Description
She seemed like the perfect nanny. Until she vanished – and the truth emerged.
Unmasking Samantha Cookes is a chilling true story of a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. Once known to millions as ‘Carrie Jade Williams’, she slipped seamlessly from au pair and nanny to therapist, psychologist, terminally ill author and online ‘sickfluencer’. Each persona carefully crafted. Each lie more audacious than the last. And each one designed to gain trust – and exploit it.
What followed was a trail of shattered lives, a surrogacy scam, and the death of a baby that would haunt Samantha as she fled across borders, changing her identity to evade scrutiny. Each reinvention brought new victims, until her most audacious lie, a fabricated terminal illness, triggered a TikTok reckoning.
Drawing on exclusive evidence and firsthand accounts, Unmasking Samantha Cookes pulls back the curtain on a master manipulator hiding in plain sight, and reveals just how easily trust can be weaponised, with an unsettling question at its core: how well do we really know the people we trust with our children?
Contents
1. Carrie Jade Williams – The Sickfluencer
2. Samantha Cookes – The Birth of a Con
3. Baby Martha
4. From Falsehoods to Fraud
5. Missing Person
6. Sophia Williamson – The Arts Teacher
7. Lucy Hart – The Au Pair
8. Lucy Fitzwilliams – The Therapist
9. Lucy Fitzpatrick – The Nanny
10. Rebecca Fitzgerald – The Child Psychologist
11. A TikTok Downfall
12. Sadie Harris – The Evangelical Christian Nanny
13. The Reckoning
14. Being Samantha Cookes
About the Author
Alan Bradley is an award-winning Irish director, actor and writer working across documentary, television drama and ads. He won the Young Director Award for Documentary at Cannes 2024 and is the youngest director to hold a prime-time RTÉ One documentary slot. Named a Broadcast Hotshot 2025, he has directed critically acclaimed films including Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost, Anorexia: My Family and Me and the hit RTÉ/BBC series Bad Nanny.
