KENMARE, Ireland – Nestled in the Ring of Kerry, the sleepy town of Kenmare is shrouded in a mist that runs off its rolling hills. Home to just 1,563 people, it maintains a unique, Wes Anderson-style charm; in the modern world yet not entirely of it. It is a million miles away from the TikTok drama that surrounds one of its newest residents, Carrie Jade Williams.
Relatively unknown until November 2020, Williams’ status in the literary community grew after she won the Financial Times’ Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize, which is open to writers under the age of 35. The winning entry is published in the FT Weekend, the weekend edition of the British newspaper, although the competition does not appear to have been run for the last two years. Williams’ entry was a moving essay about her diagnosis with Huntington’s Disease, a debilitating, degenerative genetic condition that affects the brain. Written using a speech-to-text computer programme, the essay won her a £1,000 prize.
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The piece was also praised by influential people. Hilary Knight, director of digital strategy at the Tate, a leading group of art galleries in the UK, described it as “an incredibly moving read and a reminder we shouldn’t need about designing for inclusion”.
“When I received my diagnosis I wrote a bucket list and decided I wanted to write a novel to leave behind, and that’s really how my writing started,” Williams told the Financial Times. “Getting a diagnosis that means you’ll stop being able to communicate is terrifying, but writing gave me back my voice.”
Williams hasn’t published a novel, but she has become a high-profile advocate for people living with disabilities, and a well-known figure on the Irish literary scene. She has a profile on the publishing house Penguin’s website, and has appeared at festivals in County Kerry, on the Guilty Feminist podcast, and at writers’ workshops in St John’s Theatre, Listowel and online.
She has also been interviewed by British and Irish media, including the Irish Independent and for talk radio station NewsTalk, as well as local radio, discussing her diagnosis. She wrote for the website of a prestigious scientific institution, the Wellcome Collection, too. Speaking on Radio Kerry in May this year, she claimed that Netflix had purchased a screenplay from her, apparently the first ever written using assistive technology.
Everything seemed to be going so well for Williams. Despite challenging circumstances, she was flourishing as a writer and creator. Friends said she was a “lovely person,” an inspirational figure living with Huntington’s Disease.
Except that Carrie Jade Williams does not exist.
The woman calling herself Carrie Jade Williams came to new attention in May this year, when she posted a series of TikTok videos about a shocking incident she had supposedly experienced personally.
Talking to the camera, she said she was being sued for £450,000 by Airbnb guests who said they were upset by seeing disability aids in her home. She claimed they’d said they were so triggered by the items in her home, such as her doorbell, specially adapted kettle and glasses which they’d mistaken for disability aids, that they’d needed extensive therapy.
Over a series of videos, “Williams” claimed the guests had asked whether they could “catch” her disability, and had ignored her house rules, including arriving three minutes after their projected arrival time. To add insult to injury, she claimed that Airbnb had allegedly supported them and suggested she “keep out of their way”.
For many disability bloggers, who regularly experience the sort of discrimination described by “Williams”, the story was all too familiar. The compensation being sought by her alleged guests was extreme and the story was dramatic, but it bore enough similarity to behaviour they had experienced themselves, they saw no reason to doubt her. Some supporters on TikTok praised her for “going public.”
Two stories on the alleged incident were published by the Indy100, sister title to the Independent, a British news outlet. One article has since been deleted, while the other remains on the site. Neither the Indy100 nor the Independent responded to a query asking why the story had been removed.
“Williams” herself wanted to get the story out there. In May, a reporter at VICE World News was contacted by her directly, seeking publicity for the alleged Airbnb incident. Our reporter was unable to verify her story, and stopped replying to emails sent by “Williams.”
The claims were also met with some scepticism on TikTok, where the woman calling herself Williams had 18,000 followers.
And on a call with VICE World News, a spokesperson for Airbnb said they had no record of any such complaint or legal action taking place.
The story certainly didn’t add up from a legal perspective. Wendy Lyons, a lawyer with Dublin-based Abbey Law, explained to VICE World News that the Airbnb guests “would not be able to [sue her] simply because she had a disability or disability aids. They would need to show that she negligently or intentionally ‘triggered’ them in some way.”
At this point, people on TikTok began saying that “Carrie Jade Williams” was not the woman’s real name, and started delving into her past. The story spread to Twitter too, where threads examining the claims and the woman herself went viral.
On the 6th of October, scepticism migrated to Reddit, via a post which carried a new claim that spread like wildfire across both platforms; that Carrie Jade Williams was a persona, and her real name was Samantha Cookes.
