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Wesselman-Pierce lived together with her husband, Vince Pierce, and his two sons. “I didn’t need to lose the friendship it doesn’t matter what,” a teary Wesselman-Pierce instructed Schulman within the movie. “A number of the personalities that got here out had been simply fragments of myself.”
At the tip of the documentary, a ruminative Pierce recalled a story he’d heard, and in flip, gave the film — and the expression — its identify. Cod, he stated, had been as soon as shipped by boat in vats from Alaska to China, however the fish would arrive mushy and tasteless. Eventually catfish had been added to the vats to maintain the cod wholesome. “There are these people who find themselves catfish in life,” he stated. In his thoughts, his spouse was considered one of them. “They hold you guessing, they hold you considering, they hold you recent.”
Life, he added, could be “boring and boring if we didn’t have someone nipping at our fin.”
When requested how catfishing turned rampant, and the idea so extensively understood, Schulman, now 39 and a father of three, stated that whereas folks have been conned and scammed endlessly, the fast-changing on-line and social local weather of the early 2010s produced an ideal storm — a lawless digital panorama the place once-accepted expectations round romance, friendship and connection blurred, making it more and more complicated to parse authenticity from artifice.
Instagram was launched in 2010, after which Snapchat in 2011. The courting app Grindr arrived in 2009, then Tinder in 2012. Concepts that now appear banal — beginning relationships on-line with strangers — had been nonetheless seen as weird and uncommon. On the heels of the documentary, Schulman was inundated with emails from folks with tales just like his.
The thought actually entered the general public consciousness in early 2013, when Deadspin reported on a scandal surrounding the Notre Dame soccer star Manti Te’o. He led his staff to the nationwide championship recreation and was a Heisman Trophy finalist, all within the shadow of the demise of his girlfriend early within the season. But the girlfriend, Deadspin found, was by no means actual.
Te’o was the sufferer of a catfishing hoax, however the state of affairs was so incomprehensible at the moment, theories swirled about his attainable involvement within the fraud.
