D.C. on behalf of 9-11 rescue workers to lobby for better health care. You can see him in photographs from those events, standing next to the chief of the New York Fire Department who had lost a son in one of the towers.
Fred Parisi had emerged as a public face for the first responders. But seven years later, when Parisi was arrested on an unrelated theft charge related to a furniture company he co-founded, authorities began to take a closer look at the law enforcement officer's past, which revealed that Fred Parisi was not a law enforcement officer at all, at least not in New York at the time. On September 11, 2001, Fred Parisi was actually a police cadet.
a recruit who spent most of that fateful morning in classrooms and taking a driving course in Brooklyn. He never ran into the burning building to save people. He didn't see the second plane crash. Fred Parisi was never there. But Fred Parisi wasn't going to let the truth stop him from milking a tragedy. He had raised more than $75,000 for his 9/11 charity, and he spent it all on himself and his family. Mortgage payments, restaurants, dentists, and doctors.
Not a single penny went towards its intended purpose, but no criminal charges were ever filed. But Parisi wasn't entirely off the hook. In an unrelated incident that took place in 2004, Fred was caught using a fake set of Secret Service credentials while trying to get out of a traffic ticket. Believe it or not, not even that incident was the first time Fred had impersonated an officer. In fact, Fred had been spinning lies about his relationship with law enforcement for over a decade.
In 1998, he had flashed a fake badge while repossessing cars in Jersey City and was fined $600. Before that, there was a string of dismissals and resignations from various other agencies after he was caught lying about being an expert canine handler. And when he was charged with stealing $81,000 from a pet groomer in Jefferson Township, New Jersey, Parisi wrote a letter to the Morris County Prosecutor's Office posing as a priest in an attempt to clear his name.
Fred Parisi was a career con man, a fact that even the most basic of background checks would have uncovered. Yet he was allowed to participate in the NYPD's cadet program, which he leveraged into thousands of dollars in donations that he misappropriated for his own personal use. Jim O'Connor, the Lyndhurst police chief who was involved in Parisi's eventual arrest, was shocked by the man's audacity. Quote,
During my career, I've arrested a lot of people, but nobody mired in so much controversy and deception. To do what he's doing, using 9/11, the most tragic event to take place on American soil, claiming to help victims' families and people who got sick down there, people who are still hurting, he is a ghoul. Fred Parisi was sentenced to six months in prison for impersonating a Secret Service agent. He and his mother were ordered to pay back the more than $75,000 in misspent charity funds.
Reportedly, the 40-year-old father of three has been out of work ever since. He lost his home, lives on welfare, and sleeps in the relative's basement. But he hasn't been able to find much sympathy, especially amongst actual survivors. Charles Giles, a first responder who was buried under rubble at Ground Zero, told the New York Daily News that Fred Parisi, quote, "...deserves to rot in jail."
Parisi had approached Charles Giles about using his story to generate donations for the 9-11 Rescue Workers Foundation. In return, Parisi promised scholarship money to Giles' two daughters. Of course, that promise was never kept. While Fred Parisi whined and dined using money intended for actual heroes, Charles Giles, an actual hero, struggled to pay his bills. The former EMT takes over 60 medications daily and walks with a limp and a cane.
He can't work because of a smorgasbord of health issues. He even lost his house to foreclosure.
But, Charles says, if it came down to it, he would do it all over again, without a second thought. I would do it in a heartbeat. And I think if you ask any 9-11 first responder, would you do it again? The answer is instantly, yes. When the attack occurred, Charles says he received a call from the CEO of Citywide EMS, the private ambulance company where he worked, and he was told to report to the World Trade Center for a potential mass casualty event.
The 33-year-old EMT sprang into action right away. Giles described the scene at Ground Zero as total mayhem. It was total mayhem. You know...
we all uh... as we arrived down there you know different responders we just wished each other luck because we knew that we had a uh... heavy task against us and uh... obviously we were scared but we had a job to do the estimated temperature was about three thousand degrees between twenty five hundred and three thousand degrees so uh... people were jumping you know uh... and uh... we uh...
