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survivor
fraud
This page considers 'survivor fraud'.
It covers -
introduction
The
preceding page discussed appropriation of military honours
and other attributes, such as people awarding themselves
bravery medals and campaign decorations or falsely representing
themselves as being military veterans, a deception that
may provide financial benefit and gain the sympathy or
respect of their peers.
For some observers a more disturbing phenomenon is that
of people who falsely claim to be survivors of the Holocaust
or disasters such as the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist incidents,
sometimes apparently truly believing their own claims
and without a primary motivation of financial reward.
Personal validation and/or profit by being the focus of
community solicitude is not new: fraudulent 'survivors'
appeared after the Titanic sinking, the Crusades,
Tsarist pogroms, the epochal Lisbon Earthquake of 1755,
the San Francisco Earthquake of 1905 and other events
that grabbed public attention or private sympathy.
incidents
Such betrayal of good faith and appropriation of the respect
for another's genuine suffering and endurance is apparent
in literary frauds such as Wilkomirski/Doessekker - discussed
in more detail elsewhere
on this site - and the tawdriness of fakes
such as Khouri, Willson, De Wael and JT LeRoy.
Bruno Doessekker claimed to be Holocaust survivor Binjamin
Wilkomirski. Monique De Wael posed as
Misha Defonseca who had supposedly been
succoured by wolves, Mowgli-style, while trekking across
Europe as an unaccompanied six year old in the midst of
the Holocaust.
Norma Khouri, Chicago and Gold Coast
housewife, profitably spun a tale of victimhood as the
witness to a Jordanian 'honour killing' that appears not
to have occurred.
Laurel Willson recounted tales of satanic
sacrifice and child abuse, an echo of past fantasies by
authors such as 'Maria Monk'.
Anthony Godby Johnson offered an equally
lurid 'true' account of his supposed victimhood, readily
received by a credulous audience and promoted by the same
entertainment industry that endorsed concoctions attributed
to survivor 'JT Leroy'.
Suffering isn't essential. As noted elsewhere on this
site critics have questioned the very existence of Pietro
Psaier, who was supposedly
swept away when the December 2004 Tsunami hit Sri Lanka.
He is described as a designer for Enzo Ferrari, a close
collaborator of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat,
a friend of Francis Bacon, a winner of the Italian-American
Institute of Art's 56th Annual Award and an artist whose
work was commissioned by celebrities. Alas, Psaier appears
to be a hoax, albeit one accepted by gatekeepers such
as leading art and autograph dealers (including Christie's,
Phillips De Pury and Fraser's).
Aspects of Martin Gray's memoir For Those I Loved
(New York: Little Brown 1971) - a best seller, awarded
the UN's Dag Hammarskjöld award - have been criticised
by figures such as Gitta Sereny and as feeding nonsense
from Holocaust deniers. There has been similar questioning
of Cato Jaramillo's Too Stubborn to Die: A Child of
Nordhausen (Carson City: Gold Leaf Press 1995).
In 2007 questions were asked about Twin Towers personality
Tania Head, prominent as a founder of
the 9/11 Survivors' Network (WTCSN).
Sceptics reported that, contrary to her claims, Merrill
Lynch had no record of employing a Tania Head as a member
of a mergers team in the south tower (all of whom, including
her supposed fiancee, perished on 9/11 except her). Claims
of a Harvard undergraduate degree and Stanford graduate
degree appear inconsistent with statements by those universities
that they could not find records of a student by her name.
It has subsequently been suggested that her real name
is Alicia Esteve Head. She is reportedly a member of a
wealthy Spanish family (albeit one that gained public
criticism for involvement in a major forgery scam) and
that she had been attending university in Barcelona on
9/11. Critics have depicted her as a serial liar, whose
arm injury was attributable to car or a riding accident
or a birth defect rather than the flames of 9/11.
Other attempts to profit from 9/11 include that of Jerome
Brandl (imprisoned in New York in 2002 after posing in
San Francisco, New York and Lake Tahoe as a 9/11 rescuer
- including a week's free lodging at a New York firehouse),
Mark Christopher (who sought US $52,000 survivor benefits
regarding the death of his nonexistent wife), Daniel McCarthy
(featured in newspaper accounts about supposed heroic
rescue activity in one of the Twin Towers) and Sanae Zahani
(appearing on national television as the grief-stricken
sister of a casualty at Cantor Fitzgerald).
Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (or Tosa
Motokiyu)
gained attention through publication in major literary
journals of work supposedly influenced by his experience
as a survivor of the Hiroshima A-bomb, which had resulted
in the death of most of his family. Yasusada managed to
read works by Celan and Barthes several years before they
were published, indeed before they were written.
In reality the poet appears to be a US academic whose
only experience of an atomic inferno is that of watching
newsreels and reading footnotes. Studies include 'Turning
Japanese: The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax' by Emily Nussbaum
in 6(7) Lingua Franca (1996) 82-84 and 'In Search
of the Authentic Other: The Araki Yasusada 'Hoax' and
What It Reveals about the Politics of Poetic Identity'
by Marjorie Perloff in 22(2) Boston Review (1997)
26-33.
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