hello it's alexi here the host of sweet bobby i wanted to let you know that sweet bobby is a production of tortoise media a newsroom devoted to slow journalism and investigating the stories that matter to listen to more tortoise media podcasts early and ad-free you can subscribe to our channel on apple podcasts or become a member of tortoise on our app i hope you liked this episode of sweet bobby just a quick heads up before we get started this episode contains descriptions of coercive control and some strong language did you know anything about this witness
protection program that he was in i did actually yeah i did i thought it was really really hot actually that was like a mafia movie isn't it it's like you know goodfellas or something you know [Music] so this is when the story starts to get weird like really weird [Music] you remember in november 2013 kira got a message to say that bobby this handsome cardiologist she'd been speaking to online had been shot he gone into a coma and then a few months later he died well it turns out it wasn't that simple so it was
kind of like you'd hear her talk about him a bit but then because of this whole thing about witness protection it would go quiet for a long time she wouldn't hear from him so there was a period when when bobby got shot and then he was he was in a coma right and then he started to get better but then he died did he die okay and then act one [Laughter] two comes back alive three weeks later yeah he's a lot he's alive because he's been put in witness protection where was he in the u.s
bobby wasn't dead he was alive and not only that he was in witness protection you know like in the movies friends of kira like niren and sarah who you just heard they struggle to piece this period in kirat's life together and they're not the only ones even after reading hundreds of pages of legal documents i have trouble navigating this world this mix of fact and fiction fantasy and reality it can get pretty disorientating but not for kirat she remembers every detail one day after bobby had passed away it must have been about may probably i
think where i had a message from sc bobby's widow by the way we're referring to some of these people like bobby's widow by their initials for legal reasons sc who had been told to fly to new york from nairobi so she was in new york and she said to me i had to know something but she couldn't tell me and i had to speak to simran simran that's kira's younger cousin and i was like okay what do i need to know i'm not really that close that i needed to know anything or but i was
just being there for her and while i was at work then about half an hour later or so simran called me and i remember taking my phone leaving the office going out onto the piazza to take the call and simran told me that bobby was actually alive and he'd been in witness protection which which was a bit of a like shock because he like but he died yeah i just just dumb struck speechless by may 2014 the catfisher the person scamming kira online had brought bobby back into her life he'd been resurrected and this was
when the scam really ramped up the sophistication the number of characters and soon the emotional blackmail in a few years the catfish's control over kirat would become almost absolute [Music] i'm going to tell you exactly how that was able to happen but to do that i'm going to take you through what happened from kirat's perspective what she thought was happening because i don't think you can understand how this deception worked unless you put yourself in kirat's shoes and ask yourself at each stage what would you do [Music] i'm alexi mostris from tortoise media you're listening
to sweet bobby [Music] episode 2 witness protection even after bobby turned up in new york it wasn't like he was a massive deal in cairo's life she was dating she was going out and she had her job bobby was more like a story you tell your work colleagues like you're not going to believe what happened to my friend and for a few months it even seemed like bobby was getting better but then he got sick again really sick and at this point kira felt like she could offer him some support what i know is when
somebody's that unwell and when somebody needs your help you help them there were blood clots strokes he was partially paralyzed and unable to speak properly and deep anger which is actually quite common in patients who've been through a trauma at one point bobby even tried to kill himself one of the nurses found him just in time but how did kirat know all this well bobby was sending her messages on facebook messages like this one i don't deserve you guys so please don't bother i do miss you all but i don't deserve it but she was
also getting regular updates on bobby's condition from his friends and his family as well as his consultants at the hospital usually kirat would reply with voice notes short recordings you can send instead of a text message has this all been too much the last couple of days the last week even and what's amazing about these voice notes is that we can basically listen in real time to how their relationship unfolded i don't like you feeling like this [Music] over the months kira found that she could offer bobby something they couldn't out of everyone bobby seemed