Charles was in the process of evacuating victims from the south tower when he heard the floors above him collapsing onto themselves. And I made my peace with God that I was going to die. And I hear...
Screaming, hey, citywide, it's coming down. Come on, move it, move it, move it. And this is all within a matter of 15, 20 seconds. And, you know, maybe a little longer. And he just...
Charles would never forget Port Authority Officer Number 1236.
When telling a survivor story at fundraising events, Giles often referred to the nameless, faceless man as his guardian angel. But there was only one problem. Never saw the person, never met the person. I was never inside the building. Mark Meyer, Port Authority Officer Number 1236, was never inside the building and had never met Charles Giles. He says you were in the building, you tried to pull him out, and the building collapsed on top of you.
In 2013, investigative reporter Walt Kane for News 12 New Jersey had tracked down Meyer, who debunked Guile's story.
Kane then confronted Giles with the facts, but he was adamant that his story was true. I remember a patch and I remember a shield number. I remember the number 1236. Could I have gotten that number wrong? Yes, I highly doubt it. It is possible that Giles mixed up shield numbers and the total mayhem that was 9-11, but according to his former employer, Charles was not injured at Ground Zero. The building did not collapse on top of him.
Citywide EMS said that all of their employees returned from the scene unharmed. In fact, there are photographs of Giles and the rest of the citywide crew rinsing the debris off of one another later that afternoon. But Charles downplayed all of the inconsistencies in his survival story. Quote, What would I have to gain from exaggeration? Nothing. Actually, Charles gained thousands and thousands of dollars of donations from exaggeration. He was the most well-known 9-11 survivor from Ocean County.
and the public wanted to help him out during his hard times and reward him for his bravery. As it turns out, Giles' hard times were exaggerated too. News 12 New Jersey discovered that Charles had not lost his house to foreclosure like he had claimed. According to county records, the house previously owned by Charles Giles had actually been sold for profit. And for both Charles Giles and Fred Parisi, that's what it was all about. Profit. But let's face it, capitalizing on a tragedy is nothing new.
It seems like every natural disaster or mass shooting or act of terrorism is followed by its own line of merchandise. Boston Strong. Pray for Paris. Remember the Alamo. One would have to be extremely naive to believe that all of the money generated from these tragedy slogans is being used for their promised purposes. It's abhorrent behavior, but it's unsurprising. Money can be quite the motivating factor, and that's what makes Tonya Head's story even more fascinating.
Because unlike Fred Parisi and Charles Giles, there was no financial incentive for what she did. What Tanya Head did was purely for reasons that only she will ever truly know. A 9-11 survivor shares her remarkable story with the world and becomes the face and the voice and the strength of everyone personally affected by the tragedy on this episode of Swindled.
The way Tanya and Dave first met sounds like something out of a bad sitcom.
They were on the streets of Manhattan, outside the World Trade Center where they both worked, arguing over a taxi. It was nearly midnight on a cold rainy day in February 1999. Tanya was leaving the office after a 15-hour workday and she was desperate to get back to her hotel room. She flagged down a cab and stopped to untangle her umbrella when a man on the other side of the street hurried to the car in front of her and got in. Tanya, soaking wet from the rain and livid, decided to confront the stranger.
"My name is Dave," the man told the frantic woman as he stepped back out of the car. "You can have the cab, but you have to promise to call me." And he handed Tanya his business card. Tanya returned home to San Francisco the next day and forgot about the charming man who almost stole her cab. She never did call Dave, but two weeks later when Tanya was back in New York for work, the two coincidentally ran into each other again in the lobby of the World Trade Center, and Dave offered to buy Tanya a cup of coffee.
That cup of coffee lasted for three hours as the pair chatted the afternoon away. Tanya was officially smitten, and so was Dave. After several months of long-distance phone calls and bi-coastal visits, Tanya eventually moved to New York to be with Dave. The couple bought a luxurious apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and a golden retriever puppy named Elvis. The only thing missing from their picture-perfect life was the white picket fence.
