“I really wanted to know who I am”.
A woman who claimed she was Madeleine McCann has come out to say she ‘regrets’ speaking out and clarified she didn’t mean to cause any harm.
Julia Wandelt, from Poland, made headlines last year when she came out with a video claiming she believed she was the British girl who went missing in Portugal back in 2007. Madeleine McCann was only three years old when she disappeared on a family vacation in the country. The youngster has been missing for almost two decades now and would thought to be around 20 years old.
Her case has been one of the most widely covered missing persons investigations in history.
When Wandelt made a video declaring she thought she could be Madeleine McCann, it sparked a surge to her Instagram account, which she created early last year – @iammadeleinemccann.
Although it all came crashing down when she appeared on Dr Phil to undergo a DNA test, it revealed she wasn’t British, but Polish.
She has now come out to say she “regrets” her decision to post on social media with her belief, explaining memories of childhood were patchy after attending therapy, so she began to question if something happened in those memory gaps.
When she asked relatives to show pictures of her mother pregnant with her, they dismissed her worries and told her she wasn’t adopted. But this spurred Julia on, thinking she may have been kidnapped because they evaded the conversation.
Julia then went in search of answers on missing persons’ websites and found the infamous case of Madeleine McCann.
The Polish woman believed she shared a resemblance, and that they both had a rare eye defect, coloboma of the iris, which affects just one in 10,000 children.
She says she tried contacting police in Poland and the UK but “no-one treated me seriously”. Therefore she turned to social media to be heard.
She told the BBC, Why Do You Hate Me? series, she spoke out to find out the truth. But was adamant it wasn’t for fame.
“I never meant to hurt anyone – including [the] McCanns,” she said. “I really wanted to know who I am.”
She added: “I knew that there will be people who will not believe me or hate me, but I didn’t expect that I will get death threats, for example. It was something that I don’t understand. People knew that I was abused and they all knew that I deal with depression.
“I was trying to be strong even when people said, you should die. You should be raped. You should be killed. You should be murdered. You shouldn’t exist in this world. You’re a b***h.”
Julia continued that she wouldn’t have made the Instagram profile in hindsight.
She also apologised to Kate and Gerry McCann, Madeleine’s parents.
