Freida McFadden Unveils Her Real Identity: Meet Sara Cohen

Thu Apr 09 2026 14:29:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

The best-selling thriller author Freida McFadden reveals her true identity as Sara Cohen, shedding light on her dual career as a writer and doctor.

Freida McFadden, renowned for her best-selling novel 'The Housemaid,' has disclosed her real name as Sara Cohen. After years of using a pseudonym, Cohen, who has also been practicing as a doctor, expressed the pressure of maintaining her secret identity. Her literary success, with significant sales figures, has now led her to focus more on writing while easing her medical commitments.

One of the biggest mysteries in publishing has been solved, after the best-selling US author known to millions of readers as Freida McFadden revealed her true identity.

McFadden has been one of the world's most popular authors of recent years, thanks to thrillers like The Housemaid.

The author has never made a secret of the fact Freida McFadden is a pseudonym, and that she also works as a doctor, but had never revealed her real name.

She has now told USA Today she is actually Sara Cohen. I'm at a point in my career when I'm tired of this being a secret, she explained. I'm tired of people debating if I'm a real person or if I'm three men. I am a real person and I have a real identity and I don't have anything to hide.

Under the name McFadden, she was the second best-selling author of 2025 in the UK, selling 2.6 million books, and sold six million print copies in her home country.

Those sales were fuelled by the success of The Housemaid, which was first published in 2022 and was turned into a film last year starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.

She is a prolific writer, having published 29 novels so far, and has already topped the best-seller charts this year with three books - The Housemaid, Want to Know a Secret?, and Dear Debbie.

Cohen initially chose a pen name to hide her true identity when she self-published her first book, a fictionalised account of her life as a resident doctor, titled The Devil Wears Scrubs, in 2013.

She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke - after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.

But she kept the two identities separate, as she worried her patients might feel weird about being treated by a best-selling thriller writer.

That success allowed her to go part-time as a doctor in 2023, and she has now scaled back that work further, making it easier to reveal her true identity.

My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn't be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job, she told USA Today.

Now, as she opens up about her identity, Cohen insists that her fans will still know her by her pen name, embracing her readers affectionately as McFans and Freida Readahs.