Controversy Bite: Tania Head (9/11 Scammer)

Tania Head was known for widely sharing her harrowing September 11, 2001 survival story. As she'd explain it, she was on the 78th floor of the south tower when the World Trade Center building was hit by the second plane, making her one of only nineteen people at or above the point of plane impact to have survived. Tania was also known for her tireless efforts running the World Trade Center Survivor's Network, supporting  others affected by the attacks. So, why after only a few years of leading the group, would an anonymous email from Spain be sent to the Survivor's Network claiming Tania had committed suicide? And where was Tania, was she ok? Find out more today on the Controversial Figures Podcast.


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Episode Sources

• Michael Daly (September 7, 2006). "An Amazing Woman & Her Smile". New York Daily News. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1696977/posts
• The Woman Who Wasn't There, 2012 Film and Book
• Wikipedia Alicia Esteve Head https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Esteve_Head
• Music: The 6 is Silent by Skyjelly

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Transcript

00:00

Tania Head was known for widely sharing her harrowing September 11, 2001 survival story. As she'd explain it, she was on the 78th floor of the south tower when the World Trade Center building was hit by the second plane, making her one of only nineteen people at or above the point of plane impact to have survived. Tania was also known for her tireless efforts running the World Trade Center Survivor's Network, supporting  others affected by the attacks. So, why after only a few years of leading the group, would an anonymous email from Spain be sent to the Survivor's Network claiming Tania had committed suicide? And where was Tania, was she ok? Find out more today on the Controversial Figures Podcast. 

00:47

Music Interlude

01:13

Welcome to Controversial Figures; a podcast about intriguing figures in the media. My name is Tammy Hawkins. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a 5 star rating and comment on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts - and don't forget to subscribe to the show. Visit Controversial Figures on Patreon and donate anything that  you can. I will give you a shout out on a future show, and send along occasional swag to regular donors. If you donate at higher tier levels, you will obtain access to additional content on a regular basis. And with that, let's discuss our Controversial Figure for today.

01:56

Tania Head was running her own 9/11 survivors' group online when she became aware of a group called the World Trade Center Survivor's Network in 2004.

02:06

The Survivors Network was created to provide support to civilians present at the World Trade Center and the personnel and volunteers involved in the rescue and recovery efforts afterward. 

02:16

As the members of the Survivors Network came to know Tania, they also came to know her story. Tania was working as the Senior Vice-President for Strategic Alliances for an investment Think Tank who's client offices were inside Merrill Lynch in the World Trade Center in New York. She was on the 78th floor of the South Tower when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the building. Tania, injured by the blast with severe burns to her arms amongst other injuries, crawled through the fiery carnage to her safety. 

02:50

This story already received a strong degree of attention because Tania was one of only 19 people located above the plane impact point in the building in the World Trade Center South Tower to have survived. She said she could smell her skin burning as she worked to escape the burning building. But there was even more to this fascinating story.

03:09

Tania painfully shared that her fiancé Dave was killed in the North Tower that day. The couple was prepared to be married the following month - October 2001. Tania would tell the extremely romantic story of how Dave proposed to her to full rooms of teary eyes. Really sad, right? Well wait, there's more…

03:32

Tania also shared, as she was struggling to make her way out of the building, a dying man had passed his wedding ring to her so it could be returned to his widow. It had an inscription inside and she would later return it to the widow. Super duper sad right, but…well I think you already know what I'm going to say next…but amazingly, there's even more…

03:57

Tania said the primary reason she had survived…? She had been rescued by Welles Crowther. Welles Crowther was a 24 year old American equities trader and volunteer firefighter well known for saving as many as 18 lives during the September 11 attacks in New York City; during which he sadly lost his own life. He is a true hero from that day.

04:20

This is a quoted example of how Tania would recount the story to a 9/11 tour group from an article in the New York Daily News in 2006…and I quote…

04:32

She had been at an 8:30a.m. meeting on the 96th floor of the south tower.

