Sweet Bobby · Puppet Master · Prince Andrew
Plus: one fewer source for true-crime investigations
the true crime that's worth your time
Podcast Sweet Bobby promises to tell the tale of “one of the world's most sophisticated catfishers.” But is that enough to sustain nearly seven hours of audio? Ultimately, that depends on how serious a crime you consider catfishing to be, and how patient you are with catfishing victims unwilling to simply shrug and move on.
The details of the case are likely familiar to readers of the U.K. press: London-based radio host Kirat Assi was in an eight-year, almost exclusively online, romantic relationship with a cardiologist named Bobby. But as it turns out, Bobby wasn’t real — he was the creation of Assi’s then-juvenile cousin, Simran Bhogal, who also created a cast of online characters to help support Bobby’s narrative with Assi.
The story begins in 2009, a year before seminal quasi-doc Catfish made online identity fraud like Sweet Bobby’s a household word, and three years before the Catfish series made tales like Assi and Bhogal’s a weekly TV event. But anyone who’s watched the show can predict the bones of Sweet Bobby’s tale. And anyone who’s watched the show will also holler “Haven’t you seen Catfish?” during some of the podcast’s numerous moments when it seems hella obvious that Bobby was a total fraud.
Here’s the outline, though: Assi is approached online by “Bobby,” whose outreach to her is buffered by social-media conversations she’s had with folks ostensibly connected to him. They continue to message, growing closer and closer as he’s plagued by dramatic incidents including a stroke, a shooting, and a witness protection placement in the U.S.
Any doubts Assi might have had about these arguably controvertible events were quelled by multitudes of other online friends who supported Bobby’s claims, as well as through Bhogal, who also claimed to know Bobby via a previous relationship. But, still, there were so many red flags that it’s hard to believe Assi didn’t willingly ignore her doubts on her own.
In perhaps the podcast’s most confounding event, she actually approaches and speaks to a man identical to photos of Bobby at a club, who confirms that he is, indeed, Bobby but claims not to know her. You guessed it: that guy was the real Bobby, photos of whom Bhogal was allegedly using to keep the relationship myth alive. But Assi, somehow, looks past that, and podcast host Alexi Mostrous doesn’t really push back.
That lack of pushback might be based in a desire to keep Assi on board with the podcast, which, after an initial series of episodes explaining the initial relationship (it ran from 2009-2018), goes into a “live investigation” (their words, not mine) of the scam. Alienate Assi, and you’ve got a three-episode show (and even those three episodes are fluffed beyond forgiveness, but I’ll get to that in a moment). Keep her happy, and you’ve got a whole show, one that — per a report from the Guardian published just last week — reeled in a “million-plus listeners” during its run from October-December 2021.
And alienating Assi might have been pretty easy to do, based on that same Guardian piece. Questions about how she might have fallen for this improbable scam are met with allegations of victim-shaming. “For me, victim shaming is a big thing in this, it’s what shuts people up,” she tells the publication. “Please focus on the perpetrator. Why did she do this?”
Assi isn’t wrong, of course. No one deserves to be lied to for eight years, it’s mean and fucked up and creepy. (But it’s not illegal, though Assi has apparently pursued criminal and civil action.) But, barring a few identifying details here and there, it’s also a story that the Catfish TV series told variations on for eight seasons, typically within a tight 42 minutes. The similarity between those tales of online relationship scams made the show feel so repetitive, in fact, that by the end of its run in 2018, there was little reason to watch.
The same is true for Sweet Bobby, which inflates that standard 42-minute (tops!) tale into six episodes of around that length. At the end of the podcast, I was still unclear on what made this catfishing tale worthy of this protracted treatment, or why Assi, even now (per an interview last week in the Sunday Times) seems unwilling to move on from the trauma of the years-ago relationship.
Assi says she had eight years stolen from her due to Bhogal’s online deception, and her impossible desire to get that time back is clear. It’s not her fault that her experiences could have been distilled into fraction of Sweet Bobby’s length, and I’m not mad at her or the podcast’s creators. And after I finish typing this line, I’m moving on. — EB
Perhaps The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman will scratch the identity-fraud itch that Sweet Bobby couldn’t. Netflix dropped the trailer for the docuseries last week; that’s it above. The three-episode show is about Robert Hendy-Freegard, a con artist who was basically the Bill Paxton character in True Lies.
