I Fell in Love With a Catfish During Chemotherapy... and The Internet Found Her (Part 2/3)

Chapter Two: Closing in on the truth

Oh, hey there.

Are you here to read a damn good story or settle a blood debt?

If you missed last week, make sure you catch up on how I fell in love with a woman online before finding out I’d been catfished for 9 months. If you’re here for the blood debt, YOU’LL NEVER GET A DROP FROM ME.

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

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When we left off, the internet was searching for “Saylor Tomasic” using the many images I’d been sent. These were candid photos—taken in bars, at parties, at Disneyland and with friends—so I figured the person who stole the images must live in the same orbit as the woman in the photos.

This was a helpful use of the internet, which had come a long way since I first logged on. When I was in my teens, I downloaded several images of naked women to a floppy disk and hid the disk under my bed. I accept that this admission has aged me terribly.

This was not my best plan because looking at the disk was not arousing, and we didn’t have a computer at home to view the pictures. I remained as floppy as the disk, despite my best horny intentions.

Fast-forward: Internet sleuths began dropping clues about the woman in the photo. Small background details, like the type of trees, the style of license plates, or specific beer on tap, helped them pinpoint locations.

At the same time, it wasn’t universally accepted that a stranger had catfished me. One prevailing theory was that my Dad had bought the laptop as stage one of a long, looooong game. This theory suggested he’d seen my loneliness and paid someone to pose as “Saylor Tomasic”, using the very laptop he’d given me as a conduit!!!

I appreciated the sentiment, but I once spent 45 minutes having phone sex with “Saylor” while she spoke through a pair of underwear clenched between her teeth. That feels like a problematic angle to pitch to a local theatre student being paid to be my girlfriend.

Speaking of phone sex…

I would sooner insert a phone up my butt and get a friend to call it so I could feel the vibrations than have phone sex again (this gives a brand new meaning to a booty call). If you’re in a long-distance relationship and get freaky on the phone, more power to you, but you’re not having sex — you’re masturbating with a phone.

In an era where digital privacy has been steadily eroded, I might have subjected some poor Government agent to a lot of grunting and heavy breathing during my relationship with “Saylor”. For that, I apologise. I hope it wasn’t an intern. If I was being bugged, that thing I said about a finger in my butt was 100% a joke. And I’ve never done that thing with peanut butter and my dog. All just jokes!

Back to the story…

My crude attempts at a reverse image search failed to return results, with nothing appearing for her various email addresses either. We spoke on Skype, so there was no traditional phone number to search, but you can’t hold a good internet vigilante mob down, and it wasn’t long before they found her.

Well, they found the woman whose photos had been used to create the “Saylor Tomasic” story — her real name was Samantha*

*Not her real name. I’ve picked a generic white woman's name instead for privacy.

With a name and multiple contact options (emails, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn), I figured the hardest part was over. Once I reached out, Samantha would probably know who had stolen her identity since the pictures were so informal. She’d help me understand why everything had happened. She was the missing piece of the puzzle.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t like a kid’s puzzle where you have to be a clinical potato head to fail. It was more like one of those 1000-piece puzzles where every piece is the same shade of blue.

I explained my story, why the truth mattered to me and how I wanted nothing from her but to be pointed in the right direction. Then, she’d never hear from me again. I would vanish like a deadbeat Dad heading to the store for milk and cigarettes.

It seemed like a good plan (and a handy reminder to pick up milk and cigarettes), but every message went unseen. Help requests landed in unchecked Instagram inboxes, friend requests went unanswered, and emails were fired into the void without reply.

Despite the modern world's interconnectedness, I couldn’t reach Samantha. It was like looking through a window, banging on the glass and screaming for attention while the family inside lived their lives, blissfully unaware I existed.

Years passed in this holding pattern, with annual attempts to nudge a message to the top of her inbox. The internet had done the hard work of identifying the woman in the photos, but I couldn’t stick the landing. It was like bowling with the gutters on, but I still kept throwing gutter balls for some reason.

Maybe Samantha ignored this one because I couldn’t spell “closure”.

If you’ve ever had an itch inside your shoe or in the middle of your back where you juuuust can’t reach, you know how powerful the urge to scratch can be. I was dealing with a 10+ year itch by now that remained a bee’s dick out of reach (this is an informal measurement).

I was still living my life and trying to forget what leukemia was like, but you can’t escape memories like that. There was always something to remind me of the catfishing experience and renew my desire for answers.

The mention of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. American candy. Someone speaking through a rolled-up pair of underwear and clenched teeth — ordinary, everyday things agitated the unscratchable itch.

After years of trying and failing to contact Samantha, I expanded my search. The internet sleuths had found not only the woman in the photos but also her husband.

Still, no response…

By now, I had exhausted her email, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, so I had only one contact option left in the chamber: her work email.

Giving it one last crack, I hit all the story's main points like I was performing a ‘Best Of’ album at a live show. Someone had stolen her photos. Someone might still be stealing them. Someone she might know had spent 9 months lying to a cancer patient.

What would you do if you got an email like that? Would you believe them? Would you have questions? Would you care that someone had stolen your photos to create a fake life?

Here was the first and only response I got after almost fourteen years:

She didn’t give a shit.

She dismissed my decade-long search for the truth like she was flicking away a bug.

The speed and scale of the walls she slammed up made me think she knew who stole her photos. I don’t think for a second it was her living a double life. But the fact that she wanted her friends left alone—when I’d never contacted any of them or spoken about them in an email—makes me 99% sure she knows which friend it was.

That surprised me.

If someone emailed me out of the blue and told me my identity had been stolen, I’d want to know more. I’d want to get to the bottom of it. I’d like to think I’d give a damn about their pain.

But she didn’t.

For whatever reason, hearing that someone had stolen her identity put her on edge—her desperate attempts to keep the past locked away were both obvious and frantic. It wasn’t that my emails had failed to reach her, she’d been actively ignoring them.

Also, if there are authorities who police people’s emails, I hope they arrest me for some of the “poetry” I sent an ex-girlfriend. Lock me up and throw away the key.

Again, I understand I’m part of this story — but not the only character. She wasn’t obligated to speak to me; I’m under no illusions. She had every right to vanish and brush me off. I might disagree with that choice, but I respect her right to make it. I couldn’t force Samantha to help if she didn’t want to.

So that was the end of my search for “Saylor Tomasic”… well, almost.

This story has been viewed more than 500,000 times online in the previous 15 years (a snapshot of total figures below), and once again, the ending didn’t please people.

I wasn’t ready to let it go, either.

Samantha was a dead end, but that didn’t mean the flow of information would stop. Now that we had credible information, a location, and a specific community to investigate, new waves of internet sleuths offered to help close the net.

Together, we found the woman in the photos, but she was unwilling to help. So, this time, they’d go straight to the source. I gave the green light to find the catfish and let the internet do its thing all over again…

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COMING NEXT WEEK: PART THREE

Internet sleuths quickly found the woman who created the “Saylor Tomasic” lie. After a decade and a half of searching, all I had to do was reach out and get closure. That’s when I discovered something so wildly unexpected and impossible that my jaw hit the floor.

With love,

New World Porter

P.S. If you enjoyed this story, please leave a Like or Comment with the button below (takes 0.46 seconds) so I can think terribly filthy thoughts about you. 👇