Kirat Assi’s catfish nightmare first came to public attention in 2021 after the Sweet Bobby podcast dissected the nine-year deception that pushed her to the edge. Now Netflix is releasing a documentary about it.
The latest true crime documentary to hit our screens is described as “a fairytale romance gone horribly wrong”. It labels itself “one crazy story” in its opening scene.
But while Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare is a true story, the near-decade of deception, manipulation and coercion it depicts isn’t a crime.
Catfishing – the name given to using fake online profiles to trick others into believing they are in a relationship – is not illegal in the UK.
Kirat Assi, the subject of Netflix’s Sweet Bobby documentary tells Sky News: “People say, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ That’s the constant question you get. But none of us [victims] are stupid. It’s just the perpetrator’s gone the extra mile.”
Thought to be the UK’s longest-known catfishing scam, it’s the story of Kirat, an events assistant and radio presenter, who was deceived into believing she was in an online relationship with a cardiologist called Dr Bobby Jandu between 2009 and 2018.
Using the identity of a real person who Kirat had once briefly met, the perpetrator spent years building up the fake friendship, with the relationship becoming romantic from late 2015. They even became engaged.
But nothing was what it seemed, and every interaction – with around 60 people in total across multiple social platforms – was all one of Kirat’s distant relatives.
Kirat admits she wasn’t keen for the first telling of the story via Tortoise Media’s podcast of the same name in 2021, let alone the documentary it’s now inspired.
So why is she allowing it to be shared with the world via the world’s largest streaming platform?
Now 44, Kirat says: “At the moment of her confession, I was screaming, ‘Why?’ But I’ve long ago let go of that… There’s just no reason to have done what she did. Now, I just need to know how she did it.”
How unlucky can one person be?
The documentary sets out how, during Kirat’s relationship with Bobby, he was shot six times in Kenya; put into witness protection in New York; suffered a stroke, brain tumour and heart attack; and fathered a secret child.
But while Kirat concedes she found it “strange”, “a bit weird”, and even asked herself “How unlucky can one person be?”, a circle of Bobby’s friends and family always validated the events in his life across numerous forms of social media.
The couple would Skype call all night and share voice notes and messages constantly.
Kirat is at pains to say it wasn’t a 10-year romance, and that initially she baulked at the idea due to their friendship being firmly in the “bro-zone”. But after years of persuasion, she says she finally gave in and they became a couple.
‘My life was hellish’
Towards the end of the relationship, Kirat says Bobby became controlling, accusing her of flirting with other men, and discouraging her from going to work or seeing friends and family.
She says that’s when things took a turn for the worse: “I started to lose weight… It was coercive control, to a point where you’re thoroughly being abused, where you don’t have any sense of yourself left anymore. And you’re just scared all the time.”
That’s when she hired a private detective, confronting the real-life Bobby on the doorstep of his family home in Brighton.
Kirat says: “I was just trying to find out the truth in that last period, but at the same time trying to keep the peace and not rock the boat because my life would be made hell. And it was hellish enough already.”