This will contain spoilers for the Netflix show called “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish”.

I watched this show two nights ago and it hooked me immediately. A whodunit. Who was responsible for sending the text messages. But then it got weird and I was left feeling confused, sad, and unsettled.

The story involves a few key characters:

• Lauryn – teen girl who was the main target of the text messages
• Owen – teen boy who was dating Lauryn
• Kendra – Lauryn’s mother.
• Cloe – teen girl who is Owen’s friend

There are other people involved but these are the 4 key people. In the Netflix show, we are taken through some interview/testimony about how Lauryn and Owen started dating when they were 13 or so and very much in love. Then Lauryn started receiving text messages from an Unknown Number that were harassing, violent, mean, and threatening. Things like how ugly she is, how bad she is for Owen, how they need to break up, how she should take her own life. And there were a pile that were sexual, saying things like “he fucks me when you won’t” and things of that nature. I think Owen was also receiving text messages but I can’t quite remember.

So Lauryn tells Owen and they eventually go to their mothers with the text messages. The mothers went to the school and police. Based on nicknames and other information, they think it could be a close friend. The Unknown Number starts saying it is Cloe. Cloe was a friend of Owen’s who was said to have had a crush on him and wanted to date him. But Cloe said it wasn’t her sending the messages.

After a couple of years, Lauryn and Owen broke up and the text messages hadn’t stopped. The cops finally figured out it was Kendra, Lauryn’s mom, who was sending the text messages. Yeah. The mother. And yes, this is a documentary…sort of.

The Netflix show says that Kendra ends up getting 19 months in jail for cyber stalking and is out of prison now. Kendra says she did it due to her own unprocessed trauma. And the show totally glosses over and leaves out very key information from this story.

Anyway, it left me really wondering how a mother could send such horrible messages to her own daughter. And how is she okay with herself for doing it? And how is the world just moving on? But when you find out the real story, it makes more sense.

Kendra is a sexual predator in my unprofessional opinion. She was after Owen. She injected herself into his life in various ways and was overly concerned with his love life. Kendra would also take Lauryn’s phone and type messages like “i love you” to Owen. To be fair, the show did show Owen and his mom musing about Kendra being interested in him but it was largely presented as something without legs under it. But it has so many legs the centipedes are jealous.

If you took all of Kendra’s behaviour towards Owen and Lauryn and reversed all of the genders, you’d have an adult man, grooming/stalking/predating his teen son’s teen girlfriend, while sending text messages telling his son to kill himself. If that happened, you can be sure, the sexual predator angle would have been presented in the documentary. But it wasn’t.

Apparently the producers had a hard time getting Kendra to participate that they eventually framed the documentary from her point of view. The emphasis was on Kendra’s mental state and not on the predation of one child and abuse of two others.

The Netflix show was good and made me interested in this story in a very unsettled way. I do not appreciate having the abuser’s point of view spotlighted without commentary. I think it’s telling only half the story. We do get to see the body cam footage of the day Kendra was arrested including her admitting to her husband that she hadn’t worked in a couple of years. This is how she had so much time to stalk and harass some kids.

It is disturbing. Kendra has emotionally damaged at least three teens, including her own daughter. She’s already out of jail. This only happened a few years ago. Kendra went to jail in 2023. Is it too soon for them to already be making a documentary about it? The teens re-told their stories so soon. This can’t be good for them. All of this attention. Heartbreaking.

I wish this wasn’t real and was just a story. It would be an absolutely gripping and thought-provoking story. But it is real.