The perjury charge arose from his testimony under oath in official proceedings about his identity.

He made sworn statements about being Nicholas Barclay in contexts where those statements affected official decisions about his legal status, benefits, and treatment.

These statements were knowingly false, constituting perjury.

What Bourdin was not charged with — at least not in the San Antonio federal proceedings — was the exploitation of the family’s grief, the psychological harm caused to them, or the obstruction of the investigation into Nicholas’s actual disappearance.

These dimensions of his conduct, while genuinely harmful, did not correspond to charged criminal offenses.