Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

by Kathleen Hale

  I reminded myself that some people were private. Hence the presumably fake name. Also, just because “Blythe” was perfect looking didn’t mean she had to post selfies. She had other things to do, like cook beautiful meals for her adoring family and live in her mansion. I zoomed in on a picture of her entryway, with its marble floor and two-story-tall vaulted ceiling, pretending that I lived there. At the bottom, I noticed a thin white band and partial lettering.

  I knew right away what I was seeing—because I’d saved enough of Blythe’s tweets to know what a screenshot looked like. The white space and lettering at the bottom of Blythe’s photo marked it as stolen. She’d grabbed it from someone’s life and had forgotten to crop out the evidence before posting.

  So, was anything about this woman real?

  The idea that Blythe might be fake made me feel normal for the first time in days. If I could discount her existence, I could discount everything that she had said. If I could prove to myself she was a bogeyman, then I could finally wake up.

  I had no ideas for how to fact-check her identity. But the next morning, after several more glasses of bourbon, I had a really bad idea.

  * * *

  After my book came out, a book blogger emailed me saying she wanted to publish a series of author interviews by bloggers on her site. She’d asked me to participate and had offered to let me pick any blogger I wanted.

  I wrote back as fast as I could. My sweaty fingertips slid across the keys: “Blythe Harris. I choose Blythe Harris to interview me.”

  The book blogger responded saying she’d reach out to Blythe on my behalf. Then she wrote back saying Blythe had agreed to do the interview (I screamed with joy). The book club explained that it was common for authors to do “giveaways” in conjunction with the interview, and asked if I could sign some books. I agreed, and they forwarded me Blythe’s address.

  The exterior of the house that showed up on Google Maps looked thousands of square feet too small for the interiors Blythe had posted on Instagram. According to the telephone directory and recent census reports, nobody named Blythe Harris lived there. The address belonged to someone I’ll call Judy Donofrio, who, according to an internet background check ($19), was forty-six—not twenty-seven, as Blythe was—and was a vice president at a company that authorized disability claims. She lived less than an hour away from me by car.

  It looked as if I had been taken in by someone using a fake identity.

  I Gchatted Patricia: “I think we’ve been catfished?”

  Patricia asked how I could be sure Judy D. wasn’t merely renting to Blythe H.?

  I clicked over to the active Gchat I had going with my best friend, Sarah McKetta, one of the smartest people I know, and sent her all the current “evidence” I had. Did McKetta think I was right?

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” she said, and sent me a car rental link. “Go talk to her.”

  Authors and reviewers have a long history of showdowns. Proust famously challenged his worst critic to a duel. Dale Peck, known for his icy and crotchety book reviews, was pied in the face by Rick Moody (he called Moody the worst author of his generation) and slapped (twice!) by author Stanley Crouch. Gore Vidal wrote an essay slamming Norman Mailer, and when the two appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, Mailer headbutted Vidal backstage. By comparison my agenda felt tame. All I wanted to do was see Blythe’s real face, and maybe talk to it.

  “DO NOT DO THIS,” Patricia cautioned me, and if only I had listened to her, I might have saved myself a world of trouble.

  Instead, I clicked on the link for the rental car.

  * * *

  I planned my car rental for a few months down the line. I was procrastinating, hoping to untangle the mystery without face-to-face confrontation. I sent a message to Blythe through the book blogger, asking if we could do the interview via video chat. She vanished for a month, then told the blogger she’d been dealing with family issues and didn’t see herself having the time to do a video chat. So I asked the blogger to ask Blythe whether we might do the interview via phone, instead, and Blythe countered by pulling out of the interview altogether—she had to go to Europe, she explained, but she hoped I’d still address “the drama,” a reference to my drunken tweets.

