This week’s “Catfish” took a trip to Creepy Town when it appeared Nev and Max might be dealing with a stalker. The online romance between Ayissha and Sydney started off innocently enough, but things went south quickly when the latter avoided taking the relationship offline.
Sydney and Ayissha had developed a storybook romance from a chance Twitter encounter, but by the time Ayissha contacted N and M, Sydney’s stalkerish behavior had reached scary heights. A explained how S would never meet her in person when she came into town and kept blaming her second job for it. Because of the issue, the two lovebirds eventually ended their romance.
After the breakup, Ayissha went to a party and kissed another girl. Oddly enough, her now ex-girlfriend texted her that same night, saying only, “I have a feeling… Ur somewhere ur not supposed to be.” After an argument, Sydney admitted to being named Whitney and sent her ex an entirely new set of photos. Despite the admission of guilt, Ayissha still had a lot of love for Whitney and found it difficult to quit her, even though Whitney had already caused A to miss midterms and drop out of school. The tarnished love story had some big consequences.
The sleuths started by going through the catfish’s Facebook page. Immediately, they noticed that she and Ayissha shared mutual friends. Three of these pals — Markeith, James and Eric — also shared many mutual friends with Ayissha. Nev and Max reached out to the guys to find out if they knew Whitney; as they waited for responses, they discovered that Whitney’s phone number was associated with a Whitney Shanice Robinson.
The next day, one by one, each of the boys responded to Nev with variations on the same response: “I don’t know who Whitney Shanice is.” The similarity of their responses led Max to realize that Whitney was likely running the guys’ profiles to keep multiple tabs on her victim’s behavior by checking their mutual friends’ statuses.
At this point, there was nothing left for Ayissha to do but confront Whitney. Both sides were apprehensive about coming face to face but finally agreed to meet near W’s home in Texas.
As is typical with catfish, Whitney looked quite different from the two photo sets she sent Ayissha, but she wasn’t as vicious as expected. In a local park, she explained to an understandably distraught Ayissha that catfishing gave her a way to reach out and gain love from people after her mom’s negative reaction to her coming out.
It was a sad, potentially scary situation that seemed to find a good ending — even though the two women did not remain in touch: At the close of the show, Ayissha was back in school and Whitney had joined the Navy.
