I Fell in Love With a Catfish During Chemotherapy... and The Internet Found Her (Part 1/3)

Chapter One: Who is Saylor Tomasic?

My Dad bought me a laptop the day after I was diagnosed with leukemia.

As far as gifts go, it was pretty good, although I wouldn’t recommend getting cancer just to get a laptop. There are much easier ways to get online. This was 2008, so technology was comparatively limited. The internet felt more like a place you visited and left vs. the inescapable thing it is now.

Confined to my hospital room, the laptop was my access to the chatrooms I’d visit for hours to combat the loneliness of treatment. That’s where I met Saylor Tomasic. She was 30, a former model, and the daughter of a prominent sports attorney in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

She told me Ben Roethlisberger, the former Pittsburgh Steelers NFL quarterback, was her ex-boyfriend. The break-up was messy, but they were on good terms. If you’re not a football fan, this is the guy she’s talking about.

I later learned that Ben Roethlisberger was in a series of high-profile relationships from 2005 onwards—none of which involved Saylor Tomasic. If only I’d had access to a device connected to the internet where I could fact-check these things. Ah, well, the laptop connected me to Saylor, and that was all that mattered.

Her impressive resume should have been a warning sign as she was a retired model with a booming bank account… who hung out in chatrooms. There were more red flags than a Chinese Communist Party function. But when you’re 20 and slowly dying of cancer, the colour of flags isn’t so bright. I wasn’t lying about my life — I was a 20-year-old virgin being treated for blood cancer, so why would someone be lying to me?

Then again, maybe I knew it sounded too good to be true. Maybe I didn’t care.

Every night (Pittsburgh being 16 hours behind Sydney), we’d swap messages about our lives. She told me about her roommates, Mitch and Dante, who were gym junkies and good blokes. She loved fitness. She had a love/hate relationship with her best friend. And she hugely admired her Dad, who ran the firm she worked at.

Eventually, she told me she loved me.

Thrust into a cancer treatment without warning, I was unable to face the reality of my circumstances. Or unwilling to. For a young man who felt like a little boy inside, this person was my escape. Saylor Tomasic quickly became my world.

I told her I loved her too.

I’d never had someone tell me they loved me (in that context), and I’d never said it to anyone. I still remember how alive I felt saying it, well, typing it. Is that embarrassing? Maybe. That’s up to you to decide, and your prerogative. I wouldn’t blame you either way.

From there, our bond strengthened through hundreds of emails, voice notes, and endless hours on the phone (well, Skype—this was 2008, remember). Her presence in my life made chemotherapy bearable.

I was still filling bags with vomit and crying into my pillow at night, but she was like a flicker of light in that darkness. She was something to hold onto. She was someone to live for.

After seven rounds of chemotherapy, I was sent home. I say ‘sent’ because the hospital had become my home. Like an institutionalised prisoner, I felt unsure of my footing outside the confines of my cage. I’d reached 244 days on the cancer ward, and a part of me had hoped to reach 250, as twisted as that sounds.

But Saylor was always there.

At home, struggling to find my place in the world as a 20-year-old in remission from Acute Myeloid Leukemia, I was comforted with packages from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were full of food, candy, sports gear, clothes, and even perfume-scented underwear. If my parents wondered why there was a box of women’s underwear beneath my bed, they never asked. For all I know, they thought I was wearing it. I’m probably not going to ask them about it, either.

If you’ve seen MTV’s long-running show, Catfish, you already know that not all catfishers (what is the plural of catfish?) are financially motivated. I wasn’t being scammed; in my mind, I had a girlfriend. And someday, a wife.

So I sent gifts back—never money (not that I had any). Instead, I sent clothes, Australian snacks, lollies, and jewellery. I shopped for a ring at a local jewellery store, nervously browsing the glass cases before the shop assistant asked who I was buying for.

I stuttered, “My girlfriend,” as my heart danced.

But life changes and mine certainly had. Now, I was back in the real world like a rehabilitated deer after a collision with an 18-wheeler. Without the guardrails of my illness, a fog began to lift.