to respond best to her so she found herself being the one to tell him off if he drank too much praying for him before a risky operation she was slowly becoming bobby's crutch something's bothering you and i can't work out what it is and using to not be able to work it out either are you just not well do you just have a bad feeling about something that you can't put your finger on those first years 2014 and 15 some other pretty weird stuff was happening as well bobby's wife started acting oddly she flew over
to be by bobby's side in new york and then she disappeared for a few days before turning up with no explanation and bobby he started drinking a lot sneaking out of hospital to drink in bars and getting into fights to kira it seemed almost like he was daring her to give up on him it was kind of like he was on a like a vengeful challenging like i'm going to kill myself let's see what you guys are going to do about it it was very much that way that was his mindset and it was really
disturbing and this continued until one day about seven months after he returns from the dead bobby confesses his feelings for kirat so i think somebody had said something that he likes you or something you know i think those hints had been dropped in the past i needed to deal with stuff i had a lot going on and he was not well he just wasn't in the right state of mind he didn't know what he was saying as far as i was concerned he was very delicate you know fragile i think we'd had had him sectioned
in the hospital at one point when i hear kirat talk like this it's so clear to me that she believed in this created world and to an extent still does you can hear it in how she speaks about it that in her mind an element of it is all still real i think i did at some point say it to him that i don't think you you know what you're saying kind of thing but then i i then i had the whole thing is you're belittling my feelings and you're just telling me they're not real
i am i do know what i'm saying kind of thing and then he started telling me how far back his feelings for me went i think it's worth pointing out something here bobby's declaration of love that came four years after his first contact with kirat this wasn't some whirlwind love affair this was a slow burn whoever was behind this deceit they were patient a few months later on valentine's day 2015 kirat and bobby officially became a couple and even then kira had reservations obviously i do did have feelings for him whether they were the right
kind of feelings question mark massive question mark because everybody kept saying it to me and then his life expectancy was so short we knew he wasn't gonna last for months he could die with his next operation and so it was a case of he deserves happiness for the time that he's got left and it's not like i can do anything physical with him or anything like that so i wasn't worried about that side of things it was more granting his kind of dying wish in a way so i cared about bobby a lot i loved
him as a friend as a brother or whatever it was not as a brother anymore but what was i going to lose by making a very sick man happy but the thing is whatever the crisis bobby always seemed to be able to pull through and over time their relationship developed and eventually kira was won over [Music] despite having a boyfriend in hospital in new york with life-threatening injuries who remember she'd only ever met once back in that brighton nightclub and who couldn't even tell her the name of his doctor for security reasons despite all of
that kira fell head over heels you mean everything to me you could hear it in her messages to him at the time she's besotted invested [Music] and listening to them makes me realize that despite all these red flags and all the obstacles some part of her just wanted to believe that all of this could have a happy ending i love you i missed you so much today sweets so much i really hope you're not too down [Music] today i caught myself smiling for no reason then i realized i was thinking about you this is torture
i love you so much please don't ever forget i know a few people in long distance relationships and it's not always easy battling time zones and months apart but most of them make it work and even though this was definitely an odd situation there were parts of it that feel familiar bobby and kirat would have these long skype calls some lasting 13 hours at a time they'd log in in the evening talk for a bit and then fall asleep listening to each other breathe a friend of mine used to do that actually with his girlfriend
in america there was an extra reason too the skype calls meant that she could listen out in case bobby had a medical emergency but even as their relationship grew stronger there was one thing about bobby's skype calls that never changed he never turned his camera on still it was in a very modern way romantic if they couldn't be in the same bedroom then the skype calls were the closest thing to it and they had date nights together too they cook a meal and watch apprentice on tv giggling together on different sides of the atlantic kira
in her bedroom in london bobby in a hospital in manhattan during this period kira even recorded and housed this for devotion an entire harry potter book for bobby just so he had something to listen to harry had from hogwarts one sunday morning about a week after he arrived at the borough he and ron went down and they messaged constantly about everything about buying a house together about what they would call their children about what their families would say when they knew but mostly about when bobby was finally going to come to the uk stay positive
