Her Best Friend Was Her Secret Stalker

A 19-year-old student was inundated with lewd messages and fake Facebook profiles pretending to be her. The most shocking part was the person behind it all.

Illustrations by Kaylynn Kim | Edited by Farah Mohammed

Editor's note: This article contains descriptions of rape threats.

“hi my little bitch ..get naked orelse I gangbang you.”

It’s 4:36 a.m. and 19-year-old Utsa Chatterjee’s screen is glowing from a private message she’s just received on Facebook. Even though it’s early in the morning and Utsa is barely awake, she is not surprised. In recent weeks, multiple online accounts have been harassing her with lewd messages soliciting sex — sometimes as a request, sometimes more violently.

It all began when Utsa suddenly started noticing copycats of her own profile cropping up on Facebook. Accounts with the name “Utsa Chatterjee” would appear and request to add her as a friend. The fake profiles had pictures from her own account, so they were hard to distinguish from her real one. At the time, Utsa was still in high school in Bangalore, a major city in the southern part of India. With long dark hair and a pretty smile, she modeled on and off for small brands and had an active social media presence. She had a large group of friends, and when any of them pointed out the copycats, she’d ask them to report the fake accounts.

“There was a time when I kept saying, ‘Please report, please report.’ And then people would report it, and Facebook would take down the profile,” says Utsa. But that was just a temporary fix. Inevitably, “this would happen again.”

Sometimes, the mimic profiles would start conversations with Utsa. In the conversation that starts with “hi my little bitch,” on May 3, 2013, the profile follows up with, “I am kidding[,] sorry,” before sending her a spate of other messages, all poorly written, riddled with bad spelling and grammar. The person on the other end of the profile sounds desperate and pleading, eventually writing, “[I] am sorry … will you be my gf?” After several more messages, the person behind the fake profile asks “will u talk please?” before apparently giving up and signing off for a few hours.

Some of the alarming messages Utsa received via Facebook Messenger. (Images courtesy of Utsa Chatterjee.)

At first, it seemed to Utsa like this was merely an annoyance, but it quickly escalated to more personal — and unsettling — attacks.