Tanya Head, the 26-year-old native of Barcelona, had achieved the American dream. She had attended Harvard undergrad and completed her MBA at Stanford. Now she had a fancy job in New York City as the Senior Vice President for Strategic Alliances at Merrill Lynch, with a new office on the 96th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. When Tanya looked down upon the clouds from her office window, she felt like she had power, like she had really achieved something in life.
and the fact that she had finally found the person whom she referred to as her American Prince Charming. Well, that was just the cherry on top. Tanya and Dave had the kind of relationship that would gross out everybody around them. They would finish each other's sentences, push food into each other's mouths, just all around insufferable cuteness. Some say opposites attract, but for Dave and Tanya it was different. It was almost like they were the same exact person. What Tanya loved most about Dave was his sensitivity.
She once saw him leave his shift volunteering at the soup kitchen with tears in his eyes because, as he told her, no one should have to go hungry. And he was just as funny as he was thoughtful and romantic. Dave would serenade Tanya in public with corny love songs just to make her blush. Of course, he had his quirks too. He was always forgetting his keys and his wallet, and he insisted they never be even one minute late to anywhere they were going. But Tanya didn't mind. He was worth it. In so many ways, she felt like Dave was too good to be true.
He was young and successful, had ambitions and goals, and he was never too far away. Dave worked in the World Trade Center, just like her. In early spring of 2001, Dave asked Tanya to marry him during a romantic dinner at Windows on the World, a fancy restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline. Tanya, of course, said yes, and wedding plans were immediately underway.
But Dave did not want to wait that long. I came home
from work and what I found was rose petals leading from the door to our dining room and I followed the rose petals and I found Dave standing there with a coconut bra and a grass skirt dancing to Hawaiian songs and I was like, "Oh my God!" And he had even cooked this really disgusting Hawaiian food recipe that he had found on the internet and on the dining table were two tickets to Hawaii leaving the next day.
The Hawaii trip occurred about two months before the scheduled date of their official legal wedding in New York. But Dave had planned a surprise unofficial ceremony in Maui just for the two of them. It was just another way for Dave to make Tanya feel special. According to Tanya, the next morning, they called all their friends and family to say they had gotten Mauied. Not married. Mauied. Tanya and Dave had a bright future ahead of them. But sometimes life doesn't always work out as planned.
A few weeks later, their relationship and their goals and their dreams would all come to a sudden and tragic end. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money. Most Americans think they spend about $62 per month on subscriptions. That's very specific, but get this, the real number is closer to $300. That is literally thousands of dollars a year, half of which we've probably forgotten about.
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On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.
Tanya was working on the 96th floor of the South Tower, helping to close a merger between Fiduciary Trust and Franklin Resources Incorporated. When out of the corner of her eye, through the window, she saw an airplane crash into the top of the North Tower across the way. Her first thought was Dave. He worked on the 100th floor of the North Tower. She started counting the stories from the top of the building to where the plane had struck. She realized that Dave's floor had been hit. Then, she ran.
She made it down the 18 flights of stairs to the 78th floor sky lobby, where she could catch the express elevator and be street level within 60 seconds. People were pushing, trying to get into the elevators. Tanya remembers hearing a man yell out, quote, Ladies, this is not the Titanic. It's not women and children first. Tanya was standing at the elevator when she heard what sounded like the roar of a plane's engine from the tarmac. She heard another woman screaming, saying another plane was headed directly towards them.
There was a deafening explosion, and a fireball ripped through the corridor. Tanya saw the wing of the airplane slice through the sky lobby. The first thing she felt was the oxygen being sucked from her lungs, and she flew through the air like a ragdoll. Tanya felt her body hit a marble wall, and then she felt the heat from the explosion of the plane. Her arm was nearly severed, still attached to the body by only a tiny piece of skin. Her clothes were burning as she crawled through the smoke trying to find a way out.
