 Assessments vary as to whether Anderson was a deliberate impostor, delusional, traumatized into adopting a new identity, or someone used by her supporters for their own ends. Pierre Gilliard denounced Anderson as "a cunning psychopath". The equation of Anderson with members of the imperial family began with Clara Peuthert in the Dalldorf Asylum, rather than with Anderson herself. Anderson appeared to go along with it afterwards. Writer Michael Thornton thought, "Somewhere along the way she lost and rejected Schanzkowska. She lost that person totally and accepted completely she was this new person. I think it happened by accident and she was swept along on a wave of euphoria." Lord Mountbatten, a first cousin of the Romanov children, thought her supporters "simply get rich on the royalties of further books, magazine articles, plays etc." Prince Michael Romanov, a grandson of Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia, stated the Romanov family always knew Anderson was a fraud, and that the family looked upon her and "the three-ringed circus which danced around her, creating books and movies, as a vulgar insult to the memory of the Imperial Family."
