Frédéric Bourdin

Frédéric Pierre Bourdin is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon". three being teenage missing people.

Early life Born in Nanterre, Bourdin was raised by his grandparents in Nantes until he ran away and eventually went to Paris. He never knew his father, who his mother stated was a married Algerian immigrant named Kaci.

Impersonations Nicholas Barclay, aged 13 at the time he went missing, was last seen playing basketball with his friends in his home town of San Antonio, Texas, on 10 June 1994. Barclay never made it home and has not been seen or heard from since. In 1997, Bourdin took Barclay's identity and was flown to the United States. Although Bourdin had brown eyes and a French accent, he convinced the family he was their blue-eyed son, saying he had escaped from a child prostitution ring and the ring had altered his eye color.

When Bourdin was returned to France from the U.S. in 2003, he moved to Grenoble and assumed the identity of Léo Balley, a 14-year-old French boy who went missing in 1996 when he was 6; DNA testing proved he was not Balley. On 23 March 2017, Bourdin made a Facebook post stating that Isabelle had left him for another man, claiming she had been unhappy for 10 years and very unhappy in recent months.

According to The Daily Mirror, Bourdin claimed in 2012 that he would "never impersonate anyone again". Bourdin was interviewed in 2008 by David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker. After Isabelle gave birth to their first child, Bourdin contacted Grann and told him that the child was a girl. Grann then asked if Bourdin had become a new person now that he was a father and a husband, to which Bourdin replied, "No, this is who I am." It premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.

The Imposter, a documentary about Bourdin's impersonation of Nicholas Barclay, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012.