Catfishing with Sidney Ackerman: The Ending

Spring-Summer 2012 - We keep in contact with throughout the year of 2012. We don't text each other as much as we used to but we still tweet and DM each other. I invite her to some stuff throughout the year, she declines. I find out that she's doing a Redskins Podcast with Dre and LL, 2 guys from twitter that are also Redskins fans so I figure that they have at least met her at some point. At one point, she DMs me and is convinced that they are trying to kick her off the podcast. (in retrospect, she probably was trying to make sure I was on her side in case her secret comes out)

Fall 2012 - I do not remember the exact game, but Sidney invites me to a Redskins game but like 2 hours before. I thank her but I cannot go. Looking back on it, that was probably a half assed invite because there was no way I could make it from Germantown to Fed Ex Field in time for kickoff.

December 18, 2012 - Dre and LL break the story that Sidney was using fake pics. I had been suspicious just because of the mysterious nature of Sidney but I had nothing concrete. After Dre and LL outed her, she locked her account and changed her twitter name from Red_Ridn_Hood to Red_Ridn_H00d. Honestly, I didn't really care. Whoever "Sidney" was had hooked me up with 2 Redskins tickets in the past and given me $50 and had been cool to tweet with so who really cares what he/she looked like.

December 23, 2012 - Tweeting with people and somehow catfishing gets brought up and I tweet that I am 98.8% percent that Sidney is a catfish. I get 6 DMs and a couple of texts that night from her and I can tell that she's kind of pissed. I respond in the morning

December 24, 2012 - I respond and she really isn't making sense. She sends me a bunch of screenshots and threatens to sue me for slander (I'm pretty sure if that lawsuit actually went through, I'm sure the judge would dismiss it if she actually showed up in person) and threatens to subpoena my DMs.  Eventually, she blocks me on twitter and I just tell her to lose my number and I haven't communicated with her since then.

January 10, 2013 - I figure the whole Sidney Ackerman saga is over. Jeff Darlington from the NFL Network follows me on twitter and asks me to follow him so he can DM me. I do it, and I notice that he said the same to other Redskins fan so I assume it's in reference to Sidney. I do it but I never get a DM

January 19, 2013 - I find out from LL that Sidney had another screen name. "Rideordiechick" or something like that. Totally different pics but still following other athletes. I'm told to say nothing, so I do not.

January 23, 2013 - The story breaks nationally. It was kind of funny seeing other news outlets picking up the story. I already knew Sidney was a non existent person but I had no idea this would become a national story. I tweet Dan Hellie from NBC 4 that I have 3 years worth of Sidney stories and eventually NBC 4 interviews me

 

 

In the end I am still confused. I feel like this is a real life version of The Usual Suspects. Each of those stories individually is not suspicious, but looking back and reflecting, it becomes totally obvious that she was a catfish. I have not called the number I have for her. I'm curious, I have a lot of questions for her, but I don't feel the need to contact her. I religiously watch the show "Catfish" and I get pissed off when the person being tricked is really naive. I know one of the indicators of being a Catfish is not having a lot of pictures. Sidney was the exact opposite, she changed her picture every other week,The thing that is kind of funny (and a testament to how good a catfish she was) is that I endured 3 years of flakiness and her profile was of a totally different woman and still , people were confused.

                                                                          Sidney 2009

                                                                            The right is Sidney 2012

I have had a couple of people think that I had actually met her and another person on twitter says that she gave him great medical advice when he was having an emergency. Another thing is that Sidney had an account on foursquare. (If you don't know what Foursquare is, Click Here. If you don't feel like clicking, it's basically a social media app that is based on your location)I kind of believe part of her story is true (who kills off 2 parents in order to perpetrate a fraud, but then again everything about this story is weird) Funny part is that my friends Steph and Liz saw the movie Catfish in 2010 and they immediately thought of Sidney but I refused to believe them. I watched the movie myself, and I was like "no not really"  and I actually wrote a list of 10 reasons why Sidney is not a Catfish to them.
I guess the moral of this story is you should call everyone you meet on twitter a catfish. If they flip out, they are one. If they don't, they aren't.