WHO’S THAT GIRL?
The Australian serial impostor whose many false identities have left a trail of chaos across three continents
In May, Samantha Azzopardi’s international trail of confusion and chaos came to a temporary end when a Melbourne, Australia, court sentenced her to two years in prison for child stealing. Over a period of at least 10 years, Azzopardi, 32 – also known as Emily Peet, Lindsay Coughlin, Dakota Johnson, Georgia McAuliffe, Harper Hernandez, Harper Hart and a host of other names – was a serial impostor, spinning yarns and creating false identities across Australia, Canada and Ireland, to the intense annoyance and frustration of the authorities. She had convinced a US backpacker she was a Swedish Royal named Annika Dekker who had been kidnapped when she was a young girl, forcing her to hide out with her in a cabin for eight days; led a Perth family to believe she was a Russian gymnast who was the sole survivor of a murdersuicide incident in France; and persuaded social services in Sydney that she was a teen sex trafficking victim, managing to get placed in a foster home and enrolled in school while she was actually in her mid-20s.
Azzopardi often posed as a teen, even into her 30s, getting away with it due to her slight figure, soft voice and tendency to nervously chew her fingers. In Ireland in 2013 she created quite a stir, making headlines as “the GPO Girl”, having been found by the police outside Dublin’s General Post Office looking distressed but refusing to speak. Two officers took her to hospital, where she remained for several weeks, not eating and refusing to say a word, although she indicated that she was 14 years old using hand signals. Police dedicated considerable resources to trying to identify her; as she had newly fitted tooth braces, they even contacted orthodontists nationwide. Eventually, a family she had stayed with on arriving in Ireland recognised her photo, resulting in her being flown back to Australia, escorted by police, still without ever speaking. Detective Superintendent Gallagher who led the investigation said: “There were calls from some to move to a criminal investigation for making a false report, while others felt that she in fact never made any statement or false report as she had never spoken.”
The following year, she was in Calgary, Canada, as Aurora Hepburn, a 14-year-old victim of abuse who had escaped her kidnapper; once again authorities believed her and made considerable efforts to investigate her case before someone discovered the Dublin story and made the connection, resulting in a conviction on a mischief charge and another escorted flight back to Australia.
Back in Australia in late 2016, Azzopardi enrolled at the Good Shepherd School at Marrickville in New South Wales, claiming to be a 13-yearold named Harper Hart, but in June 2017 she was charged with “dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception, for the education, counselling, food, accommodation and electronics she was given while posing as Harper” and was sentenced to a year in prison. On release, she initially kept a low profile, getting a job for a year as an au pair for professional basketball player Tom Jervis and his wife Jezze, a life coach. She lost the post after she was caught using Mrs Jervis’s identity to befriend a 12-year-old girl, pretending to be a casting agent who could get her a job as a voiceover artist in a Pixar movie and persuading her to carry out a series of bizarre tasks to qualify.
The escapade that led to Azzopardi’s most recent imprisonment came about after she posed as an 18-year-old au pair named Sakah and got a job with a French couple in Geelong. They asked her to take their children, aged four and 10 months, for a picnic, but instead of doing so locally, she took them to Bendigo, 200km (120 miles) away, triggering a police hunt. While there, she even diverted, with the children in tow, to a local counselling service where she presented herself as a pregnant teenager, dressing in a school uniform and arranging for an unknown individual to call the service in advance pretending to be her father. Shortly after, police apprehended her in a department store, finding ID documents on her belonging to 19 different people, including a child.
In court, Azzopardi pleaded guilty to the child stealing charge, although her defence said her client had not planned to keep the two children from their parents or to harm them. After carrying out an assessment, forensic psychiatrist Dr Jacqueline Rakov diagnosed Azzopardi as suffering from a rare personality disorder, pseudologia fantastica, manifesting as compulsive lying and internally motivated by her fantasies of recreating a happy childhood narrative. The court acknowledged concerns over Azzopardi’s mental health and severe trauma and abuse she had been subjected to in her past. They did, however, feel there was a high chance of her reoffending. Superintendent Gallagher, who had followed Azzopardi’s subsequent escapades after the Dublin incident, said: “The problem is whether prison is a suitable place for her… In Ireland, she wasn’t a danger to herself or others, albeit she was a considerable nuisance.” BBC News; news.com.au, 30 May 2021.