All around her were burning bodies, many of them people she knew. Tanya saw that her own assistant had been decapitated. One man started tugging on her nearly severed arm, and she screamed, fearing that he would accidentally rip her arm off of her body. She tucked it into her coat pocket and continued on. She encountered a man who lied dying on the floor. He handed her his inscribed wedding ring. It had a woman's name and the word "forever."
He asked Tanya to promise to find his widow and return the ring to her. And in all of that chaos, Tanya promised him she would. And then Tanya had lost consciousness. When she reawakened, her back and right arm were on fire. She could smell the scent of her own burning flesh. That's when she saw a man with a red bandana wrapped around his face running towards her.
The man used the jacket to extinguish the flames on Tanya's body, and he hugged her and told her to stay awake before leading Tanya to the only stairwell where they could escape. It was a long way down. Tanya feared for her life. She quietly sang her favorite Sting songs to herself to try to calm down. The pain was unbearable, but she thought of Dave. She thought of the wedding dress she had finally chosen for their upcoming wedding. And she kept moving forward, because she wasn't going to miss that for the world.
with about 20 flights of stairs left to go. Tanya passed out again. Luckily, a firefighter found her and carried her to the bottom floor and passed her off to a colleague. As she was being carried out of the building, Tanya remembers hearing a thundering noise behind her. The tower was about to fall. A firefighter threw Tanya underneath the fire truck and shielded her with his body. The tower collapsed above them and they were engulfed in debris. It was pitch black. Tanya couldn't see or breathe.
but the firefighter shared with her his oxygen mask until they were both rescued from the pile. At the end of the day, Tanya Head was one of only 19 survivors who were at or above the point of impact where the planes hit the World Trade Center. Tanya's fiancé, Dave, was not so lucky. I was on the South Tower and I lost my fiancé that day. Tanya Head woke up in the hospital five days later, confined to a wheelchair which she couldn't operate because one of her arms had been badly burned.
Tanya required assistance around the clock and remained in the hospital for more than two months until finally going home on Thanksgiving Day. Tanya was traumatized. She didn't know where to start. It was all just too much. He was gone. It was all gone. In the blink of an eye, Tanya described the feeling of losing Dave and her entire life as she knew it, combined with her extreme injuries and lack of mobility, as being like looking at a 20,000 foot tall mountain that she might never be able to climb.
But Tanya knew it was Dave who was looking over her that day and helped her get out of the tower. She was determined to remain strong for him, and she did. In time, Tanya began to heal then. She channeled her anger and her pain into helping others. She established Dave's Children's Foundation and served as its executive director. She returned the inscripted wedding ring to the widow of the dying man that she had promised to do. And amazingly, with the help of a judge and an attorney,
Tanya was able to legally marry Dave posthumously. Tanya Head was officially a widow, but she had a hard time being alone. In May of 2003, Tanya Head began to look for support externally. She logged onto an online forum for friends and families who had lost loved ones on 9/11, and for people that had survived. Tanya happened to be both. She posted a few messages of gratitude on the message board, but didn't share too much of her own story.
Like many of the other survivors in the group, Tanya felt wrong about posting too graphically or emotionally about what she had experienced that day out of respect for the families. But the survivors needed help. Many were having economic problems, health issues, and survivor's guilt, as well as feeling a sense of living in a parallel reality. In all of this, they felt isolated and unseen. The attention was rightfully on the loss of life and the families who had lost people. The survivors were considered the lucky ones.
They had gotten out alive, but they needed support too. We started as an online peer support group where you go into a Yahoo group and connect to other survivors 24 hours a day. So one day you were having a bad day and you would post it online and within 30 minutes you get 40 replies of people saying, "I know what you feel, you know, it's okay to have those feelings, I'm here for you, just call me anything you need."
