caption,
Left to right: Megan, Louis Tomlinson, Johanna and Megan’s mother Jean
Item Information
- Author: Jamie Bartlett and Ruth Mayer
- Roll, BBC News
2 hours ago
In 2020, a prestigious children’s charity closed down. Two years earlier, the young founder had died under mysterious circumstances and everyone involved was desperately looking for answers.
Only now is the truth coming out a tale of medical deception and celebrity obsession uncovered by a group of parents determined to protect the cancer patient community from scammers.
On August 10, 2015, a crowd of fans cheered and waved as two members of pop band One Direction posed for photos before a benefit ball at London’s Natural History Museum. But inside, the real stars were a group of very ill children all in long dresses or suits, some accompanied by their carers, others in the midst of chemotherapy.
For Megan and her mom Jean, this Cinderella Ball was another opportunity to raise funds for their fastgrowing charity, Believe in Magic. Over the past two years, they’d made hundreds of seriously ill children’s dreams come true, including parties and trips to Disney.
Guests also knew that Megan who was just 20 at the time had organized the ball while she was publicly battling a brain tumor. It’s an “incredible privilege” to work with Believe in Magic, One Direction musician Louis Tomlinson told attendees. But behind the ball gowns and themed masks lies a secret about one of the most mysterious syndromes in medicine.
Megan
Believe in Magic was inspired by Megan’s own struggle with the disease. After her parents separated when she was very young, Megan moved in with her mother Jean and lived a fairly normal life in the suburbs. But at the age of 13, Megan was diagnosed with idiopathic intracranial hypertension a buildup of pressure in the brain.
A few years later, Jean told friends that Megan had also been diagnosed with a brain tumor. That experience inspired Megan, then 16, to start Believe in Magic to bring a little joy to extremely ill children.
caption,
Megan’s halfsisters said they “adored” her
Despite Jean’s regular online posts about Megan’s daily cocktail of medication and frequent visits to the hospital, the pair worked tirelessly for their charity. Megan, Jean and their institution rose to fame by throwing glamorous parties and supporting the band One Direction.
“It was unbeatable,” says Lucy Petagine, whose daughter Luna has attended several events.
“Every kid felt like it was very important and not bad.”
In 2015, Megan received an award from then British Prime Minister David Cameron, who praised her “extraordinary courage”.
However, at the height of Believe in Magic’s success, Jean revealed that Megan’s tumor had worsened and she needed to raise £120,000 for vital emergency treatment in the United States. Megan’s supporters rushed to help and reached the destination in less than 48 hours.
But a group of parents from the childhood cancer community didn’t believe Megan was as ill as she claimed.
detective parents
When Jo Ashcroft first saw Megan’s Facebook fundraiser on digital platform JustGiving in early 2015, painful memories flooded back. After her son was diagnosed with neuroblastoma a cancer of the nervous system Jo raised £250,000 for successful, cuttingedge treatment in the US.
But something about Megan’s request sparked alarms in Jo. She did not name any specific doctors or hospitals.
“I was a little suspicious,” he recalls.
“I just wanted to make sure the money went to the right place.”
When Jo spoke to three friends whose children had also been diagnosed with neuroblastoma, they all agreed it was unusual. However, they warned of caution it was unthinkable to wrongly accuse someone of lying about a brain tumor.
Questions posed amicably to Jean and other supporters went unanswered, so Jo returned to running the family business and caring for their three children. Until a year later Jo saw Megan and Jean fundraising again Jean said Megan was seriously ill in a hospital in the US and needed more money.
Jo and the other parents swore that this time they would find out the truth.
“It became a solid idea,” she says.
“I don’t want people to be misled, especially in the cancer patient community.”
She took on a pseudonym and even pretended to be a journalist writing a story about Megan — but again, it got nowhere. But one member of the group used his computer skills to find out where Jean and Megan opened their emails. It wasn’t a hospital. It was a luxury hotel at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Private detective
A few weeks later, Megan and her mother Jean disembarked on the ocean liner Queen Mary II in the port of Southampton, UK.
According to Jean, they were lucky to be back. All summer she asked supporters to help her raise money explaining that Megan had “16 sources of infection” and severe sepsis. At one point, she said, doctors gave Megan a 10% chance of survival for the next seven days.
