The Woman Who Wasn't There by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr.
Title: The Woman Who Wasn't There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception.
Author: Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr..
Genre: Non-fiction, 9/11.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2012.
Summary: Tania Head's astonishing account of her experience on September 11, 2001, was a tale of loss and recovery, of courage and sorrow, of horror and inspiration. It transformed her into one of the great victims and heroes of that tragic day. But there was something very wrong with Tania's story-a terrible secret that would break the hearts and challenge the faith of all those she claimed to champion. Told with the unique insider perspective of a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the efforts of the Survivors' Network, and previously one of Tania's closest friends, the story is one of the most audacious and bewildering quests for acclaim in recent memory-one that poses fascinating questions about the essence of morality and the human need for connection at any cost.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ But others had begun dropping from the upper floors, spiraling inelegantly against a void blue sky toward a certain and terrible death. One after the other, men and women plunged out of gaping holes and broken windows, thrashing and flailing, trying against impossible odds to hold on to what was left of their lives. At first Tania though they were blown out of the building. But, watching closely, she could see some of them making conscious choices to die by falling rather than by fire. Defiant in the face of death, they would at least choose how to end their lives.
♥ One night Manny's wife told him that up until September 11, they were always on the same page. Now there was a gap between them that couldn't be filled. She called it "the 9/11 hole."
There was no such void between Manny and his fellow survivors. The tragedy was their bond, and they were attracted to one another like paper clips to a magnet. In the months following the attack, little attention was paid to the thousands of regular people who had made it out of the towers that morning. The focus of the massive media coverage and charitable outreach programs was first responders and families of the dead. Out of that seeming lack of empathy from the public grew a mounting sense of isolation on the part of the survivors, and many retreated into solitary cocoons of grief. For months, these vulnerable men and women quietly acquiesced to the role assigned to them-that of inconsequential witnesses-until they could no longer deny their terminal misery and slowly began to seek out the only people who could understand: one another.
♥ We continue to be tortured by that day, yet it seems that nobody, even the people that are supposed to help us, understand what we are going through. We have all been through something horrible. We have seen things that people going to work on a beautiful day in September aren't supposed to see. Most of us at least one time that morning were convinced we were looking at our last seconds of life. But somehow we walked away (or more likely ran away). We watched thousands of people just like us die. Not on TV, but with our own eyes. We knew it was just a matter of chance that it was them and not us. And when other people got on with their lives, we suffered in obscurity with that day. We lived with the flashbacks, the depression, the anxiety, and especially the survivor guilt.
♥ An inherent tension existed between the survivors and the families of the men and women who'd lose their lives on 9/11. Family members were placed at the top of the hierarchy of grief, and some questioned the veracity of the survivors' distress-and even their right to grieve what had happened to them. After all, they were alive. They were the chosen ones. The survivors, on the other hand, were growing bitter about being misunderstood and overlooked. Because the survivors' forum was part of the World Trade Center United Families Group, an organization that had been formed first for families, and could be viewed by family members, the survivors who used it didn't feel comfortable with opening up about their suffering. But that restraint cracked in September of that year, on the second anniversary of the attack, when some of ;p'[Lthem were turned away from ground zero ceremonies.
For many of the survivors, the second anniversary memorial service was their first venture back to ground zero, and it had taken all of the courage they could muster to return. Yet when survivors were refused admission for not having the proper credentials to the invitation-only ceremony, the perceived slight unleashed a torrent of bitterness on the forum.
♥ In the months after the attack, Bogacz suffered severe bouts of depression and stress, but most of all, guilt. He quietly berated himself for not staying in his office longer to make sure that his coworkers had all evacuated, and he second-guessed his decisions to flee as quickly as he had. One day he passed an impromptu memorial outside a church near where the towers had stood and stopped to read the messages. They were from people all over the world. Before moving on, he left his own message: "I escaped from the World Trade Center on September 11. I am very sorry for those who did not." Those two sentences summed up the whole, awful experience. Tears stung his eyes as he walked away. A year later, he was still taking antidepressants to be able to get through the days and still looking for ways to redress his survival.
At the same time that others were coming together in the online forum, Bogacz was floating to fellow survivors the idea of a support group. After work on February 26, 2003, a group of a dozen gathered at the Cedar Tavern in the West Village to talk it over. They discovered that they had all begun thinking about reaching out to other survivors at about the same time and decided that was significant. If they had all been suffering with the same feelings of angst and isolation, surely there were other survivors who were still struggling and needed the same sense of belonging. Toasting to a better future, the group clinked glasses that night and promised to go ahead. That August, Bogacz sent out a solicitation email to a wide net of professionals, and, by word of mouth, news of the support group spread.