That October, Tanya suggested that the survivors split off and start their own group. Thus, the World Trade Center Survivors Forum was born, where survivors could connect with each other 24 hours a day. The group grew quickly, and in the air of intimacy, friendships deepened. The survivors felt that now they had permission to be more direct in sharing their stories from that day, and Tanya felt like she could actually share the details of hers, too.
Over the course of a few days, Tanya had posted all of the horrific details from her experience of 9/11. Her story shocked everyone else in the group. No one's experience could even compare to hers. Many of the members responded with support but also with feelings of inadequacy. Tanya's story made them feel like maybe they didn't belong in the group since their own stories were so much less severe. Tanya assured the others that everybody belonged, that what they lived through was as equally important, and it wasn't a competition.
The resilience Tanya demonstrated in the group brought its members hope. No one could imagine being in her shoes and yet here she was, a survivor. It made the other members feel emboldened, like if Tanya could survive with her pain, then they could survive with theirs too. Through the Yahoo group, Tanya had met Jerry Bogax, another survivor of 9/11 who had founded an informal in-person support group for people with similar experiences. Tanya began attending Jerry's meetings and helped his group become more formalized.
Eventually, Tanya's online forum and Jerry's support group merged members and they settled on a name: The World Trade Center Survivors Network. The new group drafted a mission statement and an ambitious long-term agenda. The goal was to become a real voice for survivors. They wanted to help survivors become a more substantial part of the 9/11 story, to feel less ignored, and they wanted to be included in plans for the World Trade Center site. One of their most important goals was the creation of a Survivors Day.
where survivors could go past the gates and into Ground Zero, something that no one had been able to accomplish thus far. Tanya Head had a renewed purpose, and she was driven and worked non-stop to advocate on behalf of the survivors. And aside from the prominent scars on her arm, Tanya didn't wear her suffering on her sleeve. She had a tremendous sense of humor. Her laugh would fill up the room,
and now with her position as a board member of the Survivors Network, Tanya could keep busy planning events and bringing people together. The other survivors found her energy not only infectious but effective. Within weeks of joining the group, Tanya had successfully lobbied for survivors to be given access beyond the public barriers of Ground Zero, a huge step for many of the survivors towards finally putting the event behind them. Many of them needed to visit the site to find closure. Others just wanted to say goodbye.
Tanya Head also used the newfound Ground Zero access to volunteer as a tour guide for the Tribute Center. Everyone agreed that with her cheerful demeanor and dramatic personal story, there was no one better suited for the job. Days before the fourth anniversary of the event, surrounded by throngs of press and spectators, Tanya led the first guided tour of the site in which she shared her story for Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Tanya admitted to being nervous on the tour and suffering from a panic attack immediately after, but there was another part of Tanya that obviously loved the attention. She shared news footage from her date with the high-profile politicians to the members of the Survivors group, just in case they had missed it. Tanya Head was officially the celebrity survivor. She even convinced director Angelo Guglielmo to follow her around with a camera to film a documentary about the work she was doing for the Survivors network.
Tawny Head had secured her spot to top the hierarchy of suffering, and even though she would never admit it, she was certainly enjoying the view. Support for Swindled comes from SimpliSafe. If you're like me, you're constantly thinking about the safety of the people and things you value most. After my neighbor was robbed at knife point, I knew I needed to secure my home with the best. My research led me to SimpliSafe.com.
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After the South Tower was hit, some of the injured huddled in the wreckage of the 78th floor. The fires were spreading. The air was filled with smoke. It was dark. They could barely see. It seemed as if there was no way out. And then there came a voice, clear, calm, saying he had found the stairs. A young man in his 20s, strong, emerged from the smoke and
Over his nose and his mouth, he wore a red handkerchief. He called for fire extinguishers to fight back the flames. He tended to the wounded. He led those survivors down the stairs to safety and carried a woman on his shoulders down 17 flights. Then he went back, back up all those flights, then back down again, bringing more wounded to safety. Until that moment when the tower fell. They didn't know his name. They didn't know where he came from.