  “Europe” seemed a vague destination for an adult planning a vacation. But a few nights later, lit only by the glow of my screen, I watched in real time as Blythe uploaded photos of Greece to Instagram. The Acropolis at night. An ocean view. A box of macaroons in an anonymous hand. The images looked generic to me, the kind you can easily find on Google Images. But then Blythe posted a picture of herself sitting in a helicopter. The face matched the tanned Twitter photograph. My initial reaction was jealousy, tinged with embarrassment. I was wrong. Blythe was real. And her life was fucking fantastic. But then I clicked over to Facebook, and saw that Judy Donofrio—the owner of Blythe’s house—had updated her own profile with photographs of a vacation in Oyster Bay, New York. I clicked through and saw that the holiday had started on the same day as Blythe Harris’s.

  * * *

  In preparation for my surprise visit, I thought it might be helpful to get some expert advice about meeting a catfish in person. So I telephoned Nev Schulman, who was (at the time*) known and celebrated for his 2010 hit documentary Catfish, which had first coined the now-mainstream term,** and for hosting and producing the MTV spinoff show, Catfish, in which he helped people confront their long-distance internet boyfriends, girlfriends, and enemies—almost 100 percent of whom ended up being fakes. Maybe, I thought, he could help me, too.

  “Of all the catfish I’ve confronted, there was only one I didn’t tell I was coming,” Nev said cagily, apparently shocked by my plan to go to Blythe’s unannounced. Nonetheless, he had some tips: “This is a woman who is used to sitting behind her computer and saying whatever she wants with very little accountability. Even if she hears from people she criticizes, she doesn’t have to look them in the face. She doesn’t know she hurt your feelings, and she doesn’t really care.”

  For a moment I felt deeply understood, as if I were talking to someone with psychic powers. “How did you know that she hurt my feelings?” I asked.

  In a tone like, duh, Nev responded, “Because you’re going to her house.”

  He urged me to listen to whoever answered the door and not to make our impromptu meeting about my “issues.”

  Throughout our conversation Nev used the word “issues” so many times that I decided to speak on the phone with another kind of expert: a doctor. Former filmmaker Dr. Michael Rich splits his time between teaching pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and lecturing on “Society, Human Development and Health” at Harvard’s School of Public Health. He is also the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital and runs a webpage called Ask the Mediatrician, where parents write in about concerns ranging from cyberbullying to catfishing. Given the adolescent nature of my problem, he seemed like he would be an excellent resource.

  “The internet doesn’t make you crazy,” he said. “But you can make yourself crazy on the internet.”

  I asked Rich about his catfished patients: How did they react in the months that followed their discovery? “Depression, anxiety. They tend to spend more time online rather than less.” I glanced at my browser window, currently open to three Blythe Harris platforms. “They’re hyper vigilant, always checking their phone. Certainly substance abuse.” I swallowed some whiskey. “The response is going to vary,” he concluded, “but it will have a commonality of self-loathing and self-harm.”

  “Great,” I said, half listening.

  I double-checked Blythe’s address.

  * * *

  I parked down the street from Blythe/Judy’s house. It wasn’t a mansion but looked like something from a storybook, complete with dormer windows and a lush, colorful garden. It was only now occurring to me that I didn’t really know what to say and should probably have brought a present. I needed a white flag.
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  I searched my bag, but all it contained besides notebooks and tampons was a tiny book I’d been given and hadn’t read yet: Anna Quindlen’s A Short Guide to a Happy Life. This seemed a little passive-aggressive, but I figured it was better than nothing.

  Before I could change my mind, I walked briskly down the street toward the Mazda parked in Blythe/Judy’s driveway. A hooded sweatshirt with pink lips emblazoned across the chest lay on the passenger seat; in the back was a large folder full of what looked like insurance claims. I heard tires on gravel and turned to see a police van. For a second I thought I was going to be arrested, but it was passing by—just a drive through a quiet neighborhood where the only thing suspicious was me.

