When Kirat Assi received a Facebook friend request from a man named Bobby Jandu, in 2009, she had no reason to view it suspiciously. It was 2009 – everyone was expanding their Facebook networks. Bobby’s family was well-known in the Kenyan Punjabi Sikh community and the two shared many mutual friends online. Bobby’s younger brother, JJ, was dating Kirat’s younger cousin Simran. They were both in long-term relationships, and both posted frequently about their lives. Though the two had never met in person – Bobby, a cardiology assistant, bounced between the UK and Kenya, and Kirat, a marketing professional, lived in London – they struck up a friendship online.
Over nearly a decade, that friendship deepened into a virtual romance, an engagement and eventually an all-consuming web of unfulfilled promises that ate up the bulk of Kirat’s 30s – all part of an elaborate catfishing scheme relived and re-enacted in the Netflix documentary Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare. The film, co-produced with Tortoise Media and based on its hit podcast of the same name, is a mostly chronological, first-person account by Kirat of her experience. She’s a cogent and remarkably grounded narrator of her story, detailing in present tense how she grew closer and closer to “Bobby”, as well as to his friends and family, via Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, phone calls and Skype, as Bobby “recovered” from a shooting and stroke in New York.