An anonymous Redditor started a thread in the r/Ireland subreddit, which linked to an article from 2011 that said Cookes had been convicted of fraud after posing as a surrogate mother and scamming a childless couple out of £1,200.
“Williams” shut down all of her social media accounts the same day. Forty-eight hours later, on the 8th October, she posted a lengthy statement to her personal website, implying that Cookes was actually her sister and stating that she – ”Williams” – was “an entirely separate individual to [Cookes] whose mental health past has been dragged into my life as an attempt to discredit my advocacy work.”
VICE World News can now reveal the truth behind the complicated web of lies and inconsistencies that have shaped the life of the woman now calling herself Carrie Jade Williams for the last 10 years.
The woman’s real name is Samantha Jade Cookes and she was born in 1988 in Gloucester, a rural county in the middle of England. Our investigation found that her mother’s maiden name, confirmed by birth records, is Williams.
“Carrie is Samantha,” said a cousin of Cookes’ who wishes to remain anonymous to protect their own children from family drama and any association with Cookes and her behaviour.
“Williams” was an alter-ego, allowing Cookes to start a new life as a young writer living with Huntington’s and begin several new business ventures while avoiding law enforcement. The reality of her life involves a complex and at-times tragic backstory including the loss of a baby and a criminal conviction for fraud.
The statement posted by “Williams” on the 8th of October, one of her last public statements, had threatened legal action against anyone who suggested that Williams and Cookes were the same person, saying: “It is illegal and defamation to suggest that my sisters [sic] past is mine… Legal steps have already been undertaken to stop this illegal defamation.”
VICE World News has attempted to contact Cookes’ solicitor but could not find their details. Maybe the solicitor, like Williams herself, doesn’t really exist.
In Cookes’ prize-winning essay, written under the name Carrie Jade Williams, she wrote: “I tell the computer to save my work and prepare my body to stand. I think the thought ‘stand’, but know that my body will only obey when it wants to.” The essay implied that her condition had significantly reduced her control over her own body – one of the many symptoms of the disease.
Huntington’s is a hereditary illness, and families with a history of it usually have children tested in their teens. On average, symptoms appear around age 30, reducing the sufferer’s ability to function over a period of about 20 years, resulting in a slow, painful decline and eventually death.
People who live with the disease experience a variety of symptoms which progress in stages, beginning with chorea – abnormal, involuntary movements – and leading to declining physical and mental capabilities until sufferers are unable to walk, talk or care for themselves.
In numerous interviews, Cookes has claimed she was not diagnosed until she was 31 because she had been adopted, and so lacked the necessary medical history. All of Cookes’ friends that we spoke to had been told a similar story – that she was born in an Irish mother-and-baby home, then adopted by an English woman who raised her in the UK.
The story she told of her diagnosis varies. Cookes told Newstalk, a talk radio station in the UK, she had been diagnosed “following a seizure in Dublin”, while Jane, a former friend of Cookes who withheld her real name fearing reprisals from the close-knit Kenmare community, said Cookes had told her she was diagnosed in Cork after an optician “noticed something odd in her eyes”. In tech paper URevolution, Cookes, writing as Williams, claimed she had been hospitalised and unable to walk, speak or feed herself, before “getting better,” despite Huntington’s being a degenerative disease from which people do not recover and cannot regain such skills once they are lost.
There are many other inconsistencies in her accounts of her past and her family background. Cookes also told Jane, and several other friends we spoke to, that she had later “found she had three sisters” and that one “had mental health difficulties.” None of the people we spoke to had ever been told of her conviction for fraud, nor had Cookes ever mentioned that one of her “sisters” had a criminal past.
Speaking to VICE World News via Facebook messenger, Cookes’ cousin – who told us Williams and Cookes were the same woman – said that Cookes had not been adopted, was never in a mother-and-baby home and has one younger brother, two older half brothers and no sisters. Both the cousin and another of Cookes’ relatives who spoke with us in person told us there was no family history of Huntington’s.
Her cousin also told us that Cookes had fled to Ireland. News stories on the ITV website and in local newspapers from 2013 supported this, stating that Cookes had gone missing and was believed to be in Dublin.
But what made her move away from home?
A spokesperson for England’s West Mercia Police confirmed to VICE World News that Cookes was reported missing in October 2013, but could not say who had reported this, and that she was then found in Ireland four weeks later and “handed to the Irish authorities.” Court records seen by VICE World News and a newspaper article from 2014 show that Cookes had been pregnant when she fled to the country on a fake ID to “escape social services” in the UK. The same article stated that Cookes already had one child removed from her care in the UK and was suffering from “a number of psychological problems.”
