The bestselling author known as Freida McFadden has revealed her real identity, saying she is “tired” of maintaining the secrecy that has accompanied her rapid rise.
McFadden, known for domestic thrillers including The Housemaid, revealed her real name was Sara Cohen, and that she worked as a doctor.
“I am at a point in my career when I’m tired of this being a secret. I’m tired of people debating if I’m a real person or if I’m three men,” she told USA Today. “I am a real person and I have a real identity and I don’t have anything to hide.”
McFadden debuted in 2013 with her self-published novel The Devil Wears Scrubs. She went on to write a series of psychological thrillers before breaking through commercially in 2022 with The Housemaid, which became an international bestseller, selling more than two million copies and spending more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list.
Her next novel, The Divorce, is due for publication on 26 May.
The revelation of her true identity came a few months after the film adaptation of The Housemaid expanded the author’s audience beyond readers.
Directed by Paul Feig and starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, The Housemaid follows Millie Calloway, a young woman with a troubled past who takes a job as a live-in maid for a wealthy family, only to uncover increasingly disturbing secrets within the household.
The film, released in December, was produced on a reported budget of $35m and went on to gross about $399m worldwide, emerging as one of the year’s breakout commercial successes. A sequel, The Housemaid’s Secret, based on McFadden’s novel of the same name, is in development and will see Sweeney reprise her role alongside Kirsten Dunst.
McFadden said that she adopted the pseudonym to avoid any conflict with her medical career: “My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was ready to step back from my doctor job, so it would not be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job.”
She had since reduced her clinical work significantly and worked “like once or twice a month”.
McFadden stopped working in medicine in 2023, but colleagues had become aware of her writing career by then.
“They were really nice about it,” she said, adding that some had read her books without realising she was the author.
She shared that while she did wear a wig, it was less for hiding herself and more because she had “no idea how to style” her hair.
Sara Cohen will remain Freida McFadden, however. “Even though I haven’t told my real name until now, I feel like I have shared the real me all along and everything I’ve told them has been the truth,” she said. “Even though the name will be a surprise, nothing else will. I’ve always been genuine with my readers.”
In a December 2025 appearance on the Open Book with Jenna podcast, McFadden addressed some of the speculation that had circulated about her anonymity prior to the reveal, dismissing claims that her books were written using artificial intelligence.
“I think every author gets the ‘AI is writing her books’ even though most of my books were written before AI,” she said.
She also referred to more far-fetched theories about her identity, including suggestions that “Freida McFadden” was not a single person. “One that is very funny is people saying I’m three men,” she said, adding that she took it as “sort of a compliment”.
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