Netflix Documentary Sweet Bobby Explores How a Woman Got Catfished by Her Cousin
A woman who was in an eight-year online relationship with a man who turned out to be her female cousin is hoping Sweet Bobby, her new documentary out Oct. 16, will empower other victims of catfishing to seek help.
Kirat Assi, who was in a years-long fake relationship with a man she believed to be named Bobby, adapted Sweet Bobby from her hit 2021 podcast about the ordeal. The film is pieced together through screenshots of messages she had with Bobby and interviews with family members who watched her suffer for years.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“I’m not looking for sympathy,” Assi says in the doc. “I’m looking for people to say this is wrong, we need to be making people accountable.”
A brief history of catfishing
“Catfishing” usually refers to people who create fake personalities to trick people into having romantic relationships with them online. Catfishers typically carry out the entire relationship on the internet and find excuses to avoid meeting up with their victims in person.
Catfishing is a film/TV genre in itself, popularized by the 2010 documentary Catfish and the 2012 MTV reality TV show Catfish. (Even the origins of the term “catfishing” are misleading.)
One famous catfishing victim is Manti Te’o, a Notre Dame football star who, in 2013, found out his girlfriend did not exist. The catfisher, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, explained how she carried out the ruse in the 2022 Netflix documentary Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist.
Catfishing also played a role in a now retracted 2014 Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. The purported rape victim was catfishing a male student on campus she was romantically interested in, which raised questions about her credibility as a source.
Another doc about catfishing coming out the same week as Sweet Bobby is Hulu’s Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, out Oct. 18, in which the indie rock duo open up about a fan who harassed fellow fans online pretending to have insight into Tegan’s personal life.
Falling for catfishing
In 2009, Assi received her first message from “Bobby” through a Facebook account attributed to a cardiologist named Bobby Jandu, who purported to be based in Kenya and the U.K.
Assi is a Punjabi-Sikh woman whose parents were born in Kenya and has been active in the tight-knit Kenyan South Asian community. When she met “Bobby,” she was working in marketing and had a gig as a radio DJ. At a time, she had just gotten out of an on-again-off-again relationship. She longed to get married and have children, and so she clung to the messages from “Bobby.” While she had never met “Bobby” in person, she knew of him because her cousin dated his younger brother JJ in real life.
One day she got a message from her cousin, Simran Bhogal, saying that “Bobby” had been shot in Kenya. She said he was in witness protection and had been moved to a hospital in New York to recover. Assi started getting messages from a new Facebook account attributed to “Bobby,” and she was told that witness protection officials said he could talk to her. This “Bobby” account also connected her to other Facebook friends who kept her apprised of his condition.
Assi would send him voice memos and receive text messages in reply, and she thought it was just because “Bobby” had suffered vocal cord damage. Sometimes they would have phone conversations, and the voice on the other end of the line would be a faint whisper. In the documentary, Assi’s mother says, “I found his voice, very strange, very squeaky” but “despite this, I was very happy for Kirat.” The relationship got serious, and soon “Bobby” was sending Assi vision boards of their future wedding and her engagement ring.
How the catfishing was discovered
Assi began to experience controlling behavior from “Bobby.” She had to message “Bobby” every time she went to the bathroom, and she had to send selfies of herself all day. She gave up her radio show because “Bobby” thought she sounded too flirtatious with the guests.
In 2018, “Bobby” told Assi he had checked into a hotel in Kensington. Assi rushed over, but the hotel receptionist said no one with his name had checked in. She reached out to “Bobby” and “Bobby” claimed that the hotel had been instructed not to reveal that information and that he’s not ready to see her yet.
Growing suspicious, Assi hired a private investigator to locate any address in England for a “Bobby Jandu,” and the investigator gave her an address in Brighton. When she showed up there, Assi was startled to see a man who looked just like the Bobby she had been talking to—alongside his wife, Sanj. When Assi got a phone call purporting to be from the Bobby she knew, she showed her phone to him and the real Bobby was shocked to see his own face on the screen, paired with a number that was not his.
Assi pieced together that she was connected to the real Bobby Jandu, a stranger, through her cousin, Simran, who had dated Jandu’s younger brother. She called her cousin to tell her she’d met the real Bobby and that he was denying everything, and Simran told her to leave his house.
In the documentary, Assi recalls Simran coming to her home later but saying that she shouldn’t come inside. When Assi asked why, Simran confessed that she had pretended to be Bobby the whole time, and that she impersonated his Facebook friends and family. Even the phone calls had been with Simran the entire time. As Jandu marvels in the doc, “How could she pretend to be me for so long? And she’s a girl, doing it to her cousin. None of it made any sense.”
The documentary doesn’t have answers to why Simran catfished Assi. As Assi puts it, “I was targeted just for somebody’s entertainment.”
Assi downloaded nearly a decade’s worth of Skype messages, WhatsApp messages, and screenshots on Facebook before they were deleted. In 2020, Assi took civil action against Simran and received compensation and a private apology from her cousin in 2021. There have not been any charges or prosecution by the police. Simran’s likeness in Sweet Bobby is represented by an actor, and she declined to be interviewed for the documentary.
One reason Assi, at 44, wanted tell her story through the podcast and documentary was to raise awareness of lack of legal protections for catfishing victims.
“I wanted to help break the stigma, to stop victims from being shamed,” Assi says in the doc. “We need to understand why the internet should be regulated.”