you know we'll be together really soon you see bobby kept promising to come home back to london he wanted to transfer to a hospital closer to kira where he could restart his medical career as a cardiologist just trying to work out how long it's going to be i can see you kira kept getting excited this was a voice note she sent to bobby around that time this time next week in a week you could be here wow wow i'm still deciding what i should be wearing to pick you up i'm so excited [Music] but here's
the thing something always got in the way there was always a reason he couldn't travel so do you mind just starting off just introducing yourself for the podcast telling us a bit about who you are and what kind of work you do i'm professor of public protection at the university of gloucestershire i specialize in coercive control and homicide my name's jane monctonsmith coercive control is when someone uses threats or manipulation to isolate a victim or to take away their independence and what bobby was doing was something pretty typical in a controlling relationship creating barriers the
research suggests in an ordinary relationship you might meet someone you you know that thing oh love at first sight that has a shelf life it develops into something else it develops into something more grounded and maybe stronger and more mature but where there are barriers to the relationship reaching a conclusion that stage can last much much much longer and retain that intensity it never gets to that stage really where it's developed into you know a mature equitable relationship between two people every month that went by the volume of messages from bobby increased if kirat wasn't
actually on her phone she could hear it buzzing away in her bag or in her car it was bobby making himself heard and you might be wondering heard how because bobby mostly typed yes he did speak over skype but his voice there was just a whisper one of his operations damaged his vocal cords he said and this year when kira downloaded all her facebook messages between her and bobby it became clearer that this might have been deliberate this lack of voice we've got literally thousands of examples of kirat's own voice notes but none of bobby's
because skype doesn't save calls and he never recorded any voice notes himself when i started to wade through this all i began to wonder how purposeful this all was did the person behind this deceit not want their voice preserved there is one way you can hear bobby it's through the bleeps of his messages coming in it's quite ethereal like something from another world i'm gonna have to measure a few of them first it's always not like more than a third bigger than my thumb i have small hands did you hear the bleeps that's the catfisher
by now kirat was really into bobby and look they're two adults trying to make a relationship work long distance and obviously i was wondering about the physical side of things your relationship with with bobby did develop um an intimate side as well yeah as in we had an intimate relationship but it wasn't obviously not physical and there was no um you know people like sworded details because there were no like photos or videos or anything is yeah so there was nothing like that at all for kira having an intimate relationship like this was a really
big deal it took a lot for her to trust someone in that way there's a lot about those early months in kirat's relationship which seem happy reading harry potter having date nights but when i tell experts about it they tell me things that make these events take on a much darker perspective because specialists like jane monkton smith recognize that all of this it's part of a pattern so in coercive control generally speaking there is a stage right at the beginning that in the early relationship and it's often referred to as the honeymoon stage where one
one or both people will be representing themselves as maybe a little bit different to who they actually are they're going to put themselves in the best possible life and very controlling people will want to um be able to establish their control over a person incredibly quickly so what they tend to do is bombard the other person with romance and and love and that kind of thing which can be very persuasive but they will often pull back all of a sudden to make that person crave the attention again so they'll give them all of this attention
which the person is loving and is producing dopamine and all these wonderful things then they'll just withdraw it purposely purposely and that person will then do anything for them to crave to get that attention back again and that can create a cycle and when you take a step back and look at bobby and kirat's relationship from the outside you can see it the love-bombing messages the promises the last minute disappointments i just want to hold you in my arms and never let you go you are the best thing that has ever happened to me instead
i let you down and hurt you badly and it only got worse by the end of 2015 bobby had become more and more controlling why are you studying now so you get a proper job because i'm not like your ex who tolerate you going out bob is always calling me and it got to the point where like i tried to call you who you're in the call with oh your phone line was busy who are you talking to he knew everything i did he knew absolutely everything i did every time kira didn't do exactly what
