Unknown Number: The High School Catfish

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:15Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary film Unknown Number, A High School Catfish. Your phone can be a good thing, obviously, to communicate with your friends, but there could definitely be a way that something dangerous could happen. It's crazy how having a phone could become the worst thing that happened to me. Today, we're talking to director Skye Borgman. When 13-year-old Lauren received mean text messages about her and her boyfriend, everyone assumed it was a not uncommon case of cyberbullying.

0:51Rebecca Lavoie:But the anonymous messages grew brutally cruel, sexually explicit, and never-ending. With fingers pointing in every direction, parents, teachers, and law enforcement had no luck identifying Lawrence Tormentor. Then, data buried within the messages revealed the surprising person behind the crime. The Netflix documentary Unknown Number, a high school catfish, brings us the teen victims, their families, and the investigators behind this disturbing case of digital harassment. We also hear from the catfish, who attempts to explain their actions, as well as the people they hurt and about whether or not they can forgive the pain inflicted on them.

1:31Rebecca Lavoie:There's no doubt that it'll have a lasting impact on all of these families. And the impact that this is going to have on these kids may be lifelong.

1:50Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm once again joined by Director Skye Borgman. Welcome back, Skye. Thank you so much for having me again. We've had you on so many times for so many different kinds of documentaries. We talked about American murder and sins of our mother, but also unsolved mysteries and, of course, files of the unexplained. And you were just on talking about Fit for TV. And, of course, we talked about the classic true crime film that is likely going to make the first line in your obituary, abducted in plain sight. But the thing that all these have in common is this twist. You can't make up a twist. How do you find these stories with such great twists?

2:26I mean, it really is looking at the story, looking at the elements that it possesses from really kind of story points, but also what exists to tell the story, right? It's looking at the archive that exists. It's looking at the access that you have. It's not just like, oh, this story has a great twist. You have to be able to make the twist happen, right? And so whenever I'm looking at stories, I'm really looking at the elements that either exist or that we're going to need to get interviews of people, recreations even, you know, and how those story points, how those sort of practical elements all come together to tell the story that needs to be told.

3:08Rebecca Lavoie:Last year, I got the chance to talk with Zach Stewart-Pontier, who made The Jinx and Crime Town. And he explained it is you have like a handful of cards and the secret is knowing which card to reveal at which time. Do you feel like that's what you're kind of trying to do when you tell these stories? Oh, absolutely. And some of them are a little bit harder. You know, some of them you've got like a really full deck and others you just have like three cards in your hand. It's like Uno or what's the game they play in Michigan that I never can remember how to play? oh, I don't know what it's called.

3:39Euchre? Euchre, yes.

3:41Rebecca Lavoie:It's playing different games with different cards. You start by introducing us to this very cute teenage couple, Lauren and her boyfriend at the time, Owen, and there's this kind of wholesomeness to their young romance, isn't there? Oh, definitely. I mean, look, these kids are young too. Like, I never had a boyfriend when I was like 12 or 13 years old, but these kids, like, they meet each other. I thought he was cute. Lauren was shy. But, you know, she was sweet. She was caring. We always just were talking. And then one day, eventually, I'd ask her out. It was very, like, nerve-wracking. And so I was like, I don't know if I'm ready for this.

4:20Rebecca Lavoie:I was super red. They're friends. You know, they both do sports. They're very wholesome. They have this really great relationship where they hang out. They go to each other's soccer games and basketball games, and they really support each other. And it's just a lovely little relationship. You show us photos of them at the time they're actually being harassed by these incredibly vulgar text messages. And that even serves to underline more that these are children, right? Yeah, they're so young. I mean, they're so and we do interviews with them, right? And when we're doing the interviews with them, they're 16 and 17 years old.

4:56But when this started, they were like 12, 13, 14 years old. And you kind of see them grow up a little bit throughout the course of the film.

