r/netflix • u/AnotherDarnDay • 2d ago

Discussion Unknown Number High-school Catfish Spoiler

What the hell did I just watch? And what the hell was this person thinking?

I'm in shock that someone would do such a thing to their own child. And that she doesn't seem to have any focus on what she actually did.

The daughter didn't seem to grasp what her mother did when they told her but the father acted on it right away.

Was she totally jealous of her own daughter?

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u/Silver_Start_4935 2d ago

Here's a solid article about the case from earlier this year.- https://web.archive.org/web/20250115142023/https://www.thecut.com/article/kendra-licari-daughter-cyberbully-mommy-meanest-true-story.html

One theory from the article is that part of the motive was to create a crisis within the family to distract from her financial disaster. 

Clearly though Kendra had multiple bizarre self-serving reasons to do this that baffle the rest of us. 

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u/heirophant-goddess 2d ago

Why do they call her Ashley in this article?

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u/Silver_Start_4935 2d ago

Pseudonym. They state that somewhere within the article. 

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u/Senior-Lychee6079 1d ago

Same here, I had read a different long article about this past winter so no surprise in the ending. Here it is: [https://www.thecut.com/article/kendra-licari-daughter-cyberbully-mommy-meanest-true-story.html?utm_source=nymag_app_article_share]

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u/ezpz314159 2d ago

Yes speaking of- did they have separate finances? How did their budget work without her income??

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u/anon8232 2d ago

Apparently Kendra was in charge of the finances and downplayed how disastrous they were.

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u/Silver_Start_4935 2d ago

A lot of couples have one person that is more involved in the finances. Who knows what all went on but it'd be pretty easy for her to run up a credit card, cash out a 401k, etc without her husband knowing. 

From the article, some things she said, "that the family had missed house payments because someone in New Mexico had stolen their identity or that his pickup truck had been repossessed because of a scammer in Saginaw. After Kendra’s check bounced for her portion of a spring-break condo, she explained that she had gotten hacked."

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u/Webbie-Vanderquack 1d ago

She also obviously had some tech skills, so she must have been pretty good at fudging the numbers in a way that was persuasive for her husband.

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u/AnotherDarnDay 2d ago

That she does.

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u/jmsarndt 1d ago

That’s a great, very detailed article! Thanks for sharing

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u/Swendak 1d ago

Thank you for sharing. Much more informative than the documentary!!

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u/Excellent-Cable-1366 1d ago

No, then why didn’t she do it before and why only after the daughter got a boyfriend? And why did she still tried to harass his new girlfriend? It’s because she had a crush on him and she wanted her daughter dead because she considered her a threat. 

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u/NomadFire 5h ago

My prefered theory is that she had a form of Munchausen Syndrome. She wanted to cause a problem that would isolate her daughter and cause her to rely on her mother more. She wanted to be her hero....She might have been interested in the boy and that was the theory that the documentary seemed to be really pushing, but IDK.