04:36

"We heard very loud sounds coming from outside the meeting room," she recalled.

04:42

A plane had struck the north tower, which was, by her precise account, 113 feet away. The fire was so intense that the windows of her tower were too hot to touch. She saw people begin to jump from the north tower.

04:56

"And it wasn't just one. It wasn't just two," she said. She went to the 78th floor, where several hundred people waited in the Sky Lobby for the express elevators. 

05:05

"This woman started saying, 'There's another plane coming! There's another plane coming!'" Head recalled. "We didn't believe her at first." The tip of the wing tore through the crowded Sky Lobby.

05:16

"The first thing you feel is a tremendous increase in pressure, all the air being sucked out of your lungs," she said. "The next thing you feel is flying through the air." She was knocked unconscious and awoke in searing pain.

05:29

A young man was patting out her burning clothes. His name was Welles Crowther and he wore a red bandana his father had given him to filter smoke should he ever get caught in a fire. He saved dozens that day.

05:43

"He will forever be known as the man with the red bandana," she recalled. "His calm made me calm." Burned, bleeding, nearly blinded by dust, she struggled toward the stairway.

05:54

"Blood. Body parts. I crawled through all that," she recalled. "I realized everybody around me was dying." She then encountered the first figure in FDNY bunker gear.

06:07

"I always like to say for me it was like seeing God," she recalled. "It was like, 'Okay, we're gong to make it.'"

06:14

The firefighter continued up toward her stricken co-workers and was among the 343 members of the department killed that day. The man in the red bandana also died, having gone back in after leading a group to safety. Head had managed to reach the street when the south tower came down and a firefighter pulled her under a rig.

06:32

"That was it for me. I woke up in a hospital five days later," she would conclude with the tour group. End quote

06:40

Heck of a story.

06:43

The New York Daily News went on to recount what Tania Head told them privately…quote

06:50

…as Tania crawled through the carnage on the 78th floor a man charred from head to toe placed a wedding band in her palm. She stuck it in her pocket and forgot about it until months later, when her mother went through the personal possessions the hospital had bagged.

07:04

An inscription inside the ring led to the dead man's wife, who at first did not want to speak with Head. The woman then wanted to hear everything. End quote.

07:17

The article concluded with this observation about Tania, which spoiler alert, becomes pretty creepy later in this podcast tale. 

07:24

Quote

She stood by the entrance with a beautiful smile that is her ultimate message to everyone these five years later. To behold Head's smile is to know the terrorists did not come even close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as this true survivor. 

End quote

07:47

As you might imagine, Tania's story caught a lot of attention. Tania Head was interviewed numerous times by the media, and invited to speak at university conferences. In 2005, was one of the few survivors chosen to lead tours for the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, where she was photographed with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former New York Governor George Pataki.

08:15

Tania would regularly deliver her story to Ground Zero tour groups in vivid detail, saying, "I was there at the towers. I'm a survivor. I'm going to tell you about that." 

08:40

In September 2007, The New York Times sought to verify some of the key details of Head's story as part of a September 11th anniversary piece - typical fact validation they do for any story. Tania Head had claimed to have a degree from Harvard University and a graduate business degree from Stanford University, but when contacted by the New York Times, those institutions had no record of her.

08:53

Tania Head had also claimed that she had been working at the Merrill Lynch offices in the South Tower. Yet Merrill Lynch had no record of this. In fact, Merrill Lynch did not even have offices in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. 

09:06

As the days progressed, Tania Head backed out of three scheduled interviews, and later refused to speak to reporters at all. 

09:16

The Times then contacted other members of the Survivors’ Network, and raised questions about Tania's story. By the week of September 27, 2007, the World Trade Survivors' Network voted to remove her as president and as a director of the group.

09:33

One of the many fabrications from Tina was her engagement to a man named "Dave", who had perished in the North tower. The man's family claimed to have never heard of Tania Head when contacted. 