5:05Rebecca Lavoie:Lauren got a couple of anonymous mean girl type texts and then months later she started getting them again. Can you describe what those text messages were like? Yeah, there was definitely an escalation in the messages. But when Lauren and Owen, actually, they both are getting these messages at the beginning. And it's around a Halloween party. And that's saying, don't come to the Halloween party to Lauren. They want Owen to come to the Halloween party. They don't want Lauren to come. And at first, they're definitely mean texts, but they're really encouraging the two of them to break up and for Owen to break up with Lauren.

5:38And so that's how they start. And they're coming at a pretty good clip. And then they kind of stop for a little while. And then they pick up a hand.

5:45Rebecca Lavoie:I don't want to sound Pollyanna about the kinds of things that kids know or don't know yet because they're not adults. But the language in these texts seemed beyond, for me at least, what a 13-year-old might write to a classmate. Is that right? I mean, I don't have a 13-year-old. I would say that's what I would think, but I think I'd be wrong. My fucking tits in his face. Fucking make him horny. Make it cream. What in the world? They were vulgar and nasty enough in nature to make a 53-year-old man blush. I mean, I think that the language that kids are using these days are probably pretty similar to what these text messages included.

6:27Yeah.

6:28Rebecca Lavoie:Can you talk about some of the later texts that Owen in particular received? Yeah. So there are a lot of texts and they escalate in their graphicness and particularly in their sexual connotations. And they're talking about a lot of things that we don't really want to be thinking about that 13, 14 year olds are thinking about. But a lot of sexual content and just all the time encouraging him to break up with Lauren because she won't do these sexual things. Yeah. Because she won't do all of these different things. And so so it really is sort of leveraging this sex and how experienced these kids are or inexperienced these kids are to to break up.

7:09Rebecca Lavoie:They're not just about sex and relationships, though. They speak to like deep seated insecurities, too. I mean, they're very personal and hurtful, right? Yeah. A lot of them to Lauren in particular, they talk about her body. And Lauren is a very thin girl. She's not overly thin, but it seems as if they're speaking to insecurities that Lauren has. Fucking trash, bitch. Don't fucking wear leggings. And no one won't see your anorexic flat ass. I would question when I were to school, how I look, how's my hair. I don't know if everybody knows these insecurities, you know, but it seems like they're really cutting to the point of really describing her body, describing what they think is wrong with her body, describing the clothes that she wears, describing how she presents herself.

7:56And they really are speaking to something that it seems as if this unknown number has the inside track.

8:03Rebecca Lavoie:What did everyone assume the motive of the texter was at this point? I mean, I really think at this point, everybody was assuming that the motive was to get Lauren and Owen to break up. What was the toll these messages took on Lauren? It was huge. I mean, if you think about how many text messages she and Owen both, honestly, were getting a day from this unknown number. It was 30 or 40 a day. Now, tap that on to how many they're getting from all of their friends. You know, like they're receiving all of these text messages. At night, a ton more are coming in. So they're constantly bombarded with all of these negative, terrible text messages.

8:44And they go to their parents and they talk to their parents about it. And their parents are then putting pressure on them, taking their phones away, you know, really disrupting sort of the normal course of their lives. And as these text messages continue, right, then the school gets involved. They're having to go in regularly to talk to the principal. Law enforcement gets involved. They're having to talk to them. So their lives that should be just sort of waking up, going to school, dealing with a lot because teenagers in high school are dealing with a lot. But it's like all of this like extra stuff compounded on them.

9:17And, you know, you go so far as to talk about Chloe, who is the main suspect and her parents aren't believing her. And to an extent, I would think that Owen and Lauren's parents maybe aren't believing her the way that she would hope or the way that he would hope they were.

