Alexi Mostrous untangles the extraordinary web of deceit and manipulation revealed in Tortoise's chart-topping podcast, which is now a Netflix documentary
There are a few moments in any career that stick in the memory, moments that rise above the daily grind and can come to define a period in a professional life. For me, one of those moments came on a warm June afternoon in 2021 outside a smart tapas restaurant in central London.
I was having lunch with a source, a boisterous, voluble Israeli lawyer who was shaven-headed when I first met him a decade ago but has since grown his curly hair long, making him look more like a retired roadie or a friendly labradoodle than a member of the legal profession.
We were meeting to discuss a story I was working on about online pornography. This is a deeply sinister world, populated by unregulated producers and huge opaque organisations like MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub.
The lawyer represented a homeless man who had been pressured into appearing in a sadomasochistic gay porn video by an amateur producer. The lawyer had discovered the producer's home address and found that he also happened to be a headteacher at a large British school.
Porn took up most of our conversation. But just as we were finishing, over coffee, the lawyer's expression changed. I could see that he was thinking about whether or not to say something. And then he did.
"Have a look at this case," he said, pulling a document out of his bag. "It's the craziest thing I've ever seen."
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.
The meeting in Brighton broke the scam wide open. Both Kirat and Bobby reported the incident to the police. A day later, Kirat's cousin Simran came round to her house.
When Kirat opened the door, Simran stood there quietly. "It was all me," she said. "It was all me." Ten years of Kirat's life had been taken away by someone she trusted more than almost anyone else.
Simran was only 17 when the scam started. The main question we had was why? Was she jealous of Kirat? Was she sexually attracted to her?
It's something that we struggled to work out and, to be honest, didn't get to the bottom of, even six episodes into the podcast. Simran was a very tricky character to portray editorially. I didn't want her to come across as a two-dimensional villain, and yet, apart from a perfunctory statement from her lawyers describing this as a "family" dispute, I've heard nothing from her to explain her actions.
We tried to contact her on numerous occasions. We have our own duty of care, as responsible journalists, even to her. Ultimately, we have to respect her decision to stay silent. We also have to recognise that Simran was very young when this scam started, and that we know nothing about her mental health or background.
What was obvious, however, was the effect that the scam had on Kirat. As Bobby, Simran had forced Kirat out of a job, forced her to abandon her friends and isolated her from almost everyone apart from "him".
Dr Charlotte Proudman, a barrister specialising in gender-based violence, told me Bobby was so controlling that he, or more accurately Simran, might have been in breach of criminal law. Since 2015, "coercive and controlling" relationships have been illegal. According to Dr Proudman, police should have investigated Simran for this offence. It didn't matter that Bobby wasn't real, she said, adding that the case seemed to fall "squarely" within the legislation.
But as I was to discover, the police took a much narrower view. After Simran confessed to the crime in 2018, Kirat spent months trying to persuade them to investigate, only to be told this year that what happened to her is not a crime.
For me, the police's reaction is probably the most frustrating aspect of this whole story. I have seen documents that suggest that Hounslow Police never considered whether the catfisher breached the law around coercive and controlling relationships.
To my knowledge, they have never questioned Simran. This meant that even after the confession, when Kirat was trying to pick up the pieces of her life, the catfisher was able to get on with hers, going away on holiday and even enjoying a promotion at work.
Apart from the big questions - how and why did Simran do what she did - the other questions people frequently ask me are: why did Kirat put up with all of this? How could she have a relationship with someone she had never even met? Why didn't she demand a video call? How did Simran convince her that she was talking to a man?
Kirat doesn't shy away from answering these questions. In fact, we dedicated a whole podcast episode to hearing her answers. For me, though, three things stand out.
First is the sophistication of the scam. Like a novelist, Simran's characters interacted with each other as well as with Kirat. They had their own lives, their own personalities. Sometimes the sheer deviousness of it takes my breath away.
On one occasion Bobby asked Kirat to help him choose some clothes for his baby son. They went online and decided on outfits together. A couple of weeks later, Kirat saw pictures of Bobby's real son wearing the clothes the pair had chosen together.
How could that have happened if Bobby wasn't real? The catfisher had reverse-engineered it all. Simran, it seems, somehow managed to get access to photos of Bobby's real son. Presumably by Googling, she then worked out where the clothes he was wearing came from and tricked Kirat into thinking she had chosen the clothes herself.
Another reason why Kirat believed the scam was real was because Simran, Kirat's younger cousin, told her she had met Bobby face to face in New York, when she was on a business trip. Since Kirat trusted her cousin completely, you can begin to see why that meeting made everything else seem more credible.
And finally, this was a slow-burn operation. Kirat wasn't love-bombed by hundreds of messages from Bobby early on. She would have run a mile from that kind of approach. Bobby came to her through JJ; his name was already known to Kirat. For years, they were just friends. This catfish was the equivalent of a Russian sleeper cell; an agent embedded abroad to be activated only years later.
However extraordinary Kirat's story is, it's clear that she's not alone. Since Sweet Bobby came out last October, more than two dozen catfishing victims have contacted either me or Kirat with similar stories about how they were scammed. They include an actress with more than seven million Instagram followers who missed her best friend's wedding because of a catfisher.
I don't agree with Kirat that this scam could have happened to anyone. Some people are just natural cynics. But what I do believe is that it could happen to many, many more people than you might think, including very intelligent people who would never believe they could fall for a scam like that.
Kirat's case has made me feel more sympathetic to victims of such scams and convinced me that more needs to be done to protect them. And Kirat agrees. "Police need to be educated," she says. "We need to allow victims to speak up without fear of judgement and retaliation."
She also believes police should receive more training around which existing laws might apply to catfishing cases. Even though catfishing isn't a standalone criminal offence, perpetrators may still be in breach of laws around controlling relationships, stalking and harassment. And if that doesn't work, then, like Dr Proudman, she favours outlawing catfishing outright. "While it may not be a whole solution," Kirat says, "it would act as a deterrent."
Having won a settlement in her civil case against Simran for harassment, misuse of private information and data protection breaches, Kirat is continuing to challenge the police decision not to pursue her case. There is a chance, albeit a small one, that the case might be reopened.
As for Simran, she has remained stubbornly silent. The only communication I have ever had from her was through her lawyers, who told me it was a "family dispute over events that began over a decade ago". Her statement continued: "As far as I'm concerned, this is a private family matter that has been resolved. I strongly object to the numerous unfounded and seriously defamatory accusations that have been made about me, as well as details of private matters that have been shared with the media."
I'm sure Simran has her own story. I still don't understand what motivated her, an A-star student and head girl who went on to work at two of the country's biggest financial institutions, to deceive her cousin and friend so completely.
Or, indeed, how she did it. Did she have a drawer full of burner phones? Or a map of all her many characters? I'd still like to hear Simran's story. It's the one missing piece of the puzzle. It might even make people more sympathetic to her, if they knew a bit more about her motivation.
Until then, I hope Kirat's story raises awareness about catfishing and its potential to do serious harm. Whether a change in the law is needed or just more rigorous training for police and internet providers, victims need greater protection. They deserve it.
Photographs Andrew Testa for Tortoise Media