  I strolled to the front door. A dog barked and I thought of Blythe’s Instagram Pomeranian. Was it the same one? The doorbell had been torn off, and up close the garden was overgrown. I started to feel hot and claustrophobic. The stupid happiness book grew sweaty in my hands. I couldn’t decide whether to knock.

  The curtains were drawn, but I could see a figure silhouetted in one window, looking at me.

  The barking stopped.

  I dropped the book on the step and ran away.

  * * *

  Over the course of an admittedly privileged life, I consider my visit to Blythe/Judy’s as a sort of personal rock bottom. In the weeks that followed, unable to verify Blythe’s real identity in person, I felt certain the conclusion to the Blythe Harris mystery was simply “Kathleen Hale is crazy”—and to be fair, that is one deduction. But I soon found out that it was not the only one, because while pondering that version of this story, I continued to scroll through both Blythe’s and Judy’s social media pages. And that’s when I saw something I had missed: Blythe had recently posted photos of the same dogs from Judy’s Facebook page, even using their names—Bentley and Bailey—but saying they were hers.

  I sent screenshots to Patricia, expecting her usual incredulity. But instead of debating me, she told me I was right—we’d been catfished—the dogs were the missing puzzle piece.

  “It’s the end of an era,” she Gchatted me.

  Between the emoticons and the lowercase font, she was the calmest version of herself I’d ever seen.

  “This is closure,” she said. “I am at peace now.”

  But I couldn’t say the same for myself. I wasn’t satisfied and still yearned for some kind of interaction. To me, closure meant hearing Judy admit to being Blythe—not necessarily to the world, but to me. Instead of returning to Judy’s house and knocking on her door, which still felt like the biggest breach of decency I’d ever pulled, I decided to call her at work. McKetta and I rehearsed the conversation.

  “What do I even say?” I kept asking.

  “Just pretend to be a fact-checker,” she said.

  “So now I’m catfishing her?”

  “Big time,” McKetta said.

  * * *

  I called the number, expecting to get sent to an operator. But a human answered, and when I asked for Judy, she put me through.

  “This is Judy Donofrio,” she said.

  I spat out the line about needing to fact-check a piece. She seemed uncertain but agreed to answer some questions.

  “Is this how to spell your name?” I asked, and spelled it.

  “Next question,” she snapped without answering.

  “Do you live in Nassau County?”

  “No.” she said. Judy’s Facebook page and LinkedIn account said otherwise, and that’s where her house supposedly was. She was lying, in other words, but I didn’t push it.

  I asked if she was a vice president at her company.

  “I can’t help you,” she said. “Buh-bye …”

  “DO YOU USE THE NAME BLYTHE HARRIS TO BOOK BLOG ONLINE?” I felt like the guy on The Howard Stern Show, screaming, “I exist!”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  She paused before adding, “Who’s Blythe Harris?”

  Her tone had changed, as if suddenly she could talk forever.

  “She’s a book blogger,” I said, “and she’s given your address.”

  “A book blog … Yeah, I don’t know what that is.”

  “Oh.”

  We both mumbled about how weird it all was.

  “She uses photos of your dogs,” I said, feeling like the biggest creep in the world, but also that I might be talking to a slightly bigger creep. “I have it here,” I said, pretending to consult notes, even though she couldn’t see me, “that you have a Pomeranian and another dog, and she uses photos that you posted.”

  She gasped. “I do have a Pomeranian.”

  “She uses your address,” I repeated. “Do you have children who might be using a different name online?” I already knew she had two teenagers.

  “Nope—I do, but they’re not … They don’t live there anymore,” she stammered. “You know what?” she added. “I am Judy, but I don’t know who this Blythe Harris is and why she’s using my pictures or information.” I could hear her lips smacking; unruffled, she had started snacking. “Can you report her or something?”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not a crime,” I said. “It’s called catfishing.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, so I found myself defining “catfishing” for someone who was, presumably, catfishing me (and whom I was cross-catfishing). “It happens a lot.”

