Kirat Assi from Sweet Bobby tells us about life after catifishing

Kirat Assi takes a deep breath and pauses the interview for a moment to wipe away a tear.

It's been two years since Assi first shared her story on the “Sweet Bobby” podcast, but the feelings are still raw. She's revisiting it for a Netflix show of the same name.

“Towards the end it was a nightmare,” Assi tells TODAY.com from London.

For about nine years, Assi believed she was in a relationship with a cardiologist named Bobby Jandu – first as friends, then eventually as fiancé. They started talking on Facebook Messenger. Assi both came from the same London Sikh community and immediately felt at home with Bobby. They also had a common acquaintance: Assi's younger cousin Simran Bhogal, who dated Bobby's younger brother.

She was actually talking to someone pose as Bobby – a very real person. The real Jandu appeared on both the podcast and the Netflix show, sharing his experiences with the “shocking” catfishing scheme.

Assi watched Bobby go through major changes in his life, some of them very traumatic, like a brain tumor, a stroke, and a near-fatal shooting in Kenya, as well as a divorce, a remarriage… and time in the witness protection program.

In 2015, Bobby said he loved Assi. The two began a relationship, even though they had only had one face-to-face conversation in a bar years ago.

“It was nice at the beginning,” says Assi about her love affair with Bobby. But a few months into it, the relationship became “pretty scary.” She “didn’t understand the shift” to coercive control and emotional abuse. He monitored where she went, what she did, who she texted. And yet they still couldn't meet in person.

It got to the point where Assi says she was a “shell of herself.” She remembers that she “lost weight rapidly” in October 2015. “I was just bones,” she says.

In 2018, Bobby missed Assi's grandmother's funeral, which prompted Assi to give him an ultimatum: either he flies to London to see her or the relationship was over. Bobby, she says, has booked a ticket and a hotel in Kensington. But Assi became suspicious when Bobby Despite it wouldn't see her. After hiring a private investigator, she discovered that Bobby had a permanent address in the United Kingdom.

There she met Bobby, who was married and had a child – not divorced, like he said. And he had no idea who she was.

Then came the twist. Assi's cousin Simran Bhogal admitted to pretending to be Bobby on the internet all the time. She said she was also behind more than 50 Facebook profiles that were part of a web designed to confuse and persuade Assi.

Bhogal provided a statement for both the Netflix documentary, which premiered Oct. 16, and the podcast, but did not agree to an interview.

“This matter concerns a family dispute over events that began over a decade ago when I was a schoolgirl. For me it is a private family matter that has been resolved. “I strongly reject the numerous unfounded and seriously defamatory allegations that have been made against me, as well as details of private matters that have been shared with the media,” the statement said.

Assi filed a police report against Bhogal, but as there are no laws against catfishing in the UK, the matter was not initially pursued. The case has since been reopened. Bhogal was not charged.

TODAY.com has reached out to Bhogal for comment.

Where is Kirat Assi now? Her life has “changed dramatically”

Assi tells TODAY.com her life has “changed dramatically” since the catfishing incident. The news quickly spread throughout her “connected” community – and it led to “silence” around her, she says.

“A lot of people just don’t know what to say,” she says. “Some people were just too polite, or they didn’t want to rock the boat. You don't want to upset me. I always say, just speak, just say something. I would rather you keep nothing to yourself and if you have any questions just say something.”

As she examines things closely, she tries to maintain her confidence. “Hopefully I’m still the same as before,” she says. “So, I'm still a little crazy, I still like to party and I'm still into the traditional side of my stuff too.”

But she said she had to work “especially hard” to get back to normal. When she first started talking to Bobby, she was a marketer for a popular radio show. During the relationship, she quit her radio show after Bobby accused her of flirting with a guest.

She has since returned to the radio show, which she hosts once a week.

“I love it. The listeners are nice. The following on the radio is very nice. And I enjoy what I do because it is about my culture, my heritage and the Punjabi language. I have a lot of fun on the show and hopefully the listeners will too,” she says.

As for work, she has her own marketing company, but says she's not currently employed because she's too busy dealing with the catfishing incident.

“That's why I'm afraid of sabotage, so I don't really share much about what I do (on social media),” she says.

Although she met Bobby online, she says she isn't “afraid” of social media itself, but she is careful about what she posts.

“I’m on social networks,” she says. “I use them sensibly and am very, very careful. That’s all I can do, right?”

Your dating life now

Before Bobby, Assi had been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the same man since she was 18. Although she is not currently seeing anyone, she has dated since Bobby.

“It's not that I'm afraid of meeting people,” she says. “Not everyone is that person, and not everyone can do what that person did.”

She says she looks at the Bobby catfishing incident like a “bad breakup.”

“You have a bad breakup or something bad happens, and you lose your partner and you think, 'Oh, I'll never get into a relationship again, I'll never do that again,'” she says. “But then you do it. So there is a phase of healing, moving on and dealing with things. (I’m) not saying it wasn’t traumatic.”

While breakups are a somewhat universal experience, this one, she said, was lonely.

“No one around me understood what was going on,” she says. “I had to do it alone, and I had to go to the front for so many years before I could talk about it because no one believed me before. So I’ve always been one of those people who just gets on with things, but I just had to go ahead and do it.”

How things are going with her cousin Simran

When Assi initially filed a police report detailing her allegations against Bhogal over the catfishing incident, the police said there was nothing they could legally do about it as there were no laws against catfishing in the UK

Assi began looking for other ways to get justice and presented evidence of catfishing to lawyers.

“The police had ignored her for many, many years, and when she came to me she basically had nowhere else to go,” Yair Cohen, Assi's attorney, told TODAY.com. “She exhausted all her options, came in with a box full of files and said, 'Oh, you know, this happened to me.'”

Assi sued Bhogal in civil court in 2020 over the catfishing case, which they eventually settled out of court in 2021. As part of her settlement, Bhogal paid Assi “significant damages” and legal fees and issued a private letter of apology to her, which Assi discussed on the “Sweet Bobby” podcast.

Following the publication of the “Sweet Bobby” podcast and a complaint filed by Assi with the Independent Office for Police Conduct, police reopened the Assi case, which Cohen described as “well overdue.”

“It’s kind of happening, but it’s very, very slow,” Assi says. “I was hoping it would be finished before the documentary, but yeah, that didn’t happen.”

Cohen also tells TODAY.com that he is now representing the “real Bobby” in a “separate lawsuit” against Bhogal.

At first Assi says she wanted to know why Bhogal decided to fish her but today she doesn't need that answer anymore. She's not even sure she'd believe an explanation if it were offered.

“To be honest, I don’t care why,” she says. “They obviously questioned it at the time. You just wonder why, but nothing could justify how far this person went.”

“I don’t think I could ever believe what came out of her mouth again,” she adds.

Now, years after the incident, Assi wants more public accountability.

“I just want her to take responsibility for her actions, put her hands up and just say, 'Look, I did this.' Tell us how she did it and be held accountable,” she says.