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The Imposter: A jaw-dropping true story
Aug 16, 2012, 10:32 AM | Updated: 10:32 am
The Imposter” has a jaw-dropping story to tell, a story that starts with the sudden disappearance of 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay from a little town just outside San Antonio, Texas in 1994.
Three and a half years later, the family gets a call out of the blue. Nick’s been found, alive, and in Spain. He’d apparently been kidnapped and abused by some kind of an international sex ring but had managed to escape.
His adult sister flies to Spain to bring him home, the US Consulate issues him a new passport and he has a joyous homecoming with his mother and other siblings.
Nick moves back home, starts attending high school, even goes on local TV with his amazing story. Only problem was he wasn’t Nicholas Barclay.
Even though he convinced Nick’s family, AND the consulate, AND the FBI, that he was the blond and blue-eyed 16 year old Nick, he was really a dark-haired, brown-eyed 23 year old French Algerian.
How he managed to trick everyone is the subject of this startling documentary. The movie interviews all the principal players – the Mom, the sister, the rest of Nick’s family, the American consul, the FBI agent, and most fascinatingly, the imposter himself about how he pulled off the seemingly impossible.
*** Spoiler Alert ***
So how did he trick so many people? He dyed his hair blonde and added Nick’s three small tattooes, but beyond that, he didn’t do that much. He acted shy and traumatized, so people wouldn’t press him on too many details and then he mostly depended on people wanting to believe him. Nick’s mother explains that the family attributed whatever differences they noticed about this new Nick to the abuse he supposedly had undergone.
And as for duping the FBI, the imposter (Frederic Bourdin) offered them so much detail about his sexual abuse and torture that the FBI ended up focussing its attention on tracking down the criminals who would do this to a child, instead of focussing on the criminal right in front of them.
And “The Imposter” has one final twist. After Bourdin’s deception is finally discovered, he suggests the family had an ulterior motive for claiming him as their own. He accuses them of murdering young Nicholas Barclay …
A truly strange tale.
