Tale of a 9/11 fraud
‘the Woman Who Wasn’t there’ By Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. (Touchstone, $26)
Tania Head’s friends thought of her as the “World Trade Center superstar.” They later found out she was a fraud.
After the attacks, Head was the face that took the cause of the survivors public, the “living victims” who in the aftermath found few willing to acknowledge their trauma. As the compelling founder of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network she was in a position to demand an empathetic response from within the community of organizations that evolved to treat those deeply scarred by 9/11.
Until Head made the case, survivors weren’t even allowed private access to ground zero as family members were. If they felt the need to revisit the site of the most horrific day in their lives they had to get on line with the tourists.
Her story alone qualified her to take the lead, given that she not only lost her fiancée in the north tower, but she was waiting for the elevator on the 78th-floor sky lobby in the south building when the second plane struck.
As the story goes, Head was lying on the floor when a man with a red bandanna around his face knelt down to put out the flames on her back and lead her to the stairway. She later spoke at a tribute for the young man, Welles Crowther, who died saving others.
It was Head’s charisma, though, that made her such an effective advocate for the survivors.
Her organization launched a successful campaign to preserve the two-tier staircase from 5 WTC that carried so many to safety.
She was chosen to guide Mayor Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani on a walking tour at the inauguration of the WTC Tribute Center. She was the one to present the case to Congress that survivors had health concerns, too. But then her real story was told, sending shockwaves through the community. No one suspected what she confessed in advance of a New York Times exposé in 2007 — she had made it all up.
In “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr., a documentary filmmaker who knew Head, detail her astounding deception for which she shows no remorse.
Guglielmo found her alone in her apartment the day the news broke. She was in tears but not for the reason one might expect. Head was seared by the “betrayal” of her friends, the survivors she had deceived, who spoke to reporters about the pain she caused them.
Eventually Head, whose real name is Alicia Esteve and is the daughter of a prosperous Spanish businessman who went to prison for embezzlement, disappeared.
But Guglielmo has run into her twice on the streets of New York since, the last time shortly after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. When he accosted her, Tania/alicia threatened to call the police.
Call that the final irony.