bobby wanted or she questioned the relationship or something bobby was telling her or even just did something for herself like getting her eyebrows threaded without telling him something would happen he would freak out or even worse have a stroke or some sort of medical emergency and often kira would be on the other end of the phone when that happened between 2015 and 2018 bobby went from one health crisis to the next all these things were constantly happening he's had a mini stroke he's had this he's got another clot in his head he needs to be
operated and these big things became normal i can't keep track of how many i mean it was the norm [Music] for kirat it was terrifying worrying about sometimes even listening to the person she loved jolting from one near-death experience to the next [Music] in a situation that is only online your you know your choices are limited aren't they and if you really think this person is going to leave probably going to start panicking so you're going to do something big and dramatic i've seen in some cases that as somebody's walking out the door they'll suddenly
get a marriage proposal to bring them back if this is online if somebody's feigning a heart attack you have distracted them from leaving you they're not going to walk out and leave you now they're going to get an ambulance they're going to worry about you there's going to be follow-up they're going to how are you they have guaranteed contact given them time to manipulate the situation back into their hands and it wasn't just the constant emergencies or guilt trips bobby got jealous like really jealous of callers on kirat's radio show of things she was posting
on facebook you're not as innocent as you make yourself out to be biggest [ __ ] joke even if her friends i wasn't even allowing my friends to hug me to comfort me i'd be like just don't touch me i belong to bobby because i was scared of what he might think even though he didn't know i was there i just wanted to be very clear i wanted the lines to be very clear this is not you know i was just so scared of being accused of doing something wrong [Music] did she ever talk to
you about any behavior on bobby's part that you thought was controlling i think she did now you're saying i remember yeah and he was quite controlling he was quite possessive and i thought that's a bit odd as well if he's not here to see you why is he contriving why is he possessive basically she would dance to his tune which is really annoying for me it's like who is this guy you know to make you my friend behaving this way to become so subservient and kind of like fear it felt like it felt like she
was um acting out of fear fear of of upsetting him if bobby didn't like how she was behaving he would even threaten to cheat on kirat with his nurse a woman called maria [ __ ] it i'm going out with maria for a walk don't bother calling me tonight i might be with her pretty soon kirat was signed off work because of stress she lost weight a lot of it she stopped talking to her friends she fell out with harvey her best friend she even quit her beloved radio show do you remember a time when
all this was happening when you you saw her and you you you were shocked by how she how she looked yeah i was actually shocked at how much weight she lost because she was really thin and i obviously didn't want to go on about it so you know you don't want to make her feel conscious about it but i was like oh my god she's really lost a lot of weight yeah she she didn't look she didn't look good you knew she was stressed you knew she wasn't eating properly and she would say she's not
eating properly and it's the sort of thing like we'd meet up for lunch and i'd be like okay you need to eat more because you're wasting away some of the stories kira tells me they're hard to hear between 2015 and 2018 particularly bobby's control escalated there was one time in 2016 when kirat started getting chest pains and bobby pressurized her into having a mammogram to check for cancer he was a cardiologist after all why wouldn't she listen to him and he promised her that he would be there in person in the uk by the time
the appointment came round so kira booked it but yet again bobby broke his promise he didn't get to london on time but that wasn't the worst bit kira went for the appointment on her own and it was a pretty scary experience later when bobby heard that her consultant happened to be male he freaked out how dare she let another man touch her like that by april 2016 bobby had made no fewer than six promises to kirat to come to the uk and all of them broken but on the seventh time he seemed to be serious
it was now more than a year into their relationship and kirat's family were starting to ask questions this time kira pulled out all the stops i'd bought new things for the house like new bins sorted out a new cutlery and crockery totally repainted the kitchen unit stripped them down took them into the garage she arranged to take six weeks off work most of it unpaid she even had her bathroom redone all for bobby a bit mad but well because of you baby it's all because of you but you know it is because of you the
catalyst [Music] and then a few days before bobby was due to arrive he picked a fight with her over the phone something wasn't right and i just kept saying you know what's wrong and suddenly while he was arguing with her bobby had a huge heart attack with kira on the other end of the line and then the line goes dead and i was shaking and i was in tears and i was just screaming for him down the phone and getting nothing back distraught kira rushed home she threw some clothes in a bag and drove to
