For Julia Wendell, the past few months have been a roller-coaster ride.
After finding out last week, through DNA tests, that she was not missing Madeleine McCann, who disappeared from Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz on the Algarve in May 2007, Wendell was shattered.
The 21-year-old was convinced she was the key to one of the greatest unsolved crimes in decades and gained a huge social media following after creating an “I am Madeleine McCann” account on Instagram and TikTok.
Upon hearing of the results of the DNA test, Gerry and Kate McCann said: “There isn’t anything to report at this time. If and when there is, it will come from The Metropolitan Police.”
Now that she has learnt that she is “100% Polish”, Wendell’s family has been left to pick up the pieces, namely her parents.
Her mother, Dorota Wandelt-Cholewinski, is “beside herself”. A family friend said she and her Wendell’s father Piotr Cholewinski wanted to get their daughter “the help she needs”, the Mirror reported.
Following the drama, Wendell has returned to Poland and reportedly launched a fund-raiser to “get back on her feet” in an effort to pay for a lawyer and therapy sessions.
Alongside a screen-shot of her plea, she urged: “I really need your help but if you don’t want to help I will understand.
“I created this fund-raiser because many kind people wrote me that I should do this because it's a possibility for me to pay for lawyer and therapy.”
In the aftermath, a former close friends of Wendell disclosed that she had been questioning her parentage since she was a teenager.
“What is happening now isn’t exactly new.
“When she was in her mid-teens she started to say that Dorota wasn’t her mother and that she was really a child who had gone missing in Poland a few years earlier,“ the unnamed person told the ”Daily Mail“.
The publication also learnt that Wendell previously contacted a Polish charity to say she was a missing German schoolgirl and a missing US toddler.