On September 23, 2003, Bogacz presided over the inaugural meeting of the survivors' group in the basement of St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan. The group adopted a statement of purpose, which was to address "the high probability that large numbers of survivors-those placed at immediate risk of injury or death during the attacks-have had their lives significantly disrupted and altered by the experience and, as a result, continued to face stress, disorientation, and significant levels of grief, guilt, and helplessness in the aftermath of the attacks."
♥ There came a point, with each of the survivors, when family members could no longer provide the emotional sustenance needed to keep going. How many times could a husband or a wife be expected to listen to the same dismal memories, the same angry rants, the same irrational confessions of guilt and shame? How could they possibly understand what it was like to live through something that most people couldn't even imagine, or the conflicting repercussions of surviving such a cataclysmic nightmare?
Bogacz had reached the point where he felt as if his family couldn't relate to him anymore, or maybe it was the other way around. He was a lone man stranded in a foreign place where no one understood the language he spoke, and he was tired of trying to explain how he got there and why he wasn't able to go back to where he'd been. The trouble was that he no longer even recognized the man he'd been on September 10, 2001, and sometimes he wondered if his post-9/11 self was even compatible with his former life. In Tania he had discovered someone who truly understood, a person who had been in a darker place than he was, worse than any of the other survivors, and had somehow found her way back to the light.
♥ In two months, on the Fourth of July, the city would sink the cornerstone for the replacement Freedom Tower in the northwest corner of ground zero-twenty tons of polished Adirondack granite with an inscription that read: "To honor and remember those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001 and as a tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom-July Fourth, 2004." It was a symbol of the city's resolve to rebuild. Now there was just a dank hole with pockmarked concrete walls and a red-clay floor covered with gravel. Here and there, a weed poked through the grit. Life renewed itself even in places darkened by death.
♥ Looking toward the heavens, Bogacz was suddenly struck by the vast interlude of empty space in the landscape where the towers had been. Someone once called it a hole in the city's heart. It was an apt description, he thought. That gap was once occupied by an architectural marvel, thriving with people from all over the city and all over the world. Now it was air.
♥ But as with Vietnam vets, the ability of New Yorkers to process a trauma depends largely on how close people were to the carnage.
Still, psychologists say the most overexposed-and under recognized-victims may be the nearly 20,000 New Yorkers who walked, ran, and crawled through smoke, fire, and body parts to escape the buildings.
..Linda sat there thinking that she would have given anything to loiter on the fringes of the disaster like most of the rest of the world. Instead she was sinking under the weight of untoward memories of that hellish morning. She-all of them-had been "overexposed" to the wretchedness of it all, and then they were expected to carry on as usual, as if they had been sitting in their living rooms somewhere in the Midwest, watching it on TV. Maybe now, people would begin to understand who the survivors were: anonymous men and women who were damaged by unimaginable trauma.
They thanked Tania for that. They stood and applauded her, and she giggled, curtsied, and took a deep bow.
♥ For the first time in as long as she could remember, Linda forgot about her pain and misery. For a few hours, she felt carefree, almost like a kid again. After 9/11, she felt like a rudderless boat adrift at sea. Now she felt moored to the other survivors. She had found a place to belong.
♥ "It seems no one cares about how much I suffered, what I saw," Tania wrote. "How can that help people in the future? The rest of the world saw [the attack] from their TVs at home. They saw the towers burning and the people falling, but they didn't see what was going on inside. People need to know that the 78th floor was full of bodies, burnt and ripped apart, that were their fellow Americans, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. That cannot simply be hidden because it is too hard to tell or show. People just have to know about it because, just like knowing what happened in the concentration camps, only by understanding the true horrors of the day can we do something to prevent it from happening again."
Tania didn't want anyone to suffer as she did.
