Unknown Number High-school Catfish

[u/AnotherDarnDay]

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?

[u/RogueKitteh]

So livid after watching this. Holy hell. Let me rant some thoughts/questions I have after watching.

How did the cops not immediately separate Kendra from her daughter/victim when they came to the house?? Instead they let her creepily hold/pet her? Wtf?

Why was the sexual component treated like an afterthought?? Why weren't there specific charges relating to that and why when they did briefly touch on that with Owen's mother did they try to sugarcoat it with older pictures of him instead of younger pictures of him when it actually started to drive home how creepy and fucked up it was?

Why did they give a platform to Kendra after sexually harassing children? Why did they try to humanize her and make us sympathetic with her to some degree? Would they do that with a grown man who sent equally sexually explicit messages to children?

Why didn't they focus more on how Kendra went after the new girl that Owen was talking to and her mother and what that means? I.e. that she did in fact have a fixation on him that went beyond her daughter

Why are they ALLOWING ANY contact between Lauryn and her mother after everything??

That woman belongs under the jail. For life.

Lauryn needs a world of therapy. It's almost like she needs deprogramming even

[u/Crazy-Employer-8394 → u/RogueKitteh]

Bravo! All of this! This documentary was all sorts of fucked up and they created the sexualization of Owen as an afterthought and not like a key piece of the puzzle. Her bizarro rant that we all do some illegal things and like, no psycho, we are not the same.

And yeah, she definitely belongs in jail, and I am so beyond confused that Lauryn was able to forgive her at all, and at least they are physically separated for now. Cringe all around.

[u/Palsyanna → u/Crazy-Employer-8394]

She is Lauren’s mother. No one needs to be calling this child out for wanting to hold on to her mother. Children will do anything to hold on to the belief that their parents are benevolent—it’s a survival mechanism. She hasn‘t “forgiven” her; she hasn’t processed the situation. I don’t know if it can be processed. The poor kid was still in that goddam school when this doc was made!

[u/Webbie-Vanderquack → u/Palsyanna]

I completely agree with you, but to be fair, I read this not as u/Crazy-Employer-8394 "calling this child out for wanting to hold on to her mother," but rather expressing confusion about how Lauryn appears to have been left to make sense of this horrific abuse.

I was baffled by the explanation the police gave Lauryn when they came to the house. They were so unclear about what was going on, they didn't really even tell her what her mother had been accused of. "Mom got wrapped up into some stuff and she didn't start it but continued it?" "Sometimes when we're not thinking straight we do some things that aren't right?" What was the poor kid supposed to make of that? And they didn't seem to have any intention of arresting her or separating them.

They should have explained this to Lauryn very clearly and apart from her mother, with a clear explanation about what would happen next, and with a social worker or another adult present.

So it's not surprising Lauryn doesn't have a clear idea of how she's supposed to relate to her mother now, especially with the obvious love-bombing via text message.

TL;DR: I think we're all actually on the same page her, and not blaming Lauryn.