Wesselman Pierce lived with her husband Vince Pierce and his two sons. “She didn't want to lose their friendship no matter what,” Wesselman-Pierce tearfully tells Schulman in her film. “Many of the characters that came out were just fragments of myself.”
At the end of the documentary, a ruminating Pearce recalls the story he heard, which gave the film, and its expression, its name. He said cod was once shipped by ship from Alaska to China in vats, but when the fish arrived it was mushy and tasteless. Eventually, catfish was added to the bat to keep the cod healthy. “Some people are like catfish in life,” he says. In his mind, his wife was one of them. “They keep you guessing, keep you thinking, and keep you fresh.”
He added: “If someone didn't bite my fins, life would be boring and boring.”
When asked how catfishing became so rampant and the concept so widely understood, Schulman, now 39 and a father of three, says people will never be fooled or scammed. However, he said the rapidly changing online and social landscape of the early 2010s created the perfect social environment. Storm — a lawless digital landscape where once-accepted expectations of romance, friendship, and connection are blurred, and parsing the real from the artificial becomes increasingly complex.
Instagram was introduced in 2010, followed by Snapchat in 2011. The dating app Grindr came out in 2009, followed by Tinder in 2012. The now-mundane concept of starting a relationship with a stranger online was still considered strange and unusual. Immediately after the documentary was released, Schulman was inundated with emails from people with similar stories to his own.
The idea really entered the public consciousness in early 2013, when Deadspin reported on the scandal surrounding Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o. He led his team to the national championship game and was a Heisman Trophy finalist, all in the shadow of his girlfriend's death earlier in the season. But the girlfriend, Deadspin discovered, was never real.
Theo was the victim of a catfish scam, but the circumstances at the time were very puzzling, with theories swirling about Theo's possible involvement in the scam.