The World’s Most Notorious Female Impostors and What They Have in Common
By: The Unlikely Techie
Tags: Women, Learning, History, Self, Imposter Syndrome

The World’s Most Notorious Female Impostors and What They Have in Common

Three women who wanted to claim a piece of tragic world history for themselves

Photo by Christian Gertenbach on Unsplash

We live in a world where a lot of people “feel like a fraud.” According to Gill Corkindale, “impostor syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success.” An impostor feels like they are deceiving others about their true abilities, sometimes even about their identity. “They manage to stay afloat, but seem to live in a constant state of anxiety. Their biggest fear: being found out, ridiculed, humiliated, and dismissed,” writes Dr. Abigail Brenner in Psychology Today. I light of these definitions, I asked myself: What is a “real” fraud?

According to Merriam-Webster, an impostor is “one that assumes false identity or title for the purpose of deception.” So, I set out to find the world’s most notorious impostors, only to find a lot of them. I had to narrow the list of impostors I wanted to cover down. For this article, I looked at three female impostors who used a world event to successfully deceive the world.

Anna Anderson: The impostor who claimed to be Tsar Nicholas II’s youngest daughter Anastasia

In the decades following the Russian Revolution, several individuals claimed to be members of the Russian family. The latter had somehow escaped and survived the execution by Bolshevik revolutionaries in July 1918. However, Anna Anderson (1896–1984) was quickly the most famous of them, with supporters of her claim until she died in 1984.

She first grabbed the public eye’s attention in the early 1920s after a brief stint in a mental clinic in Berlin, insisting she was Tsar Nicholas II’s youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Although members of the Romanov family rejected her and the idea of Anastasia’s survival, she had supporters to her claim, such as Maria Rasputin, the daughter of the legendary Grigori Rasputin. The latter had been a close adviser to the Tsar and his wife. Her story was the inspiration for the 1956 movie Anastasia, starring Ingrid Bergman. She was finally exposed in the 1990s when posthumous DNA evidence proved that she was not related to the royal family.

Laura Grabowski: the impostor who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor

Before we dive into this story, claiming to be a Holocaust survivor was not the only fraudulent scheme Laura Grabowski (also known as Laurel Rose Wilson, further known as Lauren Stratford) more or less successfully pulled off.

Born in 1941 and adopted as an infant by Frank Cole Willson and Rose Gray Willson, Laura was a gifted pianist and vocalist, later being known in the Bakersfield, CA area within evangelical Christian churches there. During her teens, she started to fabricate stories of mutilations and abuse, which she then wrote down in her book Satan’s Underground, published in 1988 by Harvest House Publishers. It was marketed as “the shocking, true story of her childhood in a satanic cult and her remarkable escape from abuse.” Thanks to the book, she appeared on Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Larry King Live. After an investigation by Bob and Gretchen Passantino uncovered the fraud, she was forced out of the spotlight, only to reappear in 1999, pretending to be Laura Laura Grabowski, a survivor of Mengele’s experiments at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

She collected thousands of dollars in donations intended for Holocaust survivors. As Grabowski, Willson befriended Benjamin Wilkomirski, claiming to remember him from the camps. Although he had to be around two at the time, he recognized Laura right away. However, in 2002 it was revealed that Wilkomirski (real name Bruno Grosjean) was neither Jewish nor a Holocaust survivor, aiding in Willson’s exposure as a fraud.

Alicia Esteve Head (left) and Laura Grabowski (source: The Richest/Krissie Mick)

Alicia Esteve Head: the impostor who claimed to be a 9/11 survivor

Alicia Esteve Head is a native of Barcelona, Spain. Between 1998 and 2000, she served as a management assistant in Barcelona and was enrolled in a master’s degree program at ESADE in 2001 when the attacks on September 11 took place and was in class when the attacks occurred.

In 2003 Head flew to New York for the first time and started a group for 9/11 survivors and joined the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network the next year after months of email communication with Gerry Bogacz. Gerry Bogacz had descended roughly one thousand feet from the 82nd floor of the World Trade Centre’s North Tower and two years later found the World Trade Centre Survivors’ Network. To him, it was all about connecting the 9/11 survivors. However, given the alleged tragedy of Alicia Esteve Heads’ story, she quickly became the movement’s mouthpiece and named herself Tania Head. To many, Tania’s story was extraordinary, unique, triumphant, and tragic. In her fabricated version of events, she had lost her fiancee Dave in the North Tower that day, while she escaped the South Tower’s horrors thanks to real-life hero/victim Welles Crowther. She even went as far as to meet with his family and gave an account of his “final words.”

During her time as the group’s unofficial mouthpiece, Head was never paid for the activities she did, nor for her involvement with the Survivors’ Network, and in fact, donated money to the group. She was featured in retrospective 9/11 articles as a representative of the 20,000 surviving victims who escaped the damaged buildings written by Amanda Ripley for Time in September 2004: “People cannot understand. We saw things,” says Tania Head, who was injured while evacuating. “We had to make life-or-death decisions. The higher the floor, the more lonely you were. I can’t get rid of my fear that it’s going to happen again.”

When the New York Times contacted the Network in 2007, the routine background checks didn’t add up. A R Hopwood writes that she had “claimed to be working for Merrill Lynch when the attacks took place, but the company wasn’t based in the buildings. She’d also claimed to be a graduate of both Stanford and Harvard, but neither institution had heard of her.”

Too good to be true

The women’s stories are similar in three essential points: They knew how to use world events to their advantage, when and how to appear to make themselves noticed, and they loved the attention that was given to them.

They were all masters of storytelling, so much so that they probably believed their lies themselves and somehow always managed to keep their stories alive or add new ones until the end. It comes to show that some stories are literally too good to be true.