9:31Rebecca Lavoie:It's interesting because the school that these kids go to is described in this very kind of wholesome way. But I think I think anyone who's ever been to high school knows is that high school is fraught and there's sort of natural melodrama happening in the hallways and between kids. Do you think that this makes actually high school in particular makes a good setting because of all that drama for a whodunit? Oh, I definitely think so, because I think I think no matter how big or small the high school is, there's going to be. I mean, it's like the only thing certain in this life, probably, is that there's going to be drama in high school.

10:05Right. And maybe even the smaller the high school, the more drama, because there's nowhere to escape. You can't go and be in a different friend group, really, because everybody knows everybody.

10:16Rebecca Lavoie:Well, an element of that drama was sort of characterizing, you know, different kids in the school and these different lights. So in that vein, can you talk about how Chloe found herself in the frame for this? Yeah, I mean, Chloe definitely became the biggest suspect of all of these kids at high school. Owen said something to me first. Are you doing this? And she said, I was just like, no. After a while, like, I kept getting asked more and more because after I got asked once, it really just all started to look more and more like me. And she became the biggest suspect because a lot of the text messages were starting out.

10:53They were sort of pointing towards Chloe. They were pointing to another girl. And as the text messages continued, it became more and more and more clear that these text messages were saying Chloe Wilson is the one sending these text messages. But it got to a point where if you really stop to think about it, they were pointing too much at Chloe. And they talk about the film where it's just like, hang on a second. If she was sending the messages, would she be sending them and kind of pointing the finger to her and saying, hey, everybody, it's me?

11:24Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah, it's a surprising game of three-dimensional chess that the texter is actually playing. So why was it so hard on the technology side to find out where the texts were coming from, like what phone they were coming from? So, you know, they used a third party app. You know, when I first started researching this, I was like, man, a unknown number, the person sending these messages must be super tech savvy. But it's really actually not that hard. I mean, you can download an app and you can send messages through this app. These apps, a lot of them are not American apps. So the actual process of getting a warrant to get the information from these apps isn't so easy because it's not an American company.

12:07So finding those apps or finding out who did it, it just is hard. And so when they finally got around to looking at cell phone providers, that was also challenging because the information goes away after a certain point. And so they really have to find and be able to track that the kids got messages where they were coming from within a very small window of time.

12:30Rebecca Lavoie:What's interesting is how involved the school became in this situation. And clearly now in your interviews, the parents involved don't seem to all see eye to eye on who handled this well and who didn't handle it well. Where do you come down on how the school did when it came to protecting Lauren, for instance? I mean, I think the school did an okay job. I think that they, it was pretty quick from the moment that the parents came to them with these problems. And when they got law enforcement involved, they were able to figure out pretty quickly that they weren't able to figure this out. Right? Right.

13:17I don't know what to do now because my one sort of trick hasn't really worked. So on one hand, I give them pretty good credit for doing what the only thing that they knew how to do and with getting law enforcement involved when they needed to. They also gave advice to the parents to get rid of the cell phones, which the parents didn't really do. They didn't think that that would do any good. And so I think that there's it's a little bit complicated. I think that they could have done a better job, but I think they did OK.

13:52Rebecca Lavoie:I have a question for you. Is that you playing the distorted voice of the catfisher? Oh, I'm not going to answer that. You are worthless and mean nothing. You never have. Get a fucking life out of here. Owen will never look at you again or talk to you. You fucked his life up so bad. His family fucking hates you for it. and he will never in his life acknowledge you again. Get the fuck lost, bitch. He's fucking done with you. You seem to really want to capture the high school experience with your visuals. There's a little bit of even like John Hughes vibe going on there. So on the one hand, you're scouring thousands of text messages as part of this serious investigation.

14:33Rebecca Lavoie:And on the other, you're setting shots of your heroes in detention. What was it like storyboarding this documentary given the setting and given the nature of the topic? Yeah, it was really interesting because I think that my first goal from a visual perspective going into the documentary was putting us into this world of filming the interviews in the kids' bedrooms because those are the kids' safe spaces. You know, they spend so much time in their bedrooms of being in the high school as much as possible. And so so when I'm thinking about these things, I'm thinking about these worlds that these kids find themselves in and what spots are comfortable and safe for them.