It took six months to find Weld Scrowther's body after September 11th. It was intact without burns lying alongside several others in what appeared to be a makeshift New York City firefighter command post in the lobby of the South Tower.
It wasn't until May 2002, when the New York Times ran a definitive account of the last few minutes inside the Twin Towers, titled 102 Minutes, that his parents were able to piece together what had happened to their son. Several survivors talked about a man in a red bandana that helped lead them to safety, and from that detail alone, the Crowlers family knew this hero was Wells. He had carried a red bandana in his back pocket every day since childhood, up until the day he died.
The family dog had worn one ever since. Wells Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter, had helped save the lives of as many as 18 people on September 11th by leading them to the only exit not severed by a plane. He went back inside the burning South Tower at least three times that day to help lead more people to safety before tragically losing his own life when the tower collapsed.
It was a wonderful feeling to have this confirmed and to know that he acted in such a courageous and wonderful way. He was acting as a firefighter at the last hour of his life. He wasn't an equities trader anymore. He was a firefighter. The Crowthers were eager to meet with anyone who their son had saved. They were able to track down two women from the New York Times story and both confirmed from a photo of Wells that he was the man who had helped them.
The New York Times claimed to have interviewed everyone who survived at or above the impact floors. Everyone, except Tanya Head. When the Crowthers learned that a woman leading a tour of Ground Zero was telling the story of how she had been saved by the man with the red bandana, of course they wanted to meet her. Tanya was reluctant at first. She was still suffering from survivor's guilt and she had had a hard time talking to the families of those who had passed. Sometimes those families were angry with her for surviving instead of their loved ones.
but mostly she didn't want to put the images in their heads of how their loved ones had passed. Tonya had seen so much suffering that day, she felt it was better that others didn't know. But in the end, Tonya did agree to meet with the Crowthers, but only if they could do so in a private location. The Crowthers agreed and arranged for dinner at the Princeton Club on West 43rd Street, Manhattan, where they held a membership. Wells' parents were moved by Tonya's presence. She came across so heartfelt and genuine.
At first, they mostly told stories about Wells while Tanya listened intently. Eventually, she felt comfortable enough to share her own. Every year, the Crowlers hold a memorial mass for Wells. In the year they met Tanya, they had commissioned a bronze sculpture of a phoenix rising from the World Trade Center in their son's honor. They asked Tanya if she would come to their church and speak at the mass where they would dedicate the sculpture. Again, Tanya agreed.
A woman named Linda Gormley attended the event with Tanya. Linda was a survivor too. She had witnessed the attacks from street level and watched the second plane crash directly over her head as she ran for her life. Even though what Linda had experienced was indeed traumatic, she sometimes felt a bit like a phony since she wasn't actually in the towers that day. But still, she desperately needed the group. Linda's regular nightmares and panic attacks made that much clear.
and she was most grateful that it introduced her to Tanya Head, her new best friend. Linda and Tanya had become inseparable. Linda said that Tanya, who had been through so much, taught her how to live with grace, courage, and the strength to overcome. But when they arrived to the service, that courage seemed to have disappeared. Tanya was a nervous wreck. When it came time to deliver her speech, Tanya became so overwhelmed that she lost the ability to stand on her own two feet.
Instead, Tanya asked her friend Linda Gormley to read the speech that she had prepared. Linda was, of course, more than happy to do it. After all, Wells was her hero too. He had saved her best friend. The dramatic and heartfelt message that Tanya had written and Linda delivered was well received by the family. At the end, Linda held a red bandana up to the sky in memory of Wells Crowther.
A few years later, in 2007, Allison Crowther, Wells' mother, received a phone call from David Dunlap, a reporter for the New York Times. Dunlap told Mrs. Crowther that he was working on a story about Tonya Head for the sixth anniversary of the attacks, but he was having trouble confirming a few facts. Allison was appalled that the media was harassing Tonya, someone that had helped so many people. She hung up the phone without answering the reporter's questions.
