A woman convinced the world she survived 9/11 with a harrowing tale of burns and a dying man’s wedding ring, and none of it was true

Alicia Esteve Head, who spent years posing as a 9/11 survivor under the name Tania Head, was eventually exposed as behind one of the more elaborate deceptions tied to the attacks. She held a prominent role in the recovery community for years, serving as president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. She convinced members of the media, the survivor community, and high level officials of her story before it eventually fell apart.

As reported by LadBible, Head built her public persona around a detailed, fabricated account of surviving the attacks. She described being in a meeting on the 78th floor of the South Tower when the first plane hit and said she crawled through fire and smoke to escape. Her account included a claim that a dying man handed her his wedding ring to return to his widow, and she said she woke up in a burns unit six days later to learn that her fiance, Dave, had died in the North Tower.

Head was featured in retrospective articles and led tours at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, where she was photographed with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Governor George Pataki. Members of the survivor community, including her successor Richard Zimbler, said her account felt convincing at the time. She also had visible scars on her arm that she used to support her claims of severe burns, though those scars were later found to be from a car accident in Spain years earlier.

Her story fell apart once reporters checked the basic facts

The account began to unravel in 2007 when reporters at The New York Times examined the details of her story. They found no record of her at Harvard or Stanford, the schools she claimed to have attended, and no record of her employment at Merrill Lynch, the company she said she worked for. Merrill Lynch also did not have offices in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks.

Investigators found that Head was not in New York on September 11, 2001, and was instead attending classes at the Esade Business School in her native Barcelona, Spain, at the time of the attacks. The family of the man she called her fiance, Dave, said they had never heard of her, and it emerged that Head came from a prominent Barcelona family previously linked to a financial scandal. The revelation surfaced the same week as an unrelated report about a Florida restaurant tipping dispute that drew separate attention online.

After the investigation, Head was removed from her position at the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. A 2008 documentary featured survivor Carrie Coen Sullivan, who said Head had done some good for the network but that her lies were unnecessary. Head told The New York Times in 2007, “I have done nothing illegal.”

In 2008, an anonymous email sent from a Spanish account falsely claimed that Head had died by suicide, a claim that was later shown to be false. In 2012, she was confronted on camera by Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr., the director of a documentary about her, after being spotted in New York with her mother. She was later fired from a job at an insurance company in Barcelona once her employers learned of her past, and a separate unrelated dispute over a youth football game incident drew attention in the same news cycle.

Head opened a renovation company in Barcelona in 2021 and has not held any further role connected to the 9/11 survivor community since her exposure.