We’d spoken almost daily for nearly nine months, but every attempt to video chat had been rebuffed with a last-minute issue, technical mistake, or scheduling conflict.

She’d been the only light in the terrifying darkness of my life for so long, but back in the real world, I started to see clearly. I don’t know whether it was a conscious shift or my mind finally felt safe enough to let go, but I couldn’t hide from the nagging doubt any longer.

I couldn’t find her on Facebook despite her unique name—a smoking gun, but not the murder weapon. Not everyone was chronically online (this was now mid-2009). A similar search for her father’s law firm also came up blank, just as there was no record of her friends, Dante and Mitch. And the emails they had sent — unique in addresses — used the same formatting, style and wording as Saylor’s.

Even the packages I’d been sending had been delivered to a PO Box, not a residential address. No amount of searching turned up anything credible because there was no one to find.

Saylor Tomasic did not exist.

I distanced myself from Saylor after that. I didn’t explicitly call her out for reasons I’m still unclear about. Maybe I wasn’t ready to lose her. Or, maybe I knew it was never real — that she was using Saylor Tomasic to be free from the pain of her life the same way I was trying to be free of the pain in mine.

Instead, I slowly drifted back to the real world I’d been denied while she escalated the need for attention. As I became more emotionally distant, she became more obsessed with bringing us back to where we were. First, she crashed her car — rolling her BMW onto its roof in a devastating accident. Then, her father had a stroke and died. Finally, she got breast cancer and endured a double mastectomy to save her life.

She used cancer as one final attempt to hold onto me. But after everything I’d been through, it was the final straw that drove me away.

Deceit is hurtful, but context matters. I wasn’t without disappointment and pain at being lied to. I’d shared my most vulnerable moments and given hundreds — maybe thousands — of hours of my time to her.

But that’s the thing; she’d done the same to me.

We were both running from our lives, unable to face a monster that was too big and scary without someone by our side. More than anything, I was so deeply thankful for the role she played during my 244 days of chemotherapy.

I didn’t care who she was. I cared who she is.

I told Saylor I wanted to know the real her, but not so I could get mad or try to expose her. She gave me strength when I couldn’t fight anymore. She was a huge reason—maybe the only reason—I had survived.

It was important to me to thank the real her for what she did.

I didn’t care if she looked nothing like the photos. Fuck, I honestly didn’t care if it was a man. Whatever “relationship” we had was gone, like tendrils of smoke that had vanished in the air. I just wanted to know who had saved me. Rightly or wrongly, I felt like I deserved that closure.

But when I confronted “Saylor” about everything, she vanished. After nearly 9 months of communication, the woman I had fallen in love with was gone.

But the story isn’t over…

See, this story started in 2008 when the internet was a place you visited and left vs. the inescapable thing it is now.

But this story ends in 2025.

Over the years, I shared my experience with others, and I’m grateful to say it resonated deeply. I’ve spoken with dozens of men (and some women) who went through their own catfishing experiences, hopefully offering some advice or support on their journey to find closure.

Part of me understands that she vanished because she didn’t want to be found — I respect that, I really do. But at the same time, I felt like a piece of me was trapped in that hospital room until I found out the truth. I couldn’t fully move on until I had answers.

Who was she? Was it even a woman? Why did they let me spill my heart while hiding behind a mask? Why did they choose me? Did any of it mean anything to them? Anything at all?

I debated letting it go, but the more I shared my experience, the more people wanted to help. From the same laptop I used to meet Saylor, requests came pouring in from people who weren’t happy with the story’s ending.

They wanted answers.

And I did too.

I figured if I found the woman whose pictures had been stolen, she might know who was responsible. That might explain why it had all happened and help me move on.

So I gave the green light and let the internet do its thing…

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COMING NEXT WEEK: PART TWO

Over the next several years, internet sleuths used dozens of photos, voice notes and information to search for answers — and ended up creating a brand new mystery with even more questions to answer about Saylor Tomasic. What I expected to be the end was just the start, and I had no fucking idea how explosive the truth would be.

With love,

New World Porter

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