After Cookes gave birth in January 2014, a report from a concerned neighbour led to the child being removed from Cookes’ care. Later that year, custody was awarded to the father in the UK, who already had sole custody of their other child.
A number of networks existed at this time to help parents who were fleeing to Ireland get past Social Services in the UK. As reported by ITV and other outlets, many of these parents were allowed to keep their children after intervention by Irish courts determined this to be in the children’s best interests.
As VICE World News waded through the evidence to separate the facts from fabrications, it became clear that the Airbnb story was the latest in a string of lies.
A blurry video showing a girl doing the Ice Bucket Challenge in 2014, added another name into the mix – “Lucy Hart.”
The video was filmed by Bonnie, whose name has been changed to protect her children’s identities and out of fear that she will be labelled a bad mother for exposing them to Cookes. “Hart,” the young woman in the video, was actually Cookes, Bonnie told us. It was made in 2014 when Cookes worked as their au pair under the Lucy Hart alias in Tullamore, central Ireland.
Bonnie said that she and her husband had found Cookes on Great Au Pairs, a service that connects au pairs with families. Bonnie said she now felt “stupid.” “I never asked her for references or passport [and] she was so convincing and really lovely in the interview we had,” she said.
Over time, Bonnie found Cookes’ claims increasingly ridiculous, such as saying she had worked as an au pair in Dubai with a “severely autistic boy who used to sit with her in a big tray of baked beans for sensory play”. Unable to stomach yet another tall tale, Bonnie challenged Cookes, who complained that Bonnie was “attacking” her and shortly after left their home to attend a “writers’ retreat”.
Bonnie later made a discovery while cleaning out Cookes’ room. “It made my blood run cold,” she said.
Pushed into the back of a cupboard, she says she found a number of handwritten notes written by Cookes, which appeared to have been used for a statement about visitation rights to a child identified only as “H”. Amid the pages referencing Cookes’ mental health struggles, one line stood out: “I stand shoulder to shoulder with the coroner & I did not murder my daughter. I pray she is at peace”.
Bonnie had unwittingly uncovered a great tragedy that Cookes endured, but had kept hidden. In 2008, she gave birth to a daughter, Martha, who died when she was just four months old. Little is known about her or Cookes’ life at the time. After a nine-month-long inquest, the cause of Martha’s death was officially recorded as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
In 2011, Cookes was charged with fraud after posing as a surrogate mother, setting up a Facebook page under another pseudonym, Claudia Bronwyn, and convincing a childless couple to part with £1,200 for her services, which she never provided. She was initially sentenced to 9 months in prison, but this was converted to a suspended sentence after Cookes listed Martha’s death as mitigating circumstances for her behaviour.
Records from the General Registry Office show a child named Martha was born and died in 2008 aged just 4 months, which fits with dates given in the trial. There is no evidence to suggest Martha’s death was anything more than a horrible twist of fate.
SIDS charity The Lullaby Trust has a number of resources for families, highlighting the effects of grief and how parents may feel “confused or find it difficult to make decisions, or concentrate for any length of time” as well as “[blaming] themselves or each other [and feeling] angry with the doctor, health visitor or anyone who had seen the child”. Every friend of Cookes’ contacted by VICE World News had been told about Martha.
Bonnie said Cookes started working with her family in September 2014, just weeks after the hearing which had removed her third child from her care. She also told us that Cookes had spoken of her “boyfriend in England who had two daughters” and had written a letter to him. The name Cookes gave for the boyfriend was that of the man listed in the court documents as the father of both the child she was pregnant with when she ran to Ireland and their older child. The address on the letter was his mother’s.
Cookes neglected to tell Bonnie about the recent removal of her third baby to this man, discussing him in a normal, matter-of-fact way as though they were still in a relationship.
In fact, she didn’t tell any of her friends about her children being taken away.
In early 2016, Cookes, now calling herself “Lucy Fitzwilliam,” arrived in Dublin, Ireland’s capital. Introducing herself as an occupational therapist and the owner of a domestic violence refuge, Cookes befriended local parents including Lynn McDonald, a chef with two young daughters.
McDonald said she trusted Cookes implicitly, having previously lived in a refuge herself. She said Cookes offered “therapy sessions” for her oldest daughter, who was 8 years old at the time. What happened in their sessions is unknown, but McDonald said the girl has since needed actual therapy to undo the damage caused by Cookes.
