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Hello and welcome to this exclusively exclusive Valentine's Day episode of Cult Leader. Happy Valentine's Day, my Cult Babes. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer Henry, and I'm here to warn you all.

A month ago, I asked you guys to start sending me your personal catfishing stories, and boy did the Cult Babes deliver. I've had emails coming in since December, so there were a lot. And I had my assistant, yes, look at me, assistant, go through dozens of catfish emails and pull her faves. She happens to be one of my very close friends, so I know that she knows what I would find the most interesting, and the Juicyest. I also didn't want to read them myself because I wanted to record these while it was

experiencing hearing them for the first time. She added little titles to them, which is amazing. So I'm just going to go in at random. Let's fucking do this. I'm so excited. We are going to start with the first one called London Catfish. We love an overseas story. Do you guys want me to do an accent the whole time? I was spent, I won't do that. So I was listening to your latest Cult Leader episode. The best podcast there is. Wow, thank you. And I thought I would drop by with a fun catfishing story for you.

It's a little long, but it was a whole ordeal. Some backstory. In 2014, I was 19 years old and I was studying at university in the south of England.

I had just gotten out of a pretty intense relationship, not toxic or anything like that. Just pretty emotionally draining and very fast moving in general. Then there, a little while after it ended, I was encouraged to try online dating by a friend, and for some reason I agreed.

Tinder had a pretty rough reputation at the time and Bumble wasn't really a thing, so I set up an online profile.

I met a guy on OkCupid, which we all know, I've been there, who I will call Christian. He lived in London, but my university town was only about an hour and a half drive away, so that was fine.

He was a 25 year old lawyer who lived in an artsy edgy part of town in a loft apartment. He was attractive, charming, and really quickly we moved from online messages to texting.

I would get messages from him at odd hours, late at night, during work hours, but never in the morning or evening.

I was having some self-esteem issues at the time. I'd lost a friend to suicide a few months prior to meeting Christian, and I was struggling with my degree and working too many hours at a demanding job that caused me to actually collapse with exhaustion that spring.

I didn't think too much about the odd times of the messages, because I was in a situation where I was up at all hours, and it really seemed normal.

And then I passed out at work. This was roughly a month after I had started texting Christian.

About six weeks after we had met, and I texted him to tell him that I was in the hospital, and this is where things get weird.

He showed a little sympathy at first, but then he got irritated that I was texting him too much that day.

I'd sent him around five messages, bored, and scared, and needing support, and he stopped responding.

Okay, first I'm gonna interject here. If a guy ever makes you feel like you're texting him too much when it's like a super rational thing like that, like they can fuck off,

I figured that he was probably at work, and I let it go.

I got released from the hospital and went back to my shared house to recover, which meant no work and no classes for a week.

So it's spending a lot of time online, and I noticed that I kept getting a suggestion on Facebook for a guy who I'm gonna call Daniel.

We had no friends in common, and I didn't recognize his photo, but he kept coming up.

So out of curiosity, I clicked on the profile.

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