09:50

When journalists found the man's social media pages, obituary, and news articles about his death during the 9/11 events - there was not a single mention EVER of anyone that looked or sounded like Tania Head as being his fiance or at all associated to him.

10:08

The Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia ultimately revealed that Tania had actually been in a class in Barcelona during the September 11, 2001 attacks. Tania had told her classmates that her scarred arm was the result of an automobile accident. It was found she had told other friends the wound was from a horse riding accident when she was younger. La Vanguardia also reported Tania had told classmates she wanted to work in New York.

10:36

It was found by one investigator  that Tania Head registered her e-mail address with Yahoo about a month after the attacks, and joined an online discussion group for survivors on Dec. 2, 2001. All from Spain.

10:50

It was after Tania took herself to New York in 2003 that she began her own Yahoo group for 9/11 survivors before she found the World Trade Center Survivor's Network and contacted them with her story and the idea to merge groups. The snowball of the lie only got bigger and faster from that point on. Numbers reported vary, but it is estimated there were 500-2000 people involved with the network.

11:16

Richard Zimbler, her successor as president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, said, "There was no reason to doubt her story. She looked the part. She had a badly injured arm that appeared to have burn scars and her story was very, very realistic.

11:34

After Tania's fraud was exposed, she declined all further interviews and abruptly left New York. In February 2008, an anonymous email was sent from a Spanish account to members of the World Trade Center Survivors Network, claiming that Head had committed suicide.

11:51

In research for this podcast, I watched the film documentary, with the same name as the 2012 book; titled The Woman Who Wasn't There. It's a great documentary, telling the Tania Head story through the lens of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network. 

12:05

The film does this by using interviews with Tania herself and members of the Network before and after her deception was revealed. Both the book and film noted that Head was seen with her mother in New York on September 14, 2011. 

12:19

They also reveal that her real name was actually Alicia Esteve from Barcelona, Spain. La Vanguardia newspaper reported that Alice Esteve was well known in Spain as she moved in high society circles in Barcelona. And she was known to be infatuated with America. She had never even been to the US until 2003 when she visited New York with her mother. 

12:47

The July 2012, the same year the book and documentary The Woman Who Wasn't There came out, Tania Head was fired from her position at Inter Partner Assistance, an insurance company in Barcelona. Her whereabouts are currently unknown. So watch what random friends you make in your online groups…

13:04

It is said that Tania Head received no money from the survivor's network in which she participated; in fact, members of the network state that she donated to the group. She gave her time and energy for many years. However, Tania did so for a different kind of personal gain - that of attention, admiration, sympathy, fame. 

13:25

That is perhaps the con that might hurt the most. The one that feeds off of our sincerest, empathetic human emotions. When people take our kindness and us for a fool. 

13:36

Feeding like a parasite off of the powerful mourning of the real victims with which she surrounded and associated herself. This included Tania being asked to speak at Welles Crowthers' funeral by his family due to her lie that he saved her life. She became too nervous at the event and had a fellow survivor read her statement at the funeral.

14:00

Perhaps Tania had her own psychological challenges that lead to this despicable behavior; one can only hope she sought help for herself after this.

14:09

I believe survivors should always be believed. However, we must be careful in knowing that unfortunately some may take advantage of initial belief. We should still be cautious that if a story sounds too amazing, usually, it is - and do fact checking along the way. Trust but verify. My sincere condolences to the survivors that were used by this woman.

14:35

Thank you for listening to this episode of Controversial Figures.

14:42

Just a reminder, please like, subscribe, and leave a rating and comment for Controversial Figures in your favorite podcast app

14:47

This podcast is an independent podcast created by Tammy Hawkins. This is funded by those that donate, so please join Patreon and give what you can - once I hit 50 Patreon subscribers, I'll send out swag to all donators! And I'll give shout outs during the show to anyone that has donated. Research references are available in the show notes as are musical references. Thank you so much for listening - be well.