David Dunlap would have had Tanya Head answer the questions herself, but she kept canceling meetings and hanging up the phone when he called. Tanya told friends that the questions were too personal and the thought of answering them was affecting her mental health. She was overcome with paranoia and would cry hysterically. Meanwhile, Tanya's friends didn't understand what the big deal was and encouraged her to just talk to the Times and relieve herself the stress. They assured her that the newspaper wouldn't print anything that isn't true.
Dunlap had also been in touch with Jerry Bogax, the co-founder of the Survivors Network that partnered with Tonya. And Jerry seemed to have questions of his own, especially after Tonya went behind his back a few years earlier to have him ousted from the board of the group that he helped create.
The day after blindsiding Jerry, the Survivors Network sent out a press release announcing that a new board had been established and that Tonya was the new president, an office that had never existed within the group before. The group had always operated proudly without hierarchy, well not anymore, and apparently there was only room at the top for a single throne. Jerry has not been active with the network since that day.
But during his time there, Jerry Bogax and others have noticed some inconsistencies in Tanya's story. Like how she would sometimes refer to Dave as her husband, when other times he was her fiancé. That one is understandable considering they were never legally married when Dave was alive. Besides, it would be kinda cruel for anyone to question her on something like that at a time like that. But a quick search on Google turned up a lot of information about this Dave guy. Apparently he was a very popular fellow.
Yet there was no mention whatsoever of a woman named Tanya Head being in his life. Also come to think of it, Tanya had never shown anyone pictures of Dave, nor Elvis, her golden retriever. In fact, anytime friends came over to Tanya's house, Elvis always seemed to be on a walk with Lupe, the housekeeper. What exactly was Tanya hiding? The New York Times answered that question on September 27th, 2007, with a front page story that exposed Tanya Head as a massive liar.
Of all the personal stories to emerge from the World Trade Center attacks, few could rival those told by one woman. Her tale struck so many dramatic notes, perhaps too many. We end tonight with a story that began on 9/11, a story of tragedy and heroism, survival and love. There's just one problem. This story, repeated many times in the past six years,
Tanya Head was never engaged to Dave.
although he was a real person who died in the North Tower on 9/11. Dave's family and friends said that they had never heard of a Tanya head and that any relationship between the two or trip to Hawaii was impossible. Dave and Tanya's entire love story was completely made up and there are no registration records on file with the federal government or with New York State for Dave's Children's Foundation, the charity that Tanya supposedly started in Dave's honor.
Nor did Tonya Head ever attend a university at Harvard or Stanford. The New York Times confirmed that neither institution had any record of her being enrolled. As for Merrill Lynch, the company that Tonya claimed to be working for on 9/11, no record of her employment. That's because Tonya Head was never employed at Merrill Lynch or any of the other companies that had offices in the World Trade Center. In fact, Tonya Head had never been to the World Trade Center, especially on 9/11.
because on 9/11, Tanya Head had never even been to New York. At that time, she was still in Spain attending school. Every single aspect of Tanya Head's story was fabricated, and that revelation shocked everyone that she had met.
So many hundreds of people looked up to her as a mentor, as a symbol of hope. At this point, we're just left feeling angry and hurt and betrayed. It hurts the family, and you know, we're very outraged, my whole family. You lose trust in all of America, and that's sad. This is Tanya's best friend, Linda Gormley. There's nothing that she could ever say to me today or
or going forward that will ever change the pain and the anger and I'm sorry but the hatred that I have for that woman right now. I don't have any room in my heart to find sadness for her. What she did to me, what she did to the 9/11 community and what she has done to the families. I want answers. I want to know. I want to know who she is. I need to find that out. Tanya Head was born Alicia Esteve
She came from a wealthy, conservative, Catalonian family in Barcelona, Spain. Her friends say she was spoiled and always got what she wanted. Alicia apparently even had her own purebred Arabian horse. They always do. Alicia spent her childhood horseback riding at the polo club, hanging out at the tennis courts, and going on lavish holidays with her family. People that knew her described her as a cheerful, pleasant child who was very generous with her friends.
