Sobbing dad of ‘pretend’ Madeleine McCann says daughter is not a foul individual – simply ‘sick’
Julia Wandelt believes that she is Madeleine McCann, who went missing from a hotel in Praia da Luz in Portugal in 2007, but her real father says she is mentally unwell
The father of the woman convicted of harassing Madeleine McCann’s parents has said she is not a bad person, but is mentally unwell. It comes after Julia Wandelt was sentenced to six months in prison after a trial.
Julia Wandelt reportedly pestered Kate and Gerry McCann, bombarding them with messages and letters insisting that she was their daughter who went missing during a holiday in Portugal in 2007. Eventually, she escalated the situation by showing up at Kate and Gerry’s home in Leicestershire to tell them in person that she was Maddie, sending them into a frenzy.
Courts heard how, in just one day in April last year, Wandelt, who is two years older than Madeleine’s real age, sent over 60 different messages to Kate. Kate and Gerry weren’t the only ones to bear the brunt of the messages, as their twins, Amelie and Sean, were also hit with messages from their “sister”.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Julia’s real father, Jacek, admitted he has struggled to deal with his daughter’s actions. Working as a radiologist, the Polish man sobbed as he apologised for Julia’s actions.
“When I saw her it had been a while since she said she was Madeleine McCann and so I thought maybe the situation was getting better, but I was wrong,” he explained as he recalled the last time he saw his child.
“We had gone for a drive and then, just as she did when this all started a few years ago, she said to me, ‘Daddy, I love you, but you are not my dad, I am Madeleine McCann’.”
The newspaper was also able to obtain Julia’s birth certificate, which confirmed that her parents are indeed father Jacek and mother Dorota. The paper also claimed that Julia had been abused when she was just 11 years old, which was confirmed by Jacek as he revealed the man was sent to prison for two years.
As a result, Jacek believes that the abuse she endured changed Julia into the person that she is today. “That man is a monster”, he said of Julia’s abuser. He continued: “Up until then, Julia was happy; she was carefree.
“Then this man – I say man, he is a monster – molested her and after that she changed completely. She became withdrawn and wouldn’t talk very much; she just closed up, put up a wall, and it was heartbreaking to see.”
He admitted the last time he fully spoke to his own daughter was just before Christmas, when she insisted that they were not her real parents. Instead, she claimed that she was actually kidnapped in Portugal and the couple had indeed raised her as their own.
The conversation became heated when Jacek and Dorota told Julia that they had, in fact, never even been to Portugal. When asked to describe his daughter, Jacek pleaded: “Julia is not bad, she is sick and needs help.
“Every day I think of her and I pray that she may get well.” He also sobbed and begged the McCanns for forgiveness at the chaos that Julia has caused their family, as he admitted he had also “lost” his daughter as a result of the abuse she suffered.
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