♥ At the time, a controversy was brewing over a staircase that had provided the only route of escape for hundreds and perhaps thousands of survivors on the day of the attack. The thirty-seven steps that had once connected the plaza outside the towers to the street below had miraculously withstood the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent demolition of the ruins. The stairway stood, intact but alone, in the midst of the vast, empty landscape of ground zero-the last remaining aboveground relic of what had been the World Trade Center. Some people had dubbed the artifact "the stairway to nowhere." Both the Port Authority, which owned the World Trade Center site, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), the authority created in the aftermath of September 11 to lead the renewal efforts for ground zero, insisted that it had to go because it stood in the way of the rebuilding. Critics tossed in their two cents, some saying that the stairs were an insignificant eyesore and had no place in the blueprint for the redevelopment. But to many people, those craggy stairs represented much more than a bruised mound of chipped concrete and cracked granite. The staircase had been their passageway to survival.
..The survivors had their platform. They had something to live for other than the pain. By committing their time and energy to saving the staircase, they were in essence saving themselves.
♥ The next voice streaming over the public address system was a familiar one. "Good morning," the speaker said. "I'm Condoleezzaa Rice. I am so deeply moved to hear the individual stories of brothers and sisters. To learn about the lives of those who died here. For we all know that no matter how many fall, each life tells a unique story, and that each death diminishes us all."
Secretary of State Rice commenced by reading a poem by the nineteenth-century English poet Christina Rossetti:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
♥ An ex-marine from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Jenca was the married father of two, the kind of a guy with a hard-boiled exterior and a mushy heart. Fiercely loyal to his country, he had joined the marines in 1980, not long after a mob of Islamic students and militants swarmed the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. He felt it was his patriotic duty. Jenca was completing his thirteenth year as a security manager for the Madison Avenue banking firm Credit Suisse First Boston when the towers were attacked.
His pager went off, and he had rushed to the site to help get his people out of the company's branch office there. He had headed down to the World Trade Center's underground command center but decided to turn back after discovering that he couldn't make telephone contact with anyone there. Jenca had just left the buildings when the first tower collapsed above him. As he ran for his life, he was knocked down and trampled by others fleeing from the buildings. Three strangers risked their lives by stopping to pick him up. But in his own haste to get away, Jenca ran past an elderly woman hobbling with a cane. He had never forgiven himself for not helping her. More than four years later, he was still questioning why he, a former leatherneck, hadn't had the guts to do for the old woman what the strangers did for him. He was the victim of his own hardwired human survival instinct. Still, his survivor's guilt was eating him alive.
♥ The second part of the discourse was of an exchange between Ohio senator John Glenn, a former marine pilot and astronaut, and his opponent Howard Metzenbaum during a 1974 Democratic primary. The story went that Metzenbaum, who had a business background, attempted to undermine Glenn's credentials during a debate by saying that he had "never worked for a living." Glenn volleyed back with a response that many believe won him the election. The senator challenged his opponent to go to a veteran's hospital and "look at those men with mangled bodies in the eyes and tell them they didn't hold a job."
♥ After a week of watching his lifeline slip away and being ignored by Tania, Jenca saw her online and pleaded with her to be able to return to the group. In a series of instant messages, he reminded her about their heart-to-heart talks in the past and of all of the times he had said he respected and admired her. He meant that, he said. But he had never intended to offend her with his political posting or his emails telling the others about his expulsion. He had just needed some time to cool off to understand the error of his ways, he explained. Now he wanted to come back.
Tania's response was immediate but curt. She would reinstate him, she said, if he promised to respect the others and abide by the rules of the forum. "And an apology would help," she wrote.
Jenca said he was sorry and that he would do his best to follow the rules. "When do I get reinstated?" he asked. "When I cool off," she replied.
"Well, today is October 18. How long will it take?"
"Well, you've been bitching for a whole week. I can take that long too, right? . . . Now it's me that needs some time."
Jenca could hardly believe that the same sweet woman who had welcomed him to the forum almost three years earlier could be as callous now. She knew how fragile he'd been and still was. He had revealed to her his most intimate thoughts, even those about suicide at his lowest points. She knew that he believed he needed the group to survive, but she was playing a cat and mouse game about his coming back.
"Who is this woman?" he wondered. She wasn't the Tania he knew. She was a stranger.
Jenca checked his messages every day for permission to return to the forum. He could feel himself withering without his survivor friends.
Finally, he received an email saying he was back in.
It was signed, "Tania Head."
♥ How do you act as though noting has changed when everything you believed to be true apparently wasn't? Bogacz began to look at the other board members with a doubting eye. He had opened his soul to these people. He'd cried with them and divulged to them his most closeted thoughts and fears. Now he found himself questioning the loyalty even of those with whom he had been the closest. If they had been so disappointed with his leadership, or so angry at his political beliefs, why hadn't any of them said something before it became a them-versus-him fight?