  “A long time ago I used to get books,” she said, her mouth full. “I just put ‘Return to Sender.’”

  I told her that publishing houses were sending the books. I told her she might want to check out Blythe Harris’s Instagram, as there were photos on it she would recognize. She didn’t seem to care.

  I asked how long it had been since she’d last received books.

  “Like years ago,” she said.

  An hour after I got off the phone to Judy, Blythe Harris deleted her Twitter and set her Instagram to private. A contact at a publishing house confirmed that they’d been sending books to Judy’s address all year and as recently as two weeks prior, addressed to Blythe.

  * * *

  “So,” I asked Nev Schulman, after giving him my evidence. “Am I a good catfisherwoman?”

  “Do you really need me to tell you that?” he asked, sounding tired. He added, “What’s interesting are the unanswered questions—like, why would she do this? That’s something our show does. It gives people closure. I’m tempted to tell you to call her back and tell her it’s you and that you lied to her—because, look, I’m curious to know about this chick, too—these people are really interesting, and the lives they lead and the characters they create, it takes a lot of brain power.”

  So I called Judy again, and this time I told her that I knew she was Blythe Harris.

  She started yelling. She said she wasn’t Blythe Harris and that she was going to call the police about “this Blythe Harris person.”

  I paused. “Okay.” I hadn’t anticipated the shouting.

  “The profile picture is not me,” Judy cried, referring to Blythe’s Twitter profile. “It’s my friend Carla.”

  I gasped. “You know that person?”

  “She stole [pictures of Carla] off my website from making my Facebook.”

  The way she spoke about the internet—“making my Facebook”—made doubt grow in my chest. Blythe’s blog was nothing fancy, but it had obviously been generated by someone who knew her way around a basic html template.

  “The Pomeranian is me,” Judy said. “That picture isn’t me.”

  She wouldn’t give me Carla’s last name, but I later found her by searching Judy’s Facebook friends. Sure enough, Blythe Harris had dragged her Twitter profile picture from Carla’s Facebook. The only picture on Blythe’s Instagram page that featured an actual person—the one of the woman in the helicopter—had also been repurposed from a Facebook album chronicling Carla’s recent trip to Greece.

  I asked Judy if she had told Carla about Blythe Harris. She hadn’t: “I don’t want to alarm her.” Then she started yellin
g again.

  “I’m not yelling at you,” she yelled, and started to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I feel like this is my fault,” Judy sobbed.

  “How is it your fault?” I wanted to know.

  “Whatever,” she whispered darkly. “People are stupid. If you track their IP address, you can find them easily.”

  This seemed at odds with her earlier Facebook naïveté, but I felt too suffocated to parse it all out. “Okay,” I said. “Feel better.” When I gave her my name and number, there was no obvious reaction to my identity. “If you discover anything,” I said, “or if there’s anything you feel like you forgot to say, please let me know.” Sweat trickled down my back. I knew, on some level, that I was speaking to the person behind Blythe Harris. But after all this time, and all this digging, I still couldn’t conclusively prove it. Part of me wondered whether it even mattered anymore.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll Facebook message you.”

  After we hung up, she blocked me on Facebook. Then Blythe Harris reconnected her Twitter account and set it to private. But she was still following me, which meant I could send her a direct message. I wrote to her that I knew she was using other women’s photos. I filled up three of the 140-character word limits, imploring her to contact me.

  “I’m not trying to embarrass you,” I wrote. Channeling Schulman, I emphasized that I just wanted to know more about her experience—to listen and hear how she felt about all this. Blythe responded by unfollowing me; there could be no more direct messages.

  I’m told Blythe still blogs and posts on Goodreads; Patricia tells me she still live tweets Gossip Girl. In some ways I’m grateful that her Twitter and Instagram are set to private, because it has helped me drop that obsessive part of my daily routine. Although, like anyone with a tendency toward low-grade insanity, I occasionally grow nostalgic for the thing that made me nuts.