The Imposter on Netflix: Who is Frédéric Bourdin and where is he now?

Netflix UK’s recently added a true-crime documentary that deals with Frédéric Bourdin, a French confidence trickster. Titled The Imposter, it shows Bourdin assuming the identity of a teenage boy and staying with the teen's family for a while before getting caught.

In 1997, Frédéric Bourdin impersonated Nicholas Patrick Barclay, who went missing three years ago in 1994. Bourdin stayed with the Barclay family for 5 months when a private detective and an FBI agent smelt something fishy, leading to Bourdin’s incarceration.

The true-crime documentary chronicles this case in particular and features interviews with several family members of the Barclays, Frédéric Bourdin, and others related to the case.

According to IMDb, the synopsis of The Imposter reads:

"A documentary centered on a young man in Spain who claims to a grieving Texas family that he is their 16-year-old son who has been missing for 3 years."

To note, the British documentary was first released in 2012.

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Becoming Nicholas Patrick Barclay: Frédéric Bourdin’s impersonation captured in The Imposter

A still from The Imposter. (Photo via Netflix/Sportskeeda)

Three years after Nicholas Barclay went missing, Frédéric Bourdin assumed his identity and started living with his family in October 1997. Everything was fine until Charles (Charlie) Parker, a private detective, and Nancy Fisher, an FBI agent, caught his lie.

Speaking with The New Yorker in 2008, Frédéric Bourdin said that the plan to become Barclay had come to him in a moment of crisis. The child-welfare judge, who was handling one of his con cases, asked him to prove that he was a teenager, failing which she’d take his fingerprints and he would be behind bars.

To escape prison fate, Frédéric Bourdin, then 23, rang up the Alexandria, Virginia-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He spoke in English and introduced himself as Jonathan Durean, director of the Linares shelter. He then described a “scared” child and asked the center if any kid matching that portrayal was missing.

A still from The Imposter. (Photo via IMDb)

Once he got the name Nicholas Barclay, Bourdin gathered more information about the missing boy. However, the conman faced one major challenge, as the differences in their physical appearances were huge.

To cover this up, Bourdin cooked up a story involving him being a child s*x ring victim, where his abductors injected chemicals to alter his look.

With Carey Gibson (then 31), Barclay’s half-sister, and the San Antonio Police Department’s help, he was soon with Barclays. Notably, after Nicholas Patrick Barclay went missing, his mother Beverly, who was already struggling with her drug addiction, broke down and became hooked to methadone.

So when Bourdin entered their lives as Nicholas, she didn’t think twice before welcoming him.

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Who was this Frédéric Bourdin? Let’s explore more about him

Frédéric Bourdin. (Photo via IMDb)

Born on June 13, 1974, in the Parisian suburb Nanterre, Frédéric Bourdin started living with his grandparents in Mouchamps, a Nantes hamlet, at the age of 5. Fatherless and with half-Algerian lineage, Bourdin’s case always puzzled law officers.

Eric Maurel, who is currently the Nimes public prosecutor, told David Grann of The New Yorker back in 2008 that Bourdin’s motive behind his con left them confused. He had said:

“In my twenty-two years on the job, I’ve never seen a case like it. Usually, people con for money. His profit seems to have been purely emotional.”

Called an “exceedingly clever” man by the U.S. State Department, Bourdin ran his serial imposter career from 1990 to 2007 and reportedly took up nearly 500 false identities.

He covered several locations, including Spain, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, France, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Bosnia, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and America, the publication added.

According to a French prosecutor, he was “an incredible illusionist whose perversity is matched only by his intelligence.”

Bourdin stopped his confidence game when he married a French woman named Isabella in 2007, and the couple went on to have five children. However, ten years later, in 2017, he wrote on Facebook that Isabella left with him with their kids.

Bourdin currently has accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.