The Polish woman who believed she was Madeleine McCann has claimed to be a missing child since she was a teenager.
Julia Wendell, 21, recently found out she isn't the British tot after a campaign for answers lasting several weeks ended with her taking a genetics test, showing she is almost 100% Polish.
But an ex-school friend said she's been questioning her identity for much longer than that.
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The former pal told MailOnline: "What is happening now isn't exactly new. When she was in her mid-teens she started to say that Dorota [Julia's mum] wasn't her mother and that she was really a child who had gone missing in Poland a few years earlier.
"It was so sad to see as you could tell Dorota loved her and she just wanted the best for her – she rebelled and left home and started seeing a guy who was a drug addict and that didn't help her.
"I hadn't seen her for a year or so and then a few months back I heard from friends that Julia was back at it again and saying that she was really Madeleine McCann which everyone knew was ridiculous because Maddie is younger."
The friend added that Julia had moved to Wroclaw at the age of seven with her mum and had started at a private school there, but moved to a local primary school after she struggled to settle in.
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They also said Julia was "very mixed up" and had ambitions to be a singer or a model, but after these dreams didn't materialise, she became "depressed and angry".
Julia found out she is almost completely of Polish heritage earlier this week and therefore can't be Madeleine, who went missing during a holiday with parents Kate and Gerry McCann in Portugal in 2007.
"Julia’s test results are back. We finally know the reality," Dr Fia Johansson, Julia's private investigator and self-styled psychic, announced to Instagram on Tuesday (April 4).
"Although it is impossible to tell for sure without the parents’ DNA results on either side, the test results speak to the origins of Julia’s root.
"The test results revealed that she is a 100% of Polish heart, with negligible influence from Lithuania, and Russia. The DNA test results did not show any connection to British or even German roots."
But before she discovered the truth, Julia's ongoing claim that she might have been Madeleine skyrocketed her to online infamy.
The search for answers began when she set up the now-deleted @IAmMadeleineMcCann Instagram account, which quickly amassed over one million followers in the short time it was active.
There she laid out the evidence for her sensational theory, including that she looked similar to e-fits predicting what Madeleine would look like today, aged 19, as well as other members of the McCann family.
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