♥ But he couldn't reveal his doubts about Tania. What if Williams didn't believe him? Chellis knew what happened to people who got on Tania's wrong side: they disappeared. He thought about Gerry Bogacz and Jim Jenca and all of the people who had left the network because she'd accused them of being impostors. Even more frightening than her wrath was the other survivors' blind loyalty to her. Williams, Richard Zimbler, and Lori Mogol were among his closest friends, but he had no illusions about where their allegiances lay. Everyone worshipped Tania, and he couldn't risk losing his support network-the people who sustained him-because he had questioned her honesty.
..Chellis didn't sleep that night. He tossed and turned, wondering what to do. If he told anyone his concerns, he risked being banished from the group, and for what? For proving that she, for whatever reason, needed people to think she was engaged or married to Dave? To catch her in a bunch of white lies? If he were wrong, the very relationships that had brought him back to life after September 11 and sustained him to this very day would be gone.
He decided to keep his eyes open and his suspicions to himself.
♥ At that point, though, [Tania] was survivor nobility. It was under her leadership that the survivors' group had gone from virtual obscurity to a formidable advocacy organization with power and respect. In its short existence, the network had recruited over a thousand members, forged important political alliances, saves the Survivors' Stairway from destruction, lobbied Washington for health services, and convinced the 9/11 Memorial Committee to give the survivors a presence in the museum planned for the World Trade Center site, ensuring that their legacy would be preserved for generations to come.
As if all of that hadn't been enough, next Tania spread her good will to the Tribute Center, where she had inspired hundredsJani of visitors with her story.
♥ Janice boarded the train back to Seaford and lost herself in a labyrinth of thoughts. She returned to conversations with Tania, sometimes at two and three in the morning, and talking to her the way a mother would a daughter until she was finally able to fall asleep. Her mind drifted to Lee Ielpi, and how he had entrusted Tania with representing his beloved son on tours of the sacred ground where Jonathan had given his life. She thought about the survivors, whose faith in humanity had been shattered but who had risked trusting again and had chosen Tania to lead them out of the abyss. She thought about Linda, dear Linda, and how she had unselfishly devoted herself to Tania at the monumental expense of helping herself.
"How could Tania have done this?" Janice asked herself. "How could she have betrayed so many people who had been through so much? And for God's sake, why?" She had chosen the most vulnerable people and exploited them by making up a tale so terribly heartbreaking that they couldn't do anything but trust her and care for her-care for her more than they'd care for themselves-because her story was the saddest of them all. Except that now she doubted it had even happened. Was all a lie?
For four years, Tania had been telling her story, and no one had questioned the validity of it until now. There had been signs along the way, little discrepancies that everyone, herself included, had been almost too willing to overlook. "Why?" she wondered as the train chugged toward Seaford. Why hadn't she ever stopped Tania when she referred to Dave as her fiancé rather than her husband? Why hadn't she pushed to see the house in Amagansett after Tania had made and then broken so many promises to take her there? Why had she never insisted on seeing the burned jacket? Had she wanted that badly for Tania's story to be true?
Janice missed her stop that night. She never even heard the conductor announce the Seaford station. When she finally got home, she sat alone in the dark for hours, wondering how to break the news to Linda and the other survivors. Would they even believe her when she told them that the woman who had been there for them-who had turned herself over to them, nurturing them and rallying them and teaching them by example how to transcend their unimaginable sorrow, who had also taken as much as she had given-may never have been there at all.
Janice hardly slept that night. She tossed and turned as the hours passed, thinking about how to tell the others what she knew. These were people who had been torn apart by tragedy and were mended only tenuously by the thread of trust they had in one another. When they learned that the most devout among them had violated that oath of faith, and so egregiously, would the thread snap?
Linda was of most concern. When she first joined the group, she was broken, and she had invested so much of her energy in Tania that she'd often neglected to take care of herself. Tania was her best friend. Her mentor. Her reason for being when there wasn't much else. She often told people that Tania had taught her how to live with dignity. How would she possibly react when she learned that she had entrusted her heart to a woman who wasn't there?
♥ On September 27, 2007, the headline on the front page of the Times read, "In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don't Fit." A photograph of Tania leading the Tribute Center tour for Pataki, Bloomberg, and Giuliani accompanied the 2,200-word account. The story quoted almost everyone on the Survivors' Network board and deconstructed Tania's personal history, myth by myth: The family of Dave ---, the man she claimed to have married, who really did die in the north tower, had never heard of Tania Head. Merrill Lynch had no record of an employee with her name. Nor did Harvard or Stanford have a Tania Head in its student files.
