Sweet Bobby

Sweet Bobby, reported by Alexi Mostrous for Tortoise, is the story of a woman drawn into a decade-long romance with a person who was not who the phone said he was.

The series is built from her messages and from the investigation into who was on the other end. Mostrous is careful about the victim’s agency and about the sheer number of hours the deception required.

It became a reference catfishing narrative because the scale is so extreme that the usual jokes do not fit. The reporting asks how a life can be organized around a voice.

Play it in order, and treat recap episodes as optional. The primary account is the one that changes your sense of what a message thread can do.