Her hair is now a different color and she has gained weight, but 25 years later, the woman behind one of the most notorious confidence tricks of the modern era remains recognizable.
Alicia Esteve Head, the Spanish businesswoman who adopted the name Tania Head and falsely claimed to have survived the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, has been seen walking to work on a busy street in her hometown of Barcelona.
The photographs, obtained exclusively by Our News Outlet, offer an exceptionally rare glimpse of Head, now 53. After her deception was exposed in 2007, she quietly left the United States in disgrace and returned to Spain, spending years avoiding public attention.
At one point, rumors circulated that she had fallen out with her wealthy parents. Other reports even claimed she had died by suicide in 2008, supposedly overwhelmed by shame.
Spanish media later reported that Head was living quietly with her mother, Acacia Head Ladeveze, now 92, in Terrassa, a small Catalonian city near Barcelona. There, she was said to have started a modest house-renovation business.
In 2011, reports said she found work at a Barcelona insurance company serving English-speaking customers. She was dismissed the following year, around the time a documentary about her was released, after her employers discovered her identity.
Business records show that an Alicia Esteve Head registered Zofrenia SL in Barcelona in 2021. The company offered “intermediation and coordination in the provision of health services” and recruited workers to carry out COVID-19 tests in the city. Since then, the woman who once embraced the spotlight appeared to vanish again—until now.
Our News Outlet can now report that Head is still living with her mother and continues to keep a low profile. She has never been required to publicly account for the deception and appears to have no plans to do so.
Tania Head, pictured for the first time in decades, left the United States quietly after her 9/11 survivor claims were exposed
Head falsely presented herself as a 9/11 survivor before becoming a prominent advocate for victims
Now 53, Head returned to Spain after her elaborate claims were debunked in 2007
Head and her mother have shared an apartment outside central Barcelona, although sources say they move so frequently that any address may quickly become outdated. They reportedly remained at their latest home for only eight months.
Until recently, Head worked at a Barcelona call center, selling products and services for several companies. Her employment, like her housing, is said to change regularly.
A Spanish documentary titled La Superviviente—The Survivor—was released in August. Its arrival may have made it even more difficult for Head to avoid people seeking answers about her past.
Apart from her mother, Head appears to be distant from much of her family, including her four brothers. She is unmarried and does not appear to have a partner. Without a driving license, she reportedly depends on her mother for transportation.
Barcelona is an ironic place for Head to have ended up, since it was there that her deception began. While studying at business school in the Spanish city, she claimed she was actually living in New York and working in a senior role at investment bank Merrill Lynch.
She would later describe, in vivid and harrowing detail, how she had escaped the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, badly burned moments before the building collapsed.
Her account of terror, courage and survival became so powerful that it overshadowed many genuine recollections of that tragic day.
According to the story she told, the 26-year-old Merrill Lynch manager was leading a meeting in a 96th-floor conference room in the south tower when, at 8:46 a.m., the building shook with the force of an earthquake.
The walls trembled, lights flickered and screams echoed from the corridor.
Through the tower’s reinforced windows, she said she and her colleagues watched black smoke rise from the north tower across the plaza. A huge fireball appeared to climb through the floors below them.
Some employees ran for the exits. Others called relatives and friends, urging them to turn on their televisions. Head said her attention was drawn to objects falling from a north tower window. At first she believed they were pieces of furniture, until one appeared to move its arms and she realized it was a person.
The photographs, obtained exclusively by Our News Outlet, represent an extraordinarily rare sighting of Head
Head was in Barcelona when she claimed to have been in New York working for Merrill Lynch
Head recently worked in a Barcelona call center, though reports say she has since moved to another job
Head repeated the story in interviews, to visitors at Ground Zero, where she served as a volunteer guide, and as president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. It was a narrative that stayed with nearly everyone who heard it.
She said the discovery that people were jumping from the towers was especially horrifying because her fiancé worked in the north tower.
The man she called “Big Dave” was said to be a consultant with Deloitte, working on the 100th floor.
Head claimed they had met in February 1999, shortly after she moved from Barcelona to New York. They supposedly shared a home with a golden retriever puppy named Elvis and planned to marry the following month.
Before any wedding could take place, she said, she had to flee the tower along with dozens of others who ignored security staff members telling them to remain in their offices.
With her assistant, Christine, following close behind, Head claimed she descended the stairs to the 78th-floor sky lobby. There, she said, thousands of terrified people pushed and shoved while waiting for an express elevator to take them to the 44th floor, where they could change to another lift.
She said she tried to call her fiancé on her BlackBerry. Her fear was intensified by the argument they had shared that morning over whether to buy his mother a small birthday present or take her out for dinner. Head wanted to tell him that the disagreement no longer mattered, but worried their argument might have been their final conversation.