"In recent weeks, the New York Times sought to interview Ms. Head about her experience on 9/11 because she had, in other settings, presented a poignant account of survival and loss," the story said. "But she cancelled three scheduled interviews, citing her privacy and emotional turmoil, and declined to provide details to corroborate her story.
"Indeed," the Times concluded, "no part of her story has been verified."
♥ Tania seemed to have vanished.
What she's done that ill-fated day is hijack a defenseless people and shake their faith in the goodness of mankind. Yet the great irony was that she had also taught by example that healing from such a terrible breach of trust came with taking care of one another.
The Survivors' Network went into damage control with the collective resilience of troops goaded into battle. Was its aggressive defense a fight-or-flight reaction to yet another crushing event in the members' lives, or was it that they had simply learned from the best? Probably a combination of both. Saving their trademark meant saving themselves. There was work to be done.
♥ "Part of the reason why I was in pain after I found out that she lied was because I felt that I'd just buried another friend as a result of September 11," Elia Zedeño said, speaking sadly but with resolution. "So it was basically a matter of, this is a funeral. My erasing her from my future is, well, I buried a friend."
♥ I realized that my mission had been futile. I wasn't going to learn, as I'd hoped, that Tania was telling the truth, that the Times had gotten it all wrong. And I wasn't going to get a confession of guilt, not by any means. There would be no clarity for me that day.
As I prepared to leave, I embraced her. "I'm so sorry this is happening to you," I said. I pulled on my jacket, and she turned toward me, gazing into my eyes, her own dark eyes so penetrating that I felt as though she were hacking into my consciousness. But her words didn't match my thoughts. She didn't say anything about sadness or regret, or shattered trust and broken hearts. She was oddly pragmatic.
"Well, she said. "Now we have an ending for the movie." Her answer, and the matter-of-fact way in which she delivered it, gave me the chills. Yet, in a strange way, I understood what she meant.
♥ In May 2002, Alicia graduated from business school with her MBA. She told classmates that Barcelona wasn't big enough for her dreams and she was going to New York City to start a new life. One year later, having studied everything that was written about September 11, Alicia Esteve Head became Tania Head. Three months after that, she was on her way to becoming America's most famous survivor.
♥ I stood from a distance with my camera and, for the first time, rather than focus all of their emotions on Tania, I saw that the survivors were free to feel their own feelings, as poignant and painful as those feelings were. Still, after all that had transpired, after all of the heartache she had caused them, Tania was never far from their thoughts.
Through the enormous crowd of mourners, I glanced over at Linda and Elia, walking up the ramp from the footprints of the towers, locking arms, wiping away tears. I knew they were tears for Tania. "Why do I feel this way?" Linda asked Elia. "It's not fair. I miss her!" Elia smiled. "Me too," she said.
Later, Elia summed up what we were all feeling: "Part of the sadness I feel was that someone who I got to love was no longer with us," she said. "And it hurt, even though I don't want that person around anymore. I hated the feeling. Because I don't want to miss her. But she became a part of our lives."
♥ I took no pleasure in that encounter. That night, I replayed the video and cringed. I felt sad. And sorry. Did that mean I forgave her? Who the hell knows? I didn't even know who she was.
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♥ She was fired when the book and accompanying documentary were publicized in Spain and her bosses learned about her 9/11 charade. She accused them of "throwing out a victim of international terrorism."
So is Alicia delusional? Does she really believe her alternative reality? Some experts believe so. Others say she exhibits symptoms of a factitious disorder similar to Munchhausen syndrome, a serious mental disorder in which someone pretends to be sick to get attention. Her own trauma therapist, Sam Kedem, who was treating her for post-9/11 post-traumatic stress syndrome up until the time her ruse was exposed, says Alicia has an insatiable need for attention. He believes she is perfectly cognizant of her deception, but, like any addict, more is never enough, so she does what she must to feed the need.
Most of the survivors tend to believe the latter: that she crafted her story for her own gratification, with little or no thought of the people she would be hurting. The magnitude of her lies is staggering, but most were based in someone else's truth. Had she been a student of 9/11 for the eighteen months between the attack and the time she first appeared in the survivors' online forum? The survivors believe she was.
~~from Afterword.