Jess thought she was in a long-distance relationship with Lincoln Lewis. It was all a lie.

Content warning: This story includes discussion of suicide that may be distressing to some readers. 

When flight attendant Jess* met Lincoln Lewis at work, she took a selfie with the Australian actor and shared it on social media.

She then saw what she thought was Lewis’ Facebook profile and added him. There, the two started a friendship. 

But what Jess didn’t know then was that the person she was speaking to wasn’t Lewis at all, starting a decade-long nightmare for the single mum.

“People will never understand, and they’ll always think, ‘How can you be so stupid?’,” Jess told 60 Minutes on Sunday night.

“But until you’re in it, you won’t understand how difficult it is to get out of it.”

Jess started messaging with catfish Lewis regularly. One day, their messages moved from Facebook to phone calls and texts.

“I recall him saying, ‘Can I call you?’. I thought, ‘Wow. Okay, why not?’.

“So I gave him my number.”

Although they started a long-distance relationship, Jess and Lewis never met up in person. She said he always had “excuses” for why they couldn’t meet up.

“I started to have a few little doubts. The fact that he wouldn’t meet me and, and stuff,” she said.

“I started to have niggling doubts but I thought why would anyone contact me and, you know, want to lie to me?”

Jess asked to have a Skype call with ‘Lincoln’. He agreed.

“The phone rang and sure enough, here is Lincoln Lewis talking to me,” she said.

“And I just remember seeing him talking. I would say something and there’d be a bit of a delay and then a few minutes later you would see him, like, kind of laughing and throwing his head back… I was giddy. I was excited.”