If the podcast releases of the last few years are anything to go by, it’s no understatement to say that our appetite for true crime has never been stronger. What began with the likes of Serial back in 2014 has since grown into one of the most popular podcast genres and spawned titles such as Up And Vanished, My Favourite Murder and Dirty John.

One show in particular has stuck in the minds of many: 2021’s ultimate Have you heard it? podcast, Sweet Bobby.

For those who need a reminder, Sweet Bobby tells the incredible true story of Kirat Assi, the British woman at the centre of a web of lies that controlled and destroyed 10 years of her life. Hosted by investigative journalist Alexi Mostrous and from the makers of Finding Q and The Slow Newscast, the series starts as many social media-based catfishing stories do.

On Facebook, Kirat is approached by Bobby, a cardiologist who’s vaguely known to her. But what begins as an innocent friendship quickly becomes a toxic relationship filled with lies and manipulation – the story of which is currently being adapted into a documentary film by Netflix.

As the podcast became a No. 1 chart-topping, award-winning investigative series on Spotify, Stylist sat down with the woman at the centre of it to learn how one person used more than 50 online personas to slowly and methodically rip apart Assi’s life from a scarily close distance.

“It’s been a nearly 10-year period of deceit that deliberately targetted me and destroyed all parts of my life,” Kirat tells Stylist.

“I was approached for friendship at first,” she explains. “I wasn’t online looking for love or anything like that. I’m fairly private and was just speaking to a number of people online, including my cousin in the real world. For some of them, I knew their family or people who knew them.

“Over the years, I was leaned on as a crutch by this central character, ‘Bobby’; he referred to me as a big sister. It was five years into the deception – when he was a very sick man – that he confessed to being in love with me. It took me a few months to give in, and at that point, I was giving a dying man the wish of supposedly wanting to be in a relationship with me. Except he never died.”

Throughout Sweet Bobby’s multi-part investigative search for one of the world’s most sophisticated catfishers, listeners learned not only how easily social media can be weaponised as a tool of abuse and coercion, but also the deep personal impact that had on Assi herself.

“I needed to have control of the narrative,” she says about starting the podcast. “On a personal level [I needed] to tell the story so people would believe that this can happen. And then making sure that these difficult things that people can’t understand are explained in some way.”

Yet the podcast isn’t simply a whodunnit, and it’s never a secret that someone close to Assi is toying with her life. While the identity of the individual is revealed in episode three, what strikes listeners the most is just how heavily Assi was involved in almost every aspect of Bobby’s life – and for so long, too.

“I wasn’t in a romantic relationship until six years after the deception had started,” she stresses. “That’s a really long time, and then I was stuck in this controlling relationship. Every time I tried to get away, there was a medical emergency or a crisis. The medical staff were telling me: ‘He only listens to you. Can you get him to try and eat?’ I was constantly being leaned on.”

However, Assi says that the podcast and its popularity have been something of a comfort to her following the abuse she endured. “I had to do a lot of healing to be able to do the podcast. If I hadn’t been a strong person to start with, I wouldn’t have gotten through the abuse because it was so bad. It’s even more difficult for me to speak up within my [Sikh] community, especially when the perpetrator is from that community.”

“I don’t even want to think about that person,” Kirat replies when asked about her feelings towards the perpetrator now, three years from the revelation but a decade after the abuse began. “They knew the position that I was in and that nobody would believe me, because nobody would believe that someone like them could do something like that.

“I’m angry at their arrogance; I’m angry that they didn’t say sorry. I gave them plenty of chances, even legally, before everything was in the public domain. They had opportunities. It’s a fact that they kept trying to get me to shut up while they carried on living their life after destroying mine. But I am still scared of them, I think.”

As the later podcast episodes explore, Kirat took the case to the Crown Prosecution Service and brought a civil action against the perpetrator, which was settled out of court in 2020. Because she says she had a hard time getting the authorities to act on her experience, she hopes that in light of the podcast, domestic abuse and coercive control can better be understood both on and offline.

As part of this, Kirat is passionate about social media accountability. “There were times with the other victims and I had reported certain things. The social media companies, Facebook etc, will have known something was wrong but nothing was done.”

“It’s so important to be able to speak out, and catfishing isn’t just a female issue. The more people that speak out, the more likely it is that there will be a change in the law somewhere. We need to push that agenda really, really quickly. It’s hurting a lot of people.”

This interview was first published in 2021.

Images: Netflix; Tortoise Media