At the same time, McDonald said, Cookes had tried to convince her she could be a carer for her youngest daughter, who has a number of life-limiting physical disabilities including Rett Syndrome, which causes severe developmental delays. McDonald refused. Nothing we have uncovered in this investigation suggests that Cookes was qualified to take on either role.
McDonald said that in June 2016, Cookes offered a number of local families she had befriended a trip to Lapland that Christmas. VICE World News has seen emails in which Cookes claimed her “church” would cover half of the cost if parents provided the rest. As a single parent, McDonald scrimped and saved to get the €500 fee together.
But the Lapland trip failed to materialise and, believing themselves to have been scammed, McDonald and her neighbours reported Cookes to the Gardai – Ireland’s police service. Despite this, Cookes was never charged with a crime, and the families involved lost around €500 each.
Julie Lee, a taxi driver in Cork, Ireland, said she knew Cookes relatively well. She said she had driven Cookes in 2017 when she was using yet another name – “Rebecca Fitzgerald” – on many occasions when she was living and working in the area. Lee said Cookes was still calling herself a therapist, and that she regularly dropped her off at the homes of families with young children. The work Cookes actually did with these families is unknown but she told Lee that she worked exclusively with autistic children.
In the UK, qualified therapists must be registered with the Health and Care Professionals Council, but nobody by the name Cookes, Fitzgerald or any of Cookes’ other aliases appear on the register. Likewise, there are no such therapists listed with the Psychological Society of Ireland. Certain classes of therapist (including occupational therapist) are “protected titles,” meaning that people who impersonate them can be prosecuted. Cookes attended the University of York in 2008, before dropping out part way through her first term after realising she was pregnant. She has never qualified as a therapist but had, once again, charmed her way into peoples’ lives.
None of the families involved were willing to go on record, saying they were afraid of Cookes.
Margaret Howard is principal of Rathcormac National School in Cork. She said that the parents Cookes worked with at this time had raised concerns regarding her identity and qualifications. Howard contacted the Gardai in 2017 to report these concerns but does not know what became of her report. Shortly after this, Cookes left town, telling nobody where she was going. Lee, the taxi driver, became concerned and made a missing person’s Facebook page for Cookes, to try and find where her friend and client had gone.
Eighteen months later, “Carrie Jade Williams” won a place at Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, a contemporary arts project in County Kerry, Ireland. Here she met Laura, a teacher who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because she said she was afraid of Cookes. Laura said Cookes introduced herself by saying her first ever pitch had been accepted by the New Yorker.
A well-placed source at the New Yorker said that the publication has “never done business with an individual named Carrie Jade Williams.”
In an email, a spokesperson for Netflix, to whom Cookes claimed she sold a script, also said that they had no record of ever working with Cookes.
We also contacted the Financial Times about the Bodley Head literature prize that Cookes won, which is run by Penguin Vintage and the Financial Times.
A spokesperson for the Financial Times said: “The essay in 2020 was judged at face value. We have not received any prior concerns or complaints about the essay or its author. The online debate points to a confused picture. We will look into this ourselves and look forward to reading your forthcoming article.”
A spokesperson for Penguin, where “Carrie Jade Williams” has a profile, did not respond to a request for comment.
In her winning essay, Cookes mentioned a husband, but we’ve found no record of one. Two former friends said their friendships with Cookes had been ruined by this false claim – one had sent her wedding and engagement gifts while another went dress shopping with her. Likewise both Lee – the taxi driver – and McDonald – the woman with two young daughters who said she was scammed out of a trip to Lapland – were told Cookes was married, but the name she gave for her “husband” changed each time. None of these women were ever shown a photograph of the man or any pictures of the supposed wedding.
In 2021 Cookes moved to Kenmare and quickly made friends in the literary community, helping to run workshops via the Carnegie Arts Centre. Cookes also ran a number of writing competitions at this time, which cost €8 to enter and offered prizes including bursaries worth between €10,000 and 40,000. VICE World News spoke with four people who entered the online competitions who said more than 50 women around the world attended.
Cookes told many entrants, including the four we spoke to, that they were shortlisted for bursaries and encouraged others to send her endless samples of their writing to be introduced to agents. She then stopped replying to emails, leaving them feeling “like [they] were going crazy.” Others received bogus job offers from Cookes for a company that didn’t really exist. At least one woman said she’d turned down real job offers while waiting for Cookes’ fake job to materialise.
Laura told us that Cookes had also convinced a friend of hers that she had a job for her, prompting the woman to quit her long-term paid position only to find the job never existed and Cookes refusing to answer her calls.