In reality, they would never speak again—not because, as Head claimed, he died on September 11, but because there was no such fiancé.
That truth would emerge only years later, after thousands had been captivated by her story.
Head recalled trying to regulate her breathing as the crowd waited for the elevator. Then, she said, a woman across the lobby shouted: “Another plane!”
Head repeated her account in interviews, at Ground Zero and while leading the WTC Survivors’ Network
Head and her mother have reportedly shared a series of apartments, moving often to avoid attention
She claimed United Airlines Flight 175 struck the building just above them. Glass and debris filled the air, and Christine was supposedly decapitated beside her.
Head said the force of the impact threw her against a marble slab as flames engulfed the tower. She suffered severe burns to her right arm and believed she was about to die.
She then claimed to have regained consciousness as a man wearing a red bandana tried to extinguish the flames with his jacket. The badly burned arm, she said, was barely attached to her body. The rescuer was identified as Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who died when the south tower fell.
According to Head, she and the “man in the red bandana” moved through the smoke and rubble while she sang Sting songs to remain calm. A dying man crawled toward her and offered a wedding ring, asking her to deliver it to his wife. Although Head said she did not know his name, she promised to find the woman.
She claimed that an intact stairwell offered a route out, with Crowther urging her onward whenever she lost hope.
After descending more than 50 floors, Head said she collapsed from blood loss. When she regained consciousness, a firefighter was standing over her.
She claimed he carried her down the last 20 floors, reaching the street just as the tower began to collapse.
Another firefighter then placed her in a fire truck and shielded her with his own body as steel and concrete crashed around them. In the darkness and dust, he reportedly held an oxygen mask to her face.
Head said her next memory was waking in a hospital five days later, where her parents—who had flown from Spain—told her that Big Dave had died.
For Head, the horror of 9/11 supposedly marked the beginning of a new life as a warm, outgoing woman whose smile and survival story inspired others.
To people searching for an image of hope rising from the devastation of September 11, Head appeared to embody that idea.
She claimed that, after surgeons repaired her arm, she spent months locating the widow of the man who had given her the ring, which was engraved with the word “Forever.” She said she withheld his name to avoid attracting unwanted media attention.
Yet while Head avoided details that could potentially be verified, she began publicly telling the rest of her story in 2003, after Gerry Bogacz invited her to join the WTC Survivors’ Network.
She initially posted her account on an online survivors’ forum before organizing a writing workshop where she could draw on the memories and experiences of people who had genuinely been inside the World Trade Center.
Head appeared to offer survivors and the public a symbol of hope after the September 11 attacks
The woman who once welcomed public attention later disappeared from view
She presented herself as one of roughly 20 people who had been above the floors struck by the planes and somehow survived.
Head was eventually elected president of the network and began reshaping the organization. In a particularly striking move, she introduced rules intended to stop fraudsters from exploiting the public’s sympathy for financial gain. Having spent much of her own money on the group, she became its most visible representative.
“People cannot understand. We saw things,” she told Time magazine in 2004. At a memorial event two years later, she said: “What I witnessed there I will never forget. It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”
In 2006, a New York Daily News interviewer praised her, writing that her smile suggested the terrorists had not won and challenged others to be as positive and decent as the “true survivor.”
Head attended a 2006 memorial service for Welles Crowther but was reportedly too emotional to speak.
A friend read a statement on her behalf: “Even after five years, I still bear the burden of being alive when so many other lives were taken from us… In my family, we have a tradition at Christmas. Each year, we tell the children stories drawn from our lives.”
“The story they want to hear, year after year, is the story of the man in the red bandana, whose courage stood taller than the Twin Towers themselves.”
When documentary filmmaker Angelo Guglielmo began making a film about Crowther and the survivors, Head seemed an obvious central figure. But her behavior increasingly puzzled him. He privately questioned the scar on her arm, which appeared to show an injury but did not resemble an arm that had been surgically reattached.
Other survivors also began examining inconsistencies in her account. Head initially said she and Dave were engaged, but later claimed they had married in Hawaii.
She never showed friends photographs of Dave and withheld his surname. When she eventually provided a name, there was a man with that identity who had died in the north tower, but his obituary did not mention Head. Her story about their dog also raised questions: when visitors came to her home, a maid was invariably walking the animal.
Trauma can affect memory, and genuine survivors may confuse certain details. But people who knew Head increasingly wondered why so many elements of her story failed to fit together.
In September 2007, Head canceled three interviews with The New York Times, citing “emotional turmoil.” The reporters had been investigating why such an extraordinary story had not surfaced immediately after the attacks.
