If you were prone to changing identities at the drop of a hat, with a trail of victims in your wake and a clear chance of being found out, why in the world would you contact a journalist? That’s only one of the things you’ll have to wrap your mind around while listening to RTÉ’s newly concluded series The Real Carrie Jade, which has dominated the Irish podcast charts for weeks.
If you haven’t been following this bizarre saga, here’s a quick precis: Carrie Jade Williams, a 32-year-old Irish woman who had grown up in England, contacted the broadcaster in 2021 to shine a light on her misdiagnosis. She said that, because she was adopted, doctors had failed to diagnose her Huntington’s disease. But there’s a twist, and it comes just minutes into episode one: everything Carrie Jade says is a lie, including her name.
The Real Carrie Jade, from RTÉ Radio 1’s Documentary on One team, contains so many breathtakingly brazen acts of falsehood over six gripping episodes that it’s hard to turn away. Each instalment is named after one of her aliases. There’s Samantha Cookes (the name she was born with), whom we come to understand, thanks to some impressive gumshoe reporting from the RTÉ team, was a fabulist from an early age. The producer Ronan Kelly talks to Cookes’s cousin, her ex-boyfriends and her childhood friends in the English town of Gloucester and builds a picture of an apparently pathological liar who began with minor falsehoods but ultimately damaged lives by preying on the vulnerable.
Cookes, who has been convicted of fraud in Ireland and Britain, lost her first child in a tragic accident, we hear; the loss comes into the public record only when her defence team introduces it in a case brought against her by a childless couple. They had hired her as a surrogate, and paid her hundreds of pounds after she fabricated experience and a surrogacy reference, but she never went through with an insemination.
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Then we meet Lucy, resident in Ireland since 2013: Lucy Hart, the au pair whose parents were billionaires in the diamond business; Lucy Fitzwilliams, who lost her husband and child in the United Arab Emirates; Lucy the child therapist who took money from parents of disabled children for a promised trip to Lapland that never happened; Lucy Fitzpatrick, the au pair who came from a women’s refuge.
Then there was Rebecca Fitzgerald, the child psychologist whose husband was abroad, adopting two children. There was Carrie Jade, dying of Huntington’s, who sold sensory equipment for children with autism. There was Sadie Harris, the au pair with the perfect fiancee. And, all along, vulnerable people were leaving her with their children, giving her their savings, housing her, helping her, trusting her.
RTÉ’s podcast, while long in the making, was released just months after the British comedian Sue Perkins dropped Carrie Jade Does Not Exist, on the same subject. There are overlaps, obviously, but even if you’d already binged the first, RTÉ’s podcast brings new information to light. Notably, we hear the voice of the series protagonist as Carrie Jade, who had emailed RTÉ, inviting the broadcaster to scrutinise a made-up life. We hear her tinkling laugh and upper-class English inflection telling us about her fiance, Fionn, about a revolutionary treatment she’s about to undergo, about being raised by a single mother – so many lies with such detail and conviction that, even knowing what we know so early in this podcast, it’s hard to fully disbelieve her.
Justine Stafford brings nuanced narration to this story, guiding the listener through sympathy for a grieving mother and then for her victims, many of whom appear to be still afraid of her.
RTÉ has concluded its series. Lucy Fitzwilliams, Rebecca Fitzgerald, Carrie Jade: they’re all gone. We’re left with Cookes, who at time of writing was being held in custody in Limerick in connection with alleged social-welfare fraud. Also left behind are the people living with the emotional and financial damage she caused, and with all the questions that remain about pseudologia fantastica – pathological lying – and the true motivations of Samantha Cookes, alias everything.