Cookes set up an online shop selling sensory toys and lights for disabled children in July 2022, but customers have said they never received the items they ordered. The people we spoke to spent around £300 each and the site has now been taken down. Most customers say they have been refunded by their banks.
Many former friends of Cookes we spoke with said they were appalled by the possibility that Cookes’ presence on writing retreats, at festivals and as a spokesperson for disabled writers had potentially prevented actual disabled writers from being included. One disabled TikTok creator said, “she is making life harder for people with real disabilities. We get questioned about the reality of our situation enough.”
At various points in our conversations, all of Cookes former friends asked us a variation of the same question: did this all start after she lost her baby?
From the evidence we have gathered, it appears that Cookes’ move to Ireland while pregnant may have been prompted by the trauma caused by the loss of her first child and the removal of her second. However, sources close to Cookes have said that she has been a compulsive liar since her teens and, even in high school, was known to invent tragedies and dramatic events for attention.
According to Irish law, Cookes’ practice of obtaining and offering employment under false names and claiming qualifications and businesses which she does not have, constitutes fraud. As a person with a criminal record, the Gardai Vetting System should have prevented her from working with children.
Earlier this year, the Schengen visa website highlighted the arrest and imprisonment of two men who had facilitated people entering the country on fake IDs and, last year, the UK’s Sun newspaper revealed that a man had been arrested after living in Ireland for 14 years on a false ID. In the court case which returned custody of Cookes’ baby to its father in the UK, she was noted as having fled to Ireland on “a false ID”. It is unclear how and why Cookes was permitted to remain in the country and how she has continued to work there for nearly 10 years under at least four pseudonyms. VICE World News asked the Gardai for comment on this, but they did not respond.
I spoke with Cookes by phone in mid-October. When she answered, she seemed flustered, telling me she would “get a pen” to write down my details before asking me to email her and suddenly remembering that she had a medical appointment to attend and hanging up.
It became apparent that the only way to reach Cookes was going to be in person. After asking around Kenmare to find people who might know her, I left my contact details with a couple of local businesses. Later that evening I received a phone call from Jane, one of Cookes’ former friends, who wanted to share her story. Jane came to my hotel and spent 90 minutes laying out her concerns regarding Cookes’ lies and the cracks that had formed in their friendship. She also provided me with Cookes’ address – the location of the Airbnb property that started the chain of events.
The next day I visited Cookes’ home, to find a sign on the door that said: “I am in a meeting and unable to answer the door. If you need me please text me,” with her phone number at the bottom. After ringing the doorbell to no avail, Cookes sent me a text five minutes later saying “my doorbell has logged a number of attempts this morning which I presume is you.” Cookes’ doorbell is not the kind that can “log” when it is rung, suggesting that she was home at the time I visited.
Weeks went by with no contact from Cookes. But then, on the 17th of November, Chloe McKewan, Cookes’ next-door neighbour, rang me to say that Cookes had left her house. After corroborating many of the other stories I had heard regarding Cookes’ persistent lying, McKewan told me that, in the second week of October, Cookes had left the property in the middle of the night, later texting her to say she had been rushed to hospital in Tralee, a city in the south of Ireland about an hour away from Kenmare, for a “medical emergency”.
Having failed to inform their shared landlord, Tim Hourigan, that she was running an Airbnb and owing him significant back-rent, Cookes was given an eviction notice in her absence. In response to this, she sent the landlord a lengthy WhatsApp message – seen by VICE World News – claiming she had spoken with a social worker and that he would have to reclaim her debt of €3,591 (£3122.61, $3716) from a dispute resolution service.
Hourigan claimed a significant amount of his furniture had gone missing after she left.
Now, nobody knows where Cookes is.
The way that Cookes has managed to keep moving house and shifting between identities worries many of the people we have spoken to. Bonnie, who employed Cookes as an au pair, said, “I let this person into my home with my small children… it’s chilling [to think she is still out there].”
Every woman we spoke to for this story expressed concern for their safety over how Cookes would react after her lies were revealed. Laura, the teacher she befriended, said: “I was hesitant to speak with you as she knows where I live and has been in my house.”
For now, the people Cookes knew are left with many more questions than answers.
Jane, her former friend, said that living for a year unsure of who her friend really was has been unsettling. “I’m just thankful she never had any money from us,” she told VICE World News. “I’m glad you came, because we need closure; it is like an open wound.”
CORRECTION 16/12/2022: This article has been updated to correct the length of suspended prison sentence that Cookes received in 2011.
