#Teddy and ~Jessica’s~ dog are the true victims in this bc I do want their friendship to continue but it can’t 😭

[gorlsgurlsgirls]

@vraimaisnon @bareniabirkin

It all started sometime in May when I was on an app like bumble bff to make friends for your dog. We found a puppy that was a few months younger than Teddy and we met up at the park and it turned out that they loved each other, much to my joy. We met up with the pup and his mom (whom we’ll call Jessica) once a week for a play date. Over this period of time, we got to know her relatively well, as she loved to talk about herself and all of the drama in her life. I followed her on instagram and was met with a bizarre collection of clearly edited and photoshopped pictures of herself, as well as some of her and her ex boyfriend (more on him later.) It baffled me that she would edit photos to this extent when everyone else could see that she didn’t look like that in real life, but I chalked it up to having serious body image issues and never mentioned it.

We continue our play dates until about two or three weeks ago, when a mutual acquaintance (let’s say Tiana) reached out to me over instagram. Tiana asks if we’re still in contact with Jessica bc she’s learned some “disturbing information” about her and wants to let us know what she’s learned to help us assess our relationship with her. Tiana tells me that she’s posted pictures from Pinterest claiming they’re hers, and she’s suspicious about Jessica’s ex boyfriend. I was suspicious as well. Every picture of them looked strange, like they weren’t even in the same room together. I don’t know Tiana super well but choose to trust that she was coming from a good place, and decide to do some sleuthing.

I was able to find one of Jessica’s pictures that was taken from Pinterest, but it wasn’t quite enough proof for me. I go back to the ex boyfriend. He passed away last year. She is still very publicly grieving him and my husband and I have comforted her about his loss. All I know is that he was from an Eastern European country, he passed away, and he was a skydiver - so I type it in to Google. I find an article about him right away. It says he passed away in a skydiving accident in July of last year. I go to Jessica’s instagram and find that she never posted about him before November of last year - not a picture, a video, nothing. Why would she wait so long to post something about him? Nothing is making sense.

One of the things Tiana mentioned is that she believed Jessica’s own skydiving pictures and videos were stolen as well. I went to the ex boyfriend’s defunct instagram and see nothing regarding his relationship with Jessica. I go to some posts where he tagged other women, wondering if Jessica’s skydiving pics were actually taken from one of them. Some looked close, but I could never confirm that the outfits or locations that matched Jessica’s insta. Then I had the idea to go to the boyfriend’s instagram again, but this time I would go to the photos he had been tagged in. There were a few of people posting messages of loss, how they hoped he would fly high in heaven.

Then I found Maria. At first I thought Maria was also a friend of his, but she had an instagram story saved full of videos and pictures of ex boyfriend. As I look through them, I see pictures of them eating breakfast in bed, getting couples massages, pda-ing in an elevator. Maria and ex boyfriend were actually dating. There was no doubt - Maria was his ACTUAL girlfriend. I saw pictures that I had seen on Jessica’s instagram, and realized that she had taken them from Maria’s insta and photoshopped her own face on to it, to make it appear as though THEY had been dating. It explained why the photos looked so bizarre to me! Wtf! There were so many pictures taken from Maria’s insta. As I went back to Jessica’s instagram to look at the same pictures, I saw the comments and captions, talking about how sad she was that they would never skydive again, that he would never be waiting for her at the end of the aisle (!!!!!!!!??????!!!!!!) All captions as though she was really experiencing this loss, that it was her boyfriend who had passed.

I go back to Maria’s insta and scroll until I see more pictures that I had already seen on Jessica’s page - pictures that had nothing to do with ex boyfriend; showing off her bikini on a boat, tons of flowers on her birthday, flying in a private jet (where she also photoshopped her dog/Teddy’s friend.) Then I see the skydiving pictures and videos. All of them, all of it, had been taken from Maria’s instagram. It appeared everything that Jessica ever told me was a lie.

I message Tiana back and ask, “do you know about Maria? This might go deeper than we thought.” She’d never heard of Maria. I send her a link of her profile. She freaks out. We can’t figure out what kind of person would do this - is in intentional, or is Jessica mentally ill? She shows me a collection of pictures she saved to compare to original to the photoshopped, and the discovery of Maria’s existence is a whole new ball game. Once Tiana realizes that Jessica lied about so much, she starts checking out other things on Jessica’s instagram. Using reverse image search, she discovers that Jessica’s family pictures are actually a picture of John D. Rockefeller, a boat captain connected to the Titanic, and two Victorian women whose pictures were on Pinterest and of unknown origin. Everything, even things that didn’t matter, were a lie. We compared stories from experiences that we individually had with Jessica - events, timelines, motivation - also lies or altered in some way.

I told Tiana that I wanted Jessica to stop doing what she was doing and I wanted Maria to know, so she could decide what to do about it. I didn’t feel a huge amount of betrayal, but absolute bewilderment and incredulity. I didn’t want to blow up Jessica’s life. I don’t know how, but Jessica started immediately shutting down her instagram and deleting pictures. Tiana collected the evidence and sent it off to Maria, who did not respond with the sort of gravity or seriousness that we expected. Maybe this sort of thing happens to her all the time, who knows.

Jessica hasn’t reached out to me since these events. Her instagram is up and running again, and I can’t help but feel that those new pictures aren’t hers either. Regardless - if there are mental health issues, I don’t really want to be friends with someone who not only stole pictures and videos and claimed they were hers, but claimed this girl’s story of grief and loss. That was gross to me, as much as I still feel pity for Jessica.

At the end of it all, I can’t figure out why. She had a sizable following on instagram, (under 12k) but she had no brand deals. She had no sponsorships, no trips that were given, no gifts. She always talked about how she was broke, so I know she couldn’t have been gaining anything from this financially. From what I can gather, she had few, if any friends. Besides attention, these are the only reasons why I can think of why she would tell such lies, and why she would go to such efforts to manipulate the pictures, and present this false life. It will be the greatest mystery of my life. And now I have to find a new friend for my dog.

Mutuals, if I had an insane story that just happened to me where I learned about the deception and lies of the mom of the friend we made for our dog, would you want to hear it?