Description
‘Lies? Yes, everyone lies. I’ve lied ever since I could remember. It’s the only thing I do well, and I think we should all play to our strengths, don’t you?’
Unmasking Samantha Cookes is the 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 started with the tragic death of a baby soon became a trail of fraud, deception and shattered lives. Every 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 mastermind of deception 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?
Praise for Unmasking Samantha Cookes:
‘At last, the full story – with startling new revelations – of Samantha Cookes aka Carrie Jade Williams, whose trail of deception and duplicity took more than a decade to unravel. Bradley’s unmasking of Cookes is sharp, gripping and impossible to ignore.’ – Nicola Tallant
‘Bradley writes brilliantly, setting out the facts with the poise of a forensic investigator and the pacing of a thriller writer, so that even those familiar with the story remain heavily invested in turning the pages in a frantic bid to see justice served. Superb.’ – The Irish Times
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
1. The Making of a Liar
2. Baby Martha
3. The Surrogacy Scam
4. A Disappearing Act
5. Sophia Williamson
6. Lucy Hart
7. Lucy Fitzwilliams
8. The Women’s Refuge
9. The First Crack
10. The Illusion Crumbles
11. Lucy Fitzpatrick
12. Rebecca Fitzgerald
13. Samantha Black and Jade Williams
14. Huntington’s Disease
15. Carrie Jade Williams
16. Validation
17. The Peak of Her Powers
18. A TikTok Downfall
19. Exposing the Truth
20. The End of Carrie Jade Williams
21. Jane and Sadie Harris
22. A Sense of Purpose
23. Trale
24. The Lies Revealed
25. Taking Back the Story
26. No Ordinary Con Artist
Acknowledgements
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.
