Michael Smerconish ’14: Yaniv Schulman had good reason to be nervous, even before he entered the quaint family home of his internet sweetheart in Ishpeming, Michigan. After being in contact with Megan Faccio for over nine months, Schulman, a resident of New York City, was finally meeting his unofficial girlfriend for the first time.
However, when Schulman and his brother Ariel, who helped document Yaniv’s romantic episode in the movie Catfish, approached the home, they could sense something was off.
Just a few days prior, Schulman had been listening to one of the several songs Faccio had written for him via Facebook mp3s, when he decided to type the lyrics into Google. Over the next several hours, it became clear that Faccio had actually not written or sung the songs herself, but had simply copied them from obscure Youtube videos and internet downloads.
Schulman had been fooled, big time. Behind the Facebook profile of Megan Faccio, the profiles of fifteen of her fictitious friends, and the numerous explicit text messages between Faccio and Schulman, was Angela Wesselman, a forty-year-old woman who was able to fabricate the entire relationship using only social media and her imagination.
As the events began to unravel, secondary director Henry Joost noted that Wesselman’s actions “were not malicious, just sad.”
Besides the MTV show spawned by the movie, which is hosted by Yaniv himself, the greatest attention to this internet phenomenon, which was labeled “catfishing” following the documentary, has come through Manti Te’o, a star linebacker for the University of Notre Dame.
The untimely death of Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, in September was deemed by writers Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey of Deadspin to be “the most heartbreaking and inspirational story of the college football season.” After dealing with Kekua’s valiant battle with leukemia and then the tragedy of her passing, Te’o shared his distress in interviews and even played a number of football games in Kekua’s honor.
However, investigation by Deadspin, a prominent sports news website, discovered not only that Te’o had never met his girlfriend, but that Lennay Kekua, the supposed 22-year old Stanford student, had never existed.
Te’o, like Schulman, had been fooled by an array of falsified Facebook accounts, tweets, and numerous impersonated telephone calls.
The true tragedy behind both Te’o and Schulman’s experiences, however, lay in the motives behind the false identities. Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man behind the social media and voice of Lennay Kekua, “never had a serious physical relationship with anyone and created a female persona online as a way to vent his feelings,” according to TMZ.
Time Magazine’s recap of the MTV’s show Catfish, which helps people meet their real online loves for the first time, listed the common motives behind the fake identities. Among the top five reasons were “Revenge, homophobia, attention addiction, sexual-identity anxiety, and low self-esteem.” Behind almost every episode of the show is a painfully depressing and often inexplicable reasoning for the impersonations.
“Personalities that came up were really just fragments of myself,” Wesselman noted. “People I used to be, people I wanted to be, but people I never could be.”
Although the term “catfish” has by now obtained mlutiple Urban Dictionary definitions, the most popular being “someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances,” the original term was coined in the documentary itself.
Vince Wesselman, husband of Angela, briefly mentions in the movie’s closing minutes a story about fishermen trying to transport cod from Alaska to China. According to Wesselman, the issue with the journey was that by the time of arrival “the cod’s flesh was mushed and tasteless.” So, in order to keep the cod flavorful, catfish were dumped into the vats along with the cod.
“And there are those people who are catfish in life,” Wesselman explained. “They keep you on your toes, keep you guessing, keep you thinking, keep you fresh. I thank God for the catfish because we would be droll, boring, and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fins.”

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