heathrow airport she had to make sure bobby was okay but then literally as she was at the check-in desk about to book a ticket one of bobby's cousins calls her an older woman called kb maybe you were in the wrong kb suggests to kirat bobby was stressed out about coming to see you she says and his heart gave out in other words it's your fault kirat was devastated do you know where the term catfish comes from i'm not talking about what it means here to trick someone online using fake identities i'm talking about how it
was coined i mean why catfish well perhaps unsurprisingly it comes from a story about fish and specifically about cod shipped from alaska to china on the way the cod is kept alive they're stored in big tanks on the ship but by the time the cod gets to china the flesh tastes bland and mushy and then one fisherman had a genius idea if he could find a way to keep the cod swimming then maybe he could improve the taste so he put a catfish in the tank with the cod catfish eat cod so now the cod
had a reason to swim and as a result they stayed fresh and now i've looked into this story a bit this catfish origin story and here's the thing it sounds pretty unlikely doesn't it i mean wouldn't you just get one massive catfish left in the tank at the end of the trip and actually there's very little evidence to suggest that the story is true it actually comes from a documentary filmed in 2010 the one that eventually became the popular mtv show catfish in the film the husband of a woman who is revealed to be creating
all these fake identities online he tells this story in order to justify her actions what he was saying was like the catfish his wife made life more interesting for the people she tricked so maybe even the term catfish is a type of catfish a positive spin on a behavior that can actually have devastating consequences last year a group of u.s psychologists found that nearly one in four women and one in three men admitted to catfishing online to one extent or another given that 40 of relationships now start online that's a lot of potential for harm
even though i know that catfishing is a very real problem that didn't mean i always found it easy to listen to kirat's story i mean i had a lot of questions like how come kirat didn't get suspicious that bobby had never sent her a video and if bobby was shot in kenya why did he turn up in new york why was he in witness protection in the first place and why could other people like his ex-wife go to see him but not cure at there's no denying it there were a lot of holes in this
story so i was thinking is kirat just a bit gullible and then i learned more about the scam how creative it was the sophistication it's almost admirable i'll give you one example one day bobby asked kira to help him choose some clothes for his baby son we were picking up clothes from like mother care and things like that and then um when pictures had been shared of him with bobby and then obviously he then shared them with me of his son he'd be wearing some of the clothes we picked let's just talk through what happened
bobby and kira go online to shop for baby clothes and then a couple of weeks later kirak received some pictures of the baby wearing the clothes they chosen together so that must mean bobby was real right because how could that happen if he wasn't this is always one of the first stories i tell people when i talk about the case and i think about it a lot because i think it gives you a real insight into the person behind all this and how they operate here's what actually happened remember i told you in episode 1
that bobby was real as in there's a real bobby out there who is separate from the character that kirat is speaking to well the catfish has somehow got hold of his photos including a photo of bobby's real son wearing some baby clothes and somehow they'd managed to work out where these clothes were bought from and then had tricked kirat into thinking that she had chosen the clothes herself the catfisher had reverse engineered the whole thing and there's a second reason why kirat was ready to believe bobby and it's probably the most important one of all
as i mentioned in episode 1 bobby was far from the only person speaking to kirat at this point he was just one of a cast of characters and this cast was made up of dozens of people like the time when kirik joined a facebook group with about 20 members of bobby's extended family some of whom kirat recognized you know i was like really happy that he was doing this obviously because he's taking the step into introducing me to his family bobby had promised to introduce her and he said this was a good way of doing
it and you know there was loads of banter and jokes in there about bobby and his cooking and his behaviors and the things he'd done and liked in the past most of the characters were friendly to care at it was nice though everyone was really nice and warm and welcoming apart from one of the sister-in-laws who's very close with sc she left the group she was apparently loyal to bobby's ex-wife and didn't like kira for that reason but she was fake too they were all fake the key bit here is that in total dozens of