15:15That's really what the beginning was of of how to build this story from a visual standpoint. point.

15:22Rebecca Lavoie:So there is this huge twist. We find out that the catfisher is Lauren's mother, Kendra Licari. Did you count on the viewer eliminating her as a suspect because she's one of the parents being interviewed? Because that's what I did. Well, yes and no. So Kendra was our last interview. We did not know if we could get her to interview. So from the beginning, we were thinking about the structure of the documentary from the standpoint that she would not be involved in this. She was incarcerated when we filmed it. And so we had no idea if she would sit down for an interview. We were reaching out to her.

15:58We were talking to her while she was incarcerated. We continued that conversation after she got out of prison. But we had basically finished the cut of the documentary without Kendra in it. And so we were always kind of balancing where the suspicion was sort of pointing to. And it was one of the reasons why, you know, we didn't film Jill and her husband Dave together in an interview because they would have to film Sean without Kendra and felt like that might tip suspicion towards Kendra. So there were a couple of pretty strategic decisions made early on to try to level the playing field. I still think that if we hadn't been able to sit down for an interview with Kendra, I think more people would probably think earlier on that it was her.

16:46Rebecca Lavoie:We've talked before about getting the trust of sources for making these documentaries, in particular, you know, the victims of crimes or misdeeds. And here you have the perpetrator. How did you build that trust and get her to participate in this documentary? Yeah, it was a long process. I mean, we were conversing with her while she was in prison. She wasn't always talking back to us, you know, but we kept that conversation going. And then once she got out, we reached out to her, we talked to her. And she felt that it was important to sit down and do an interview so that her words, so that she could kind of explain herself in a way, so that she could try to piece together what had happened and what had led up to this series of events.

17:30Rebecca Lavoie:I know to some, I'm a headline, I'm a villain, I'm a bad mom, I'm a whatever. But that's because they know one little piece of my story. They don't know my whole story. I think it's just, it's just contact and it's listening and it's some long phone calls and some long text messaging sessions, you know, and just trying to really let them know that we want to give her an opportunity to speak for herself. I was thinking about this a lot when we were talking about the Jussie Smollett documentary. There is this thing where if you're not in it, someone else is going to be telling your story for you.

18:09Rebecca Lavoie:And, you know, I think a lot of people see that as only upside to be able to tell that story for yourself. Was that the case here? I think so. Definitely. I mean, it is true that many people in the documentary outside of Kendra have very negative feelings towards her. Right. So it's really Kendra's opportunity to sit down and for people to see who she is and what she's been through. And I feel like if she wasn't able to do that, it would have been pretty lopsided. There's this really gripping scene in which police confront Kendra and everything just falls apart. Can you tell me your impressions of what went down in that living room when she was talking to the cops?

18:52Yeah, I think it was a slow realization for Kendra that she had been caught. And I think there was still some idea possibly in the back of her mind that she could get out of it. I mean, you see, like, she hands over her devices, she hands over a cell phone and her computer. And it isn't until Sean comes home that he tells them that there are more cell phones.

19:23Rebecca Lavoie:She had her pocket. I can show you. I've actually got a couple. Okay. Well, I have a search warrant for all of them, so I'd like to get all of them. What's really striking to me of watching that scene play out where law enforcement comes to talk to Kendra and to search the premises, it really is, they don't go to arrest her. They come with a search warrant to search the premises, right? Yeah. But you see her and Lauren and the way that Kendra and Lauren are interacting is really fascinating to watch. And with Lauren, you don't see her sort of break down with any real emotion until Sean is home and she can see the fracture happening in her family.

20:04And that is just so heartbreaking to me where Sean's telling Kendra that she's got to leave the house because he's angry and it's just the best thing for her to leave. And that's when you see Lauren understand that her family's never going to be the same again.