(MTV)
Catfish returns tonight with episode 24 of its seventh season as Shakinah seeks the help of Nev and co-host Kamie Crawford. After chatting for years with Chris, Shakinah feels she needs to move on with her love life. But when the two hosts find out that Chris is a huge pop star, they’re immediately suspicious. Here’s what went down on tonight’s episode.
Nev and Kamie begin the episode reading an email from Shakinah, a young woman who’s been talking to a guy online for three years. In all that time, the two never met in real life, and she tells the Catfish hosts that she knows there’s another woman in the picture. She wants to find out if Chris is for real and see if he’ll ever meet her.
When Nev and Kamie give her a call she drops a huge bomb: her “Chris” is Chris Brown. The pop star Chris Brown. Riiiight. Shakinah then tells them that she’s never considered the possibility that it isn’t Brown. She confesses, however, that she’s never received photos from Brown, only the occasional dick pics.
Shakinah doesn’t get selfies but she gets 🍆 pics! 😭 #Catfish
Clearly, Kamie isn’t having it, but she wants to help her new friend Shakinah out anyways.
Another celebrity on this #Catfish case! 😱
Nev and Kamie start researching. They’re positive it’s not actually the singer, but they understand that Shakinah believed the lie because she needed to after a troubled past left her feeling alone. On the fake Facebook profile Shakinah is friends with, the hosts find Takoya, Chris’s other girlfriend. Takoya comments on Chris’s posts a lot, but the hosts notice that the fake Brown doesn’t even mimic the posts on Brown’s public page.
The hosts then ask Shakinah if she knows anyone from Michigan, where Chris’s phone calls have been coming from. “This guy hasn’t even done a good job at convincing you that he’s Chris Brown,” Nev tells her. But Shakinah assures them that she’s ready for the truth. “I have to get that closure,” she says with a heavy heart.
Nev suggests that Takoya might be the one behind the ruse. Despite the fact that she had a three-way call with Chris and Takoya, Nev stands by his educated guess. He calls Chris and leaves a message only to get a text message back in response from a different number in the same area code. Chris will never do the show, it says. And he’ll “never come clean.” This new source then asks them to come to Michigan and learn the truth. And away they go!
Nev scores an address and the trio heads to the location to discover the truth. They arrive to meet a woman named Tricoci who tells them that Chris is inside the house and ready to meet Shakinah and explain.
“Chris” winds up being a woman named Johneesha, while Tricoci admits to being a woman named Betty, who Shakinah also had contact with. Johneesha then says she had the fake Chris Brown account open since 10th grade, and now she’s in her 20s. And Shakinah wasn’t the only one she was fooling.
Anyone else speechless? #Catfish
Shakinah feels crushed, while Nev presses Johneesha to spill it all. Johneesha apologizes and says she got bullied as a kid which wrecked her self-esteem. That bullying led her to her new hobby of catfishing.
“You should’ve told me the truth,” Shakinah says before walking away in tears. “I’m tired of being lied to. I’m tired of being hurt,” she says.
Kamie tells Shakinah that she doesn’t think Johneesha realizes “how f*cked up this is.”
Trococi apologizes, but the hurt remains.
When Shakinah and Johneesha finally sit down to talk, Johneesha says the catfishing helped get her the attention she never had. The longest relationship she had while using this fake profile: seven years! (Yikes!) Johneesha then reads a letter she wrote Shakinah, and Shakinah tells her the two can eventually be friends.
“It’s time to move on and meet someone amazing because you deserve that,” Nev tells Shakinah. The trio leave Johneesha’s house and we’re shown that Shakinah moved on and is now back to dating in real life.
Onward to tonight’s second helping of Catfish!
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