Her refusal to cooperate—and her reported efforts to discourage other survivors from speaking with the newspaper—did not protect her.
Basic fact-checking showed that her account was fabricated. In one statement, Head emphasized that she had never sought compensation and therefore had “done nothing illegal.”
That claim was technically accurate: she rejected benefits available to her while publicly advocating for other survivors to receive financial support.
Head began posting her account online before creating a writing workshop with people who had truly been inside the WTC
The Spanish documentary La Superviviente, or The Survivor, was released in August
The Survivors’ Network board voted to remove Head as president and director. The Tribute WTC Visitor Centre also announced that she would no longer work there as a volunteer guide.
It soon emerged that no one had thoroughly checked the central claims in her story. Few had asked for the hospital’s name, the identities of people she supposedly encountered or information about the man whose ring she said she had promised to return.
In retrospect, her account contained enough unlikely elements to fill several Hollywood films. That made the lack of early scrutiny all the more striking.
Head said, for example, that she met Dave while the two were arguing over a taxi. She allegedly tore up his business card in anger, only to encounter him again a month later at a professional meeting, after which they began dating.
Alison Crowther, Welles’s mother, may have reflected the attitude of many people who accepted Head’s story when she said she had not wanted to “probe” too deeply. “I felt it was too private and painful for her,” she explained.
So who was the woman calling herself Tania Head? She was not the daughter of a diplomat or a senior vice president for strategic alliances at an investment think tank, as she had claimed. Nor had she worked in Britain, Argentina, France, Singapore or the Netherlands. Her alleged degrees from Harvard and Stanford also could not be verified.
The New York Times found that she had never worked for Merrill Lynch, had not been in its World Trade Center offices and was not even in New York on September 11.
Her real name was Alicia Esteve Head. She was the fifth child and only daughter of a wealthy Spanish family.
People who knew her in childhood described a woman who sought attention and embellished her personal history. The scar on her arm came from a teenage car accident, although Head reportedly told people in Barcelona that it resulted from a crash in a Ferrari driven by her fiancé.
The family of the supposed fiancé, Dave, had never heard of Head, and he had never met her.
His identity appears to have been taken from news coverage of the September 11 attacks and incorporated into her invented narrative.
Head also appeared to draw on the experiences of Ling Young, a New York tax department employee who worked on the 86th floor of the south tower and was in the sky lobby when the second plane struck.
Faced with mounting evidence, Head did not attempt a sustained defense of her claims. Instead, she disappeared without offering an explanation. She was never prosecuted because she had not taken money from the survivors’ organization and therefore had not committed criminal fraud.
Some observers have suggested that Head’s deception was driven less by money than by a desire for affection, belonging, recognition or emotional attention. The makers of La Superviviente, which portrays her as a “strangely heroic figure,” recently said they were “absolutely convinced that even if Alicia had not been financially comfortable at the time, she still would not have taken money as the supposed victim of a terrorist attack.”
However extraordinary Head’s story was, false claims of connection to major tragedies may be more common than many people realize.
In a 2015 article for The Washington Post, Manhattan psychiatrist Jean Kim said she was not surprised when comedian and actor Steve Rannazzisi admitted falsely claiming that he had escaped the Twin Towers. “I also wasn’t shocked by the otherwise outrageous tale of Tania (Alicia Esteve) Head,” she wrote.
The central details of Head’s World Trade Center account went largely unchecked for years
Head was never prosecuted because she did not take money from the survivors’ organization
Kim explained that psychiatrists generally distinguish between conscious and unconscious forms of pathological lying. The first resembles “conman” behavior and is usually motivated by an obvious benefit, often financial. Rannazzisi’s false story fell into that category because his claims brought attention that helped his career.
Head, who did not appear to need money, seemed closer to the second category: unconscious motivation. Kim said this can be linked to unmet needs during childhood, including neglect or abuse, and may produce a continuing search for care and affection through destructive or manipulative behavior.
Kim also observed that the September 11 attacks generated an exceptional level of public sympathy for survivors.
“No other event has inspired so many false claims among my patients,” she wrote. “People of all stripes and socioeconomic classes seemed to sense the power lurking behind that type of attention, that kind of historic relevancy.”
Writing about Head and other people who falsely claimed links to 9/11, Kim added: “We shouldn’t necessarily just feel enraged by these individuals, although it certainly is tempting. These are usually ultimately sad, lonely, empty people who capitalize on this unprecedented capacity for charity.”
The latest photographs make clear that Alicia Head is alive and still living in Barcelona. But even if she eventually chooses to explain her extraordinary deception, many may question whether her account can be trusted. To the people who encountered her during those years, she remains one of the most convincing liars they have ever known.
