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'''Frédéric Bourdin''' (born 1974 in [[Nanterre]], [[Hauts-de-Seine]]) is a [[France|French]] serial [[impostor]] the press has nicknamed "The [[Chameleon]]". He began his impersonations as a child and {{As of|2005|lc=on}} had assumed at least |
'''Frédéric Bourdin''' (born 1974 in [[Nanterre]], [[Hauts-de-Seine]]) is a [[France|French]] serial [[impostor]] the press has nicknamed "The [[Chameleon]]". He began his impersonations as a child and {{As of|2005|lc=on}} had assumed at least 500 false identities, three of which have been actual teenage [[missing person]]s. |
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==Early life== |
==Early life== |
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Revision as of 01:51, 14 July 2012
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Frédéric Bourdin | |
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Frédéric Bourdin (born 1974 in Nanterre, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon". He began his impersonations as a child and as of 2005[update] had assumed at least 500 false identities, three of which have been actual teenage missing persons.
Early life
According to himself, his lawyer, and press reports, Bourdin was raised by his grandparents in Paris and later put into a children's home. He says that he never knew his father, that his mother intended to have an abortion and eventually abandoned him, and that he was sexually abused. His mother has stated that Bourdin's father was an Algerian immigrant named Kaci.[1]
Impersonations
In 1997 Bourdin took the identity of Nicholas Barclay, a lost son of a family in San Antonio, Texas. Nicholas, who was thirteen, was playing basketball with his friends in San Antonio, Texas on June 13, 1994. Nicholas never made it home and had not been seen or heard from since. Bourdin contacted the Barclay family, inviting them to come to the US embassy in Spain to meet him. Even though Bourdin had brown eyes and a French accent,the family stated that he was their blue-eyed son. He said that he had escaped from a child prostitution ring.
Bourdin lived with the family for three months until February 1998. In late 1997, according to himself a local private investigator grew suspicious while he was working with a TV crew that had been filming the family, Bourdin call Parker a liar and claim that Parker just care about being the saving genius for the glare of the cameras when actually he did not have any role into Bourdin identification. In February 1998 the FBI got a court order to take the young man's fingerprints and DNA, which were later identified as belonging to Bourdin. In September 1998 in federal court in San Antonio, Bourdin pleaded guilty to passport fraud and perjury. He was imprisoned for six years, more then three time as long as what the sentencing guidelines recommended.[2]
When Bourdin returned from the USA in 2003, he moved to Grenoble, assumed the name Leo Balley, and claimed that he was a teenager who had been missing since 1996. DNA testing proved otherwise.
In August 2004 he was in Spain, claiming to be an adolescent named Ruben Sanchez Espinoza (which did not exist) whose mother had been killed in the Madrid bomb attacks. When the police found out the truth, they deported him to France.
In June 2005 Bourdin passed himself off as Francisco Hernandes-Fernandez (which also di not exist), a 15-year-old Spanish orphan, and spent a month in the College Jean Monnet in Pau, France. He claimed that his parents had been killed in a car accident. He dressed as a teenager, adopted a proper walking style, covered his receding hairline with a baseball cap and used depilatory face creams. On June 12 a teacher unmasked him after seeing a TV program about his exploits. On September 16 he was sentenced to four months in prison for possessing and using the previous false identity of Leo Balley.
According to his 2005 interviews, Bourdin has been looking for "love and affection" and attention he never received as a child. He has pretended to be an orphan several times since 1990.
In 2005 Bourdin vowed that he would not impersonate anyone ever again.
Personal life
In 2007, Bourdin married a French woman named Isabelle after a yearlong courtship. They are the parents of three children, and since 2005 he retired from changing identities.
Bourdin was interviewed in 2008 by David Grann, a columnist for The New Yorker. After Isabelle gave birth to their first child, Bourdin contacted Grann and told him it was a girl. Grann then asked if Bourdin had become a new person now that he was a father and a husband, to which Bourdin replied, "No, this is who I am."
Depictions in the media
In 2010 a fictionalized account of the Nicholas Barclay case was brought to theaters under the title The Chameleon by French director and screenwriter Jean-Paul Salomé. Bourdin (renamed Fortin in the film) served as a consultant on the film and was portrayed by Canadian actor Marc-André Grondin. The film premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.
The Imposter, a documentary about Bourdin's impersonation of Nicholas Barclay, has appeared at the Miami International Film Festival, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
References
- ^ Grann, David (2009-01-07). "Serial French child imposter Frédéric Bourdin". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2010-11-30.
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/28/crime.unitedstates