However, thanks to her hard work, Megan’s condition has stabilized, she said, and specialists in Florida have allowed her to return home armed with five boxes of medical equipment and a “huge oxygen concentrator.”
But when they arrived, a private investigator was waiting for them at the cruise terminal. Jo was so determined to uncover the truth that she paid the equivalent of around £6,000 for him to photograph the pair.
The photos show Megan and Jean leaving the ship like two happy tourists. There were no oxygen tanks. According to the investigator, they laughed and chatted as they passed the porters, pushing trolleys full of suitcases.
We emailed Jean asking why she and Megan were staying at a Disney resort at the time Megan was reportedly seriously ill in a US hospital. She didn’t respond, but said, “It’s very easy to get sucked into social media lies.”
Armed with this new evidence, the suspicious parents contacted every authority they could think of, but it looked like nobody was taking action. So they decided to start a Facebook group called The Truth About Meg and Jean to share their insights. But most of Meg and Jean’s supporters didn’t want to believe it. Many had seen Megan’s poor health up close the IV tubes in her arm and the medication.
Jo was bombarded with hate mail, but she was confident she did the right thing. By early 2018, Jo’s phone rang. Megan had died.
the request
Megan died on March 28, 2018 at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London.
“All I said was, ‘Honey, if you want to go, please go and be happy,'” her mother wrote on Facebook.
Jo was stunned. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” she says.
For Megan’s supporters, there was little doubt as to who was to blame. “She was hunted to death,” wrote one on Facebook. But Jo remained convinced Megan didn’t have a brain tumor.
When a person’s cause of death is unclear, a coroner investigates what happened. An investigation into Megan’s death was launched in late 2018.
In early 2022, we were granted permission to appear in court and hear a recording of what was said at the inquest four years earlier.
For two hours we listened to the doctors explaining what they had seen. Megan was certainly not doing well over the years she had suffered from a number of illnesses, all of which were theoretically manageable.
However, the investigation was a shocking setback to the allegations Megan and Jean had made over the years. Jo was right there was no question of a tumor. According to the forensic pathologist, his brain was “morphologically normal.”
Several doctors listed other worrying details. One of them had doubts about the validity of Megan’s medical history. Another noted Megan’s “opioidseeking behavior.” There was an attempt to obtain morphine using a fake prescription. Megan repeatedly missed doctor’s appointments and jumped from doctor to doctor.
It wasn’t a tumor that killed Megan, but an arrhythmia — an acute cardiac arrhythmia — due to fatty liver, which is likely related to Megan’s high body mass index.
Jean declined an interview, but did email us to say that Megan has a pituitary microadenoma — a type of benign brain tumor that, while not usually fatal, can be harmful.
The sisters
Megan had four older halfsiblings, Jean’s children from a previous marriage.
“I was 12 when Meg was born,” says Megan’s halfsister Kate, whose name we’ve changed for this story.
“I just loved her.”
According to Kate, Megan and Jean had a strange relationship with illness. If someone they knew wasn’t doing well, sooner or later they would hear that Megan had the same thing.
Kate recalls family dinners amid dangers. Jean stacked cans unsteadily on top of empty food cupboards, which fell and smashed onto the dining table below so often that they were riddled with dents and cavities.
“Jean wanted one of us to have an accident,” Kate believes. “All the emotions that go into it. The attention.”
For Megan’s other halfsister, Rachel whose name we also changed for this story matters are even more personal. At the age of nine he developed a rash that led to kidney problems. Over the years her condition deteriorated and she required a transplant.
After Megan died, Rachel vividly recalled being fed cup after cup of Bovril (a brand of salted meat extract) as a child although the high salt content is something to avoid if you have kidney problems.
She is now wondering: “Only I ate Bovril. Was that on purpose?”
Munchausen syndrome
In 1951, a doctor named Richard Asher published a groundbreaking article in The Lancet. While directing a psychiatric observation unit, he noticed a small but constant number of patients who complained of various symptoms but who, upon closer examination, were perfectly healthy.
He called this condition Munchausen Syndrome. It’s different than hypochondria. Hypochondriacs exaggerate and panic, but genuinely think they are sick. Patients with Munchausen syndrome know they don’t have it but seek treatment anyway.
Marc Feldman is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial disorders such as Munchausen Syndrome. He also studies proxy Munchausen syndrome, also called manmade or caregiverinduced illness, a rare form of child abuse in which a parent or caregiver exaggerates or intentionally induces symptoms of illness in the child. Since this is a scam, he believes the disease is more widespread than people realize.