But from an early age, they noticed that Alicia had a tendency to lie. A lot. She invented boyfriends and the things they would do together. She told her friends about how they were planning to get married and move to the United States. Alicia was obsessed with the idea of America. She grew up with a huge American flag hanging on her bedroom wall. Even though most people ignored her childish lying, Alicia Esteve still received a lot of attention. She was the youngest of six children and the only girl.
the apple of her parents' eyes. But even with so much privilege, she still suffered. Alicia had always been a bit heavier than all of the other girls at school and kids can be cruel. So she compensated by always needing to be the best. She bragged about how well she spoke English and how good grades came easily to her when Alicia was older. That need to be the best translated into her becoming a very ambitious person professionally. Co-workers called her savagely competitive.
Furthermore, when Alicia Esteve was a child, her father became embroiled in a complex financial scandal involving $24 million of fake payments to the Catalonian finance minister. He, along with one of Tanya's brothers, was found guilty and spent time in prison. The crisis generated a ton of public attention in Spain, and it was all over the newspapers and TV. It was humiliating. So Alicia and her mother skipped town and became estranged from her father and her brothers.
Alicia suffered more trauma when she was 19 years old. On a road trip along the coast of Spain, the car she was traveling in with classmates veered off the road, rolling over multiple times. When emergency personnel arrived at the scene, they found Tanya sitting on the curb, holding her arm that had been completely torn off of her body. After multiple surgeries, doctors were able to successfully reattach her arm, and she was able to regain limited use.
Later in life, Alicia would tell people that her arm was damaged in a crash that happened in her boyfriend's Ferrari, a crash in which her boyfriend had tragically been killed. Psychologists have theorized that Alicia Esteve's traumatic car accident experience is what paved the way for her role as Tanya Head, 9/11 survivor. "Occasionally when they have something dramatic in their history that they can't deal with,
And really, it seems to be the only logical explanation. Because Tanya Head, or Alicia Esteve, whatever you want to call her, was not motivated by money. She never made a dime as president of the Survivors Network. Quite the opposite, actually.
Tanya donated to the foundation generously from her own family's fortune. It seems that Tanya Head just wanted to belong and that terrorist attacks on 9/11 gave her that opportunity. She spent years researching the event. She learned about her supposed fiance Dave and Wells Crowther, the man in the red bandana. She learned about Merrill Lynch and survivor's guilt. She learned about the layout of the World Trade Center. Tanya was so thorough in her research that she had almost a historian's view of what happened that day.
and for the most part it paid off. She had used the details of the tragedy suffered by others to construct a tragedy of her own. This is director Angelo Guglielmo. Well, you know, it's a strange thing. You know, she's sitting in front of your camera and you're interviewing her and, you know, she's baring her soul and not for a second did I believe that she was anything more than an authentic 9/11 survivor. Ironically, it was the deception that didn't seem real.
And then after you sort of come out of that shock, it sort of starts to make sense. The canceled appointments, the disappearances, the inconsistencies in stories and emotions, the emotional outbreaks, you start to say, wow, all that mystery that we couldn't figure out now is adding up. Interesting note, Tanya's story unraveled while Angela was producing the documentary about the Survivors Network.
Needless to say, the project shifted drastically when the truth was revealed, but Tanya Head remained the star. It's called "The Woman Who Wasn't There" and there's a book by the same name that Angelo co-authored with Robin Gabby Fisher. It's worth your time. When the smoke cleared, Tanya Head simply disappeared. There was an anonymous email sent to the Survivors Network in 2008 stating that she had committed suicide, but that wasn't true because in 2010,
Director Angelo Guglielmo, of all people, spotted Tanya in New York City on the street just days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Tanya refused to talk to him. She travels all over Europe. She goes from Barcelona. She pops into Manhattan, seems to be living the high life. I believe at least her therapist told me that if she's not scamming someone right now, she will definitely do it again.
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