Like Paxton’s character in the 1994 film, Hendy-Freegard worked at a car dealership, where he’d tell select customers he was actually a spy and rope them into fake operations to get money, sex, or just emotionally manipulate his victims. Unlike Paxton, he never got caught by real spies.
It’s a good story, and a very early-aughts one (we all need to brace for low-rise jeans and flip phones before watching). It’s also a yarn that hasn’t been that deeply explored, which makes it ripe for the Netflix treatment. True, the BBC covered the case as a daily (a Wikipedia user helpfully aggregated coverage links here), but a 2005 doc on Hendy-Freegard called The Spy Who Stole My Life is nowhere to be found. The full series will be released on Netflix on January 18. — EB
The Jeffrey Epstein (and friends) case continued to unfurl, even after his death and Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction. In case you aren’t completely ready to wash your hands of the mess, here are three news items on the matter that suggest we have a long way to go before this thing wraps. — EB
Maxwell Verdict Is Clouded After Juror’s Disclosure of Past Sexual Abuse [New York Times]
The prosecution in the Maxwell case declared victory following her guilty verdicts, but it’s they that have now requested into an investigation of the jury. That’s because two members of the jury have since revealed to the media that they were survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It’s thus far unclear if they disclosed their histories during jury selection, but if they didn’t, a mistrial might be in order. Maxwell’s lawyers also said in a letter to the presiding judge “that all 12 jurors who took part in the deliberations and verdict (should) be questioned” again to see what they did and didn’t disclose. It’s a situation reminiscent of the Scott Peterson trial, which has been the source of dispute for nearly 20 years.
‘Despicable relic’: Epstein, Maxwell’s little black book scares off collectors [New York Post]
Per the Post, Epstein and Maxwell’s well-covered, 92-page contact list (fun fact: at least two of my former bosses are in it!) “includes names and phone numbers of more than 1,000 celebrities, politicians and titans of business.” It’s obviously not evidence of guilt, any more than inclusion in your or my contacts list might be, but unlike your or my contacts list, it didn’t appear to be hanging out on anyone’s iPhone.
“At least two copies of the directory existed,” the Post reports. “Staff at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion were told to make sure there was a copy of the directory at both his and Maxwell’s bedsides, according to evidence submitted by prosecutors in her trial.” The hard copy of the book is under wraps, as “Prosecutors are expected to hold the directory used in the trial in a secure location.” It’s unclear what will happen to it after that, so the collector fear in the hed is fairly speculative…and this is a story where reporter Kerry J. Byrne refers to Dylan Howard as a “true crime journalist” and not a corrupt wannabe media mogul who covered up a multitude of #MeToo allegations for famous men including Harvey Weinstein, so how seriously should we really take it?
Royals await anxiously the fallout from Prince Andrew’s disgrace [The Guardian]
The latest attempt to head off a civil case against Prince Andrew for the alleged sexual assault of Virginia Giuffre is a wild one: his lawyers now say that “he qualifies as a potential defendant in any sex abuse case connected to Epstein. In other words, it appears his possible culpability is being used as his defence.” That is quite a tactic!
Here’s a bummer for folks who scout out lengthy true-crime investigations. Longform.org, the 11-year-old website and podcast dedicated to highlighting great longreads, is shutting down its text operation, they announced on their website last week.
Its podcast was purchased by Vox Media last fall, and it’s hard here not to grouse about how the company’s upper management so rarely seems interested in the writing part of the overall operation, choosing to highlight audio and video deals in company meetings, etc. But who knows what went on behind closed doors? I could be bringing my own baggage to this thing, I guess.
Where was I? Yes, Longform. The site’s founders didn’t blame the Vox deal, though, instead suggesting that paywalled content made it hard to move forward with the project. As someone who’s been involved in aggregation for most of my career, one way or another, I understand that challenge — every time I suggest you read a story in this newsletter, for example, I hope that you’re on the good side of a metered paywall, because I don’t want to disappoint you with a great tease, then send you to a locked gate. It’s not the biggest source of stress in my life, but it bugs me! So, I heartily relate to the Longform folks’ desire to just drop that part of the service.
That said, I’m disappointed, because I trusted their judgement and found a lot of gems — some true crime I never would have seen otherwise, some non-crime stuff I might not have ever clicked on if I hadn’t seen it there — through the site. In honor of its closure, here’s its Best of 2021 guide, which is heavy on the crime (because crime is the best!) but also cuts a must-discuss swath through pop culture, lifestyle, and tech. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: A discussion thread Sarah and I have yet to discuss!
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