Feldman has not met Megan or Jean, nor has he seen Megan’s medical records. But based on the detailed account of what we found out, he says Megan’s case “screams for proxy Munchausen syndrome.”
Megan was 23 when she died, so she was a legal adult. But she was just a kid when the charity opened. We’ll never know for sure who caused this behavior or what Megan really thought of it.
Feldman explains that the dividing line between a child and a consenting adult can be clear in law, but not always in practice:
“As you learn throughout your life that there are certain things you are allowed to say and think, you become cooperative.”
A direction
People fake an illness for a variety of reasons—in themselves or in others. Some do it for the money. Sometimes it is the desire to be heard or cared for. For parents, it can be a desire to be the heroic caregiver. It’s often a mix.
For Megan and Jean, one motive may have been running a popular charity confronting Megan with a lifethreatening brain tumor may have helped Believe reach more children in Magic. At a Believe in Magic event at the Tower of London, a former friend recalled Jean remarking, “The sicker Meg is, the more attention we get, the more money we make.”
caption,
One Direction’s Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson arrive at the 2015 Cinderella Ball at the National History Museum in London
More recently, Feldman has spotted a new trend: people faking certain conditions to meet celebrities. A serious illness, he says, “allows someone to stand out from the crowd of people who are in love with that celebrity.”
Kate, Megan’s halfsister, believes her brain tumor and Believe in Magic were partly due to a desire to hang out with celebrities. After repeatedly tweeting the members of One Direction, the band became supporters of the charity, allowing Megan and Jean to meet the stars.
The Kingston Review
In 2017 a year before Megan’s death the UK Charity Commission launched an inquiry into Believe in Magic after Jo made multiple allegations.
They found that more than R$600,000 had gone unaccounted for and that the charity money had been transferred to Jean’s personal bank account. In 2020, the charity disbanded and Jean agreed not to hold a trustee or a managerial position with any charity for five years.
Just a few months after Believe in Magic closed, Jean disappeared from public life. She moved to France for a while before returning to the UK last year.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. In November 2022, Kingston Council where Megan lived published an “Adult Safeguarding Review” about what had happened. These are rare investigations into cases where people may have been let down by the authorities. As usual, all names have been changed, but from what we know on the case, we have no doubt that this is Megan.
They concluded: “Although there was no formal diagnosis of an illness invented or caused by the caregiver in this case, the account and conclusion of the coroner led all parties involved to believe that this was probably a case of an illness invented or caused by the caregiver illness caused by the caregiver.”
This review does not suggest that an illness made up or caused by the caregiver is responsible for Megan’s death. The document lists the cause of death given in the coroner’s investigation: cardiac arrhythmia due to fat in the liver. Still, it shows how the artificial or caregiverinduced illness could have escaped in Megan’s case.
Illnesses caused or induced by the caregiver are considered something that can happen to children because parents attend doctor appointments and are responsible for consenting to treatments. There is much less knowledge about how this can also happen to vulnerable adults. Since Megan was an adult for most of this story, doctors and social workers lacked the training and tools to recognize her situation as a case of a manmade or caregiverinduced illness while she was still alive.
We asked Jean to respond to the conclusions of the Kingston review. She didn’t address the find directly, saying, “I loved and cared for my daughter. To suggest that I could have harmed her in any way is absolutely disgusting.”
It’s too late for Megan, but this review could change the way similar cases are understood and treated, according to Danya Glaser, an expert in artificial and carerelated illnesses.
“Kingston’s review is extremely meaningful,” she says. “It draws people’s attention to the fact that manmade or caregiverinduced illnesses can persist into adulthood.”
A few days after the review was published, we visited Kate and Rachel to share the report’s conclusion not even Megan’s sisters had any idea what had happened. Neither of them has spoken to their mother in years. When they asked tough questions about Megan and Believe in Magic, Jean reportedly shut them both out of her life.
“It’s a beautiful thing. It’s all there in black and white,” Rachel says as she reads the report.
“We thought that was all forgotten.”
She remembers her kidney transplant and wonders what this report means to her too.
Both hope that this will prevent something similar from happening again.
“Megan was a victim,” says Kate. “She was tricked into it.”