different characters were used to trick kira all of them interacting with each other as if they had autonomous lives some of them totally imagined some of them based on real people and the catfisher was behind all of them these characters they'd come in and out of kirat's life on and off stage as they were needed but most of the time she was speaking to a much smaller group of people if you think of the dozens of cousins and their husbands as a supporting cast they were also the main players in a film these guys would
be the stars and at any time kirak was speaking to about four of them not including bobby there was bobby's ex-wife sc rn who was also a medic and who was by bobby's bedside for much of his treatment kb an older cousin of bobbies the one who talked to kirat at the airport and yj another cousin but this time a male and much younger and they all had very different characters and they were all constantly texting messaging and phoning kirat like all of the time and kira would talk to her friends in the real world
about bobby too like niren and sarah or her cousin simran or harvey her best friend when i was reading the witness statement kira had to give me an actual spreadsheet to keep up with all these names so i'm certainly not going to expect you to remember all of this but the important thing is that all these characters work together they existed to confirm each other's allegations even when they seemed unbelievable in domestic abuse cases this type of behavior it's called toxic triangulation making something seem real by having more than one person tell it the catfisher
had another tactic too bobby started talking directly to kirat's family like her mum and her brother even her cousins feeding them snippets of information which they would then tell kira it was a positive reinforcement loop anytime kirat started to doubt something someone she trusted told her it was true [Music] i've spent days talking to kirat about what happened to her immersing myself in her relationship with bobby but i still only have kirat's version of events and i know i need to speak to the other person at the center of all this i need to speak
to the real bobby the person whose whole identity had been stolen by the catfisher now i've always known there was a real bobby and a fake bobby but what i still don't know at this point is exactly how much the real one knows what's his role in all of this one of the people i've been speaking to during this investigation is a lawyer called amrit amrit's been helping kirat and he also knows bobby and for weeks i've been asking amrit to pass on a message to bobby and finally one day he says yes he tells
me he's meeting bobby in person very soon he's not exactly sure when but he'll give me a call as soon as it happens and i'm nervous because if bobby says no then that's a big piece of the puzzle that i'm never gonna see now the thing with investigations like this is that nothing ever happens quite how you plan it so when amrit does call me i'm in a really loud restaurant and i missed the call and this is so annoying because i don't know how many more opportunities i'm going to get so i try and
call america back but he's not picking up and then eventually he does hi i bobby is understandably nervous but he might be willing to talk and i'm excited so i call claudia part of the team working on this series to let her know so we have to kind of go through some processes like he's still a bit anxious so we have to go down to brighton to see him that's amazing and did he give a kind of a time frame for this is it tomorrow is it next week it seems like step by step we're
getting closer to bobby back in kirat's world she was also getting closer to bobby the fake one i just wanted him here and that was kind of the be-all and end-all and he seemed to finally understand and he just said i think i think this is the way it happened i hope i'm not confusing it would say there's so many other times that he said he was coming but it was a case of literally i need you here and that's it and he's like i'm coming [Music] this is our year love you so much by
march 2018 three years into their relationship and eight years after kirat first started to speak to bobby online he finally arrives in london so much had happened since the first time he was going to come and how many times he was going to i don't know how many times he was going to come i've never counted to be honest after all those years of broken promises in kirat's mind at least all that hardship was about to be over next week on sweet bobby a big part of the puzzle falls into place as the catfisher is
revealed would you characterize the relationship between bobby and kira as a coercive control relationship i'd characterize it as high risk coercive control what do you mean by high risk high risk of curat suffering some kind of harm serious home and last question um have you ever met red or come across anyone like i think that for me is probably the most invested and obsessive controlling person in this environment that i've have seen personally i think she needs to prosecute it personally i think she needs prosecuting because if the if everybody thinks this is the end
and she will never behave like this again they're wrong she will [Music] thanks for listening to this episode sweet bobby was written and reported by me alexi mostris produced by gary marshall with additional reporting and production by claudia williams sound design is by carla patella the executive producer is basha cummings sweet bobby is a six part live investigation by tortoise media and tortoise members get early access if you enjoyed this episode why not invite your friends to get the tortoise app [Music] you
