大象传媒

I got home that night and read the document, pausing every few seconds to underline a passage or to gasp out loud. It read like a novel – but a particularly bad one; an airport blockbuster with an implausible plot.

Except that everything in that document – the witness protection programmes, the deaths, the betrayal – turned out to be true. Or at least, that’s what Kirat Assi thought at the time.

It’s rare as a reporter that you get a story that is both extraordinary on a personal level and is one that taps into an important public interest debate. Yet Kirat’s witness statement suggested it might be one of those.

The police, it seemed, had failed to take her case seriously despite strong evidence that she had suffered significant psychological harm. The internet platforms had not done much either.

On one level, Kirat’s story was about catfishing. She had fallen prey to an online scam lasting almost ten years and involving 50 fake online personas. But for Tortoise (and for Kirat) it was always about more than that. It was about the failure of our institutions to deal properly with online harm and to take seriously coercive and controlling relationships, especially online.

Kirat’s story was a catfishing story but it was also something else: a commentary on how we all live now – in a world shifting seamlessly and sometimes queasily between the offline and the online – and how unprepared our institutions are to recognise this new reality. That was ultimately what made it interesting.

I met Kirat a few days after I read the lawyer’s document, at an Indian restaurant in Covent Garden. She brought a posse: the lawyer, her friend Amrit (who owned the restaurant), and Pedro, another friend who specialised in PR. For the first half an hour, Kirat sat opposite me, quiet, withdrawn and vaguely suspicious.

But then she began to open up. Over the next eight hours, fuelled by food from Amrit’s restaurant, we talked. The broad shape of what had happened to her became terribly clear. Someone she had trusted deeply had drawn her into a web of lies, eventually leaving her jobless, friendless and on the brink of madness.

At the centre of the scam was Bobby, a handsome cardiologist who eventually became Kirat’s romantic partner, despite them never meeting in person. Bobby was a real person but his online identity had been stolen by the catfisher – someone close to Kirat in real life. When Kirat eventually found out their identity, she just collapsed. “I couldn’t understand it,” she told me. “I just kept screaming: ‘Why? Why did you do this? Ten years of my life. You’ve stolen ten years of my life. Why didn’t you stop? How could you be so sick?’”

To be honest, after our first meeting I thought we might have a problem. Kirat’s story was so extreme that I worried people wouldn’t relate to her. Would she be dismissed as gullible?

I need not have worried. The more I looked into what had happened to Kirat, the more I understood just how sophisticated this scam was – how it would have hooked in a lot of people. And the more I spoke to Kirat herself, the more it became obvious that she wasn’t some gullible naif, but an intelligent woman who was attacked by someone who, it seemed, had set out to destroy her.

The catfishing operation began in 2009 when Kirat was first contacted on Facebook by someone called “JJ”. JJ was around ten years younger than Kirat at that time – about 18 – and he was going out with Simran Bhogal, a younger cousin of Kirat’s who was also in sixth form.

JJ asked Kirat for advice. Simran and him weren’t getting on. Over the next few weeks, Kirat sent him a few messages. Nothing serious. Kirat was 29; she was going out, having fun – generally not thinking about anything too intently. And certainly not some 18-year-old kid.

Added to this, JJ’s profile looked genuine. He and Kirat had mutual friends, there were photos of him at weddings she had attended. In her close-knit Punjabi-Sikh community, Kirat had heard of JJ’s family. It all seemed to check out.

And then, tragedy. A few weeks after JJ first contacted Kirat, he died, suddenly, in Kenya. Kirat was shocked. But she didn’t know JJ that well. And so she got on with her life.

It was shortly after that that JJ’s brother – a cardiologist called Bobby – got in touch with Kirat on Facebook. Bobby was closer in age to Kirat and they quickly became friends. Again, this was nothing out of the ordinary.

Kirat was now 30, with a good job. She had a romantic partner, and thought Bobby had one too. Her friendship with Bobby was incidental. A few messages a day, a gap for a few weeks, and then a few more.

Then crazy stuff started to happen. Bobby was shot in Kenya. After weeks of hospital treatment he died (his friends posted pictures of his funeral on Facebook and former patients wrote testimonials about what a kind doctor he was).

And then a few months later Kirat received a message: Bobby wasn’t dead after all. He was in New York, in hospital, gravely ill but alive, and in some sort of witness protection programme. In London, Kirat was understandably shocked, but she did her best to comfort Bobby and make him feel like he still had friends.

Over the following months, he developed life-threatening illnesses as a result of the shooting. He told Kirat about some of it, and she started talking to his medical consultant and his ex-wife (both of whom, you might have guessed, were figments of the catfisher’s imagination).

Eventually, after about five years of friendship, Bobby and Kirat became a couple. For a while, their relationship seemed to mirror any long-distance partnership. They watched TV together, ate dinner at the same time, even fell asleep on the phone together listening to each other breathe. Bobby told Kirat that he couldn’t make video calls because his phone was broken, or because witness protection rules didn’t allow it.

After Bobby and Kirat became partners, apart from a brief honeymoon period, Bobby became incredibly controlling. He became a master of excuses. He promised Kirat he would come to London to be with her. But something always happened at the last minute to prevent it, usually a medical emergency.

He was jealous and angry. He monitored Kirat’s movements and told her which friends she could and couldn’t see. He became furious if she saw a male doctor, or if she used a “provocative” emoji on Facebook. When they argued, he would often have a “heart attack” or another medical emergency, with Kirat on the other end of the line. Fake or not, Bobby was highly manipulative.

Catfishing is a term used to describe luring someone into a relationship by creating fake social media profiles. Many people treat it as a joke, or think it couldn’t happen to them. After spending hours talking to Kirat, as well as to lawyers, former police officers and psychologists, I came to hold a very different view.

Kirat’s experience was firm evidence that catfishers cause real and significant psychological harm. Bobby’s behaviour finally drove Kirat – after years of broken promises – to the verge of madness. By 2018, Bobby had finally arrived in the UK. But he still refused to see Kirat. There was always some excuse.

So Kirat hired a private detective, who told her that Bobby’s last known address wasn’t in central London, as she had thought, but in Brighton. One day, on a whim, she decided to drive down to Brighton and confront him.

Gary Marshall, the producer on the Sweet Bobby project, Kirat and I made the same trip down to Brighton last year, almost three years after Kirat had travelled there herself. We sat with her outside Bobby’s house as she explained what she did on that day – and how it was the beginning of the end of the entire scam.

Bobby – the real Bobby – opened the door to her, she said. Suddenly here was this man who she’d been in contact with for years, standing right in front of her. She thought she’d caught him in a lie. He wasn’t in London after all. For his part, he didn’t have a clue who she was.

It was an incredible moment. In the podcast, we speak to the real Bobby, who told us his side of the story. It was shocking for him to see a woman he’d never met accusing him of betrayal, pointing to a picture of him on her phone, and claiming that she’d had a multi-year relationship with him.

If it wasn’t Bobby, then who was the culprit behind all this? How were they able to keep this scam going for so long? What follows is a story about who we are online, and how social media can be weaponised as a tool of abuse and coercion. You can listen to the full series now on 大象传媒 Sounds.