TikTok, fraud and literacy: How a lifelong scammer and disability advocate fooled the media

The Financial Times has withdrawn a prestigious literary prize after it was revealed that the winning author was a serial scammer who left an abundance of lies and manipulation in her wake.

“Carrie Jade Williams” is the name that the individual went by and was awarded the 2020 Bodley Head/FT Literature Prize for her essay about living with a disability – which she claimed was written using assistive technology.

However, on December 9th, a report from VICE revealed that “Carrie Jade Williams” is actually a convicted fraudster whose real name is Samantha Cookes. Cookes has evaded law enforcement in Ireland for a decade by regularly changing her name and moving between towns.

The essay was still available on the FT’s website on December 7th, but by December 9th, it had been removed, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine.

A spokesperson for the FT said: “Based on the information that has come to light, we made the decision to remove the essay from our website.”

They continued: “We have also discussed this with Bodley Head, our partners in the prize. The 2020 essay was read and judged in good faith and on literary merit. We have both reached out to the author to respond to the claims made in the article and have received no response. We remain open to hearing from the author, but in the meantime, we will withdraw her prize win and Bodley Head will make the ebook unavailable.”

Numerous literary sites have also quietly removed all mention of “Carrie Jade Williams” from their pages.

Although, a profile for her still remains live on the Penguin publishing house’s website, which is parent company to Bodley Head, and a link to her winning essay leads readers to Amazon, where it is still available for download. 

Under her alias, Cookes painted a picture of a brave woman who had been adopted from an Irish mother-and-baby home and lived with Huntington’s – a rare degenerative disease that is carried in families.

Her relatives explained to VICE that she had not been adopted and had no history of Huntington’s in the family. Suspicion about the accuracy of her story was first raised online after she posted a series of TikTok’s claiming Airbnb guests were suing her for $450,000. She claimed that they were upset about seeing disability aids in her home. She then said they were so triggered by the items in her home that they’d need extensive therapy.

The Independent’s Indy100 site initially ran two stories about the “Williams” Airbnb saga, one of which has since been removed.

According to VICE, the publication spent two months investigating the claims and interviewed women who had trusted Cookes to care for their children and given her large sums of money – and were left distraught by the chaos she brought into their lives. She had operated under several pseudonyms and the women expressed their fear that she remains at large. A number of concerned parents contacted Ireland’s police force over the years, but a significant effort was never made to track her down.

The lack of action shown by the police angered many. According to VICE, Julie Lee, a former friend of Cooke’s, said that when she contacted police in 2017 to report that she was posing as a therapist, they had told her they held a “thick file” on Cookes and were actively looking for her. Despite this and a corresponding report from a local headteacher, Cookes was able to leave in town in August 2017 and effectively disappear.

Recently, VICE was contacted by Abby Beall, the features editor of New Scientist, who said “Williams” had contacted her last year, attempting to sell a story about a supposedly groundbreaking brain surgery she was due to have. Beall said she dropped the story after asking her a few questions and “realising that it made no sense.”