‘Sweet Bobby’ on Netflix Tells the Catfishing Nightmare of Kirat Assi

It started with a Facebook friend request from a man named Bobby.

Kirat Assi, a 29-year-old radio host, didn’t usually allow strangers into her private Facebook life. But she’d heard of Bobby, who came from a highly regarded family in their Sikh community in West London. In fact, Ms. Assi’s cousin had dated Bobby’s younger brother, and she’d chatted with him online.

So Ms. Assi accepted. It was 2010 after all, and there was still a general sense of optimism about social media. On Facebook, existing friends were coming together and new ones were readily made. It was a seemingly harmless place, full of funny wall posts, photo albums and an endless amount of pokes.

For Ms. Assi, now 43, that friend request was the start of what proved to be a decade-long catfishing scheme that is the subject of “Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare,” a documentary that began streaming on Netflix on Wednesday.

True crime and catfishing have been popular subjects for documentaries and podcasts in recent years, but in an interview ahead of the release of “Sweet Bobby,” Ms. Assi said that the often frivolous portrayal of catfishing can dilute the very real, long-lasting devastation these scammers inflict. She prefers to use the term “online entrapment.”

“People need to know how bad it gets,” she said, noting neither the documentary nor the podcast that preceded it explained the full extent of the abuse she suffered at the hands of Bobby, as it was deemed too triggering to include.

For six years, Ms. Assi and Bobby chatted online as friends. Then, Bobby got divorced and confessed his love to Ms. Assi shortly after. They dated for three years — chatting, texting, sending intimate voice mail messages and falling asleep on overnight Skype calls. Bobby said he had a stroke, and Ms. Assi cared for him from afar.