Kendra Licari, 42, was arrested on December 12, 2022 in Michigan for cyberbullying. Photo / Isabella County Jail
A woman has been charged after police discovered she had been catfishing and harassing her teenage daughter anonymously online.
For more than a year, Kendra Gail Licari, 42, had been by her daughter’s side as the teen complained about being viciously cyberbullied by an unknown online stalker.
The high school student and her teenage boyfriend had both been targets of a “sophisticated catfishing campaign of harassment”, according to the Morning Sun.
But police discovered the unthinkable after a cyber-bullying complaint was made through the teen’s school: the girl’s own mother was behind it at all.
Licari, who had also been a basketball coach at her daughter’s high school, was charged with two counts of stalking a minor, two counts of using a computer to commit a crime and one count of obstruction of justice.
The obstruction charge alleges that the mum, from Michigan, USA, attempted to frame another minor for her actions during the investigation.
“By and large it was mostly just harassing-type text messages, demeaning, demoralising, and just mean texts,” Isabella County prosecutor David Barberi told WKRC.
“When the case first came into our office, it was bizarre and almost hard to believe.
“We’re talking about several hundreds of text messages, over 1000 pages of discovery in the case.”
Investigators say Licari catfished and harassed her daughter, and her daughter’s then-boyfriend, for more than a year, starting in early 2021.
The criminal complaint states that she used a Virtual Private Network, which is a special software to mask one’s location, and several different phone numbers, to make it seem like the abusive messages were coming from her daughter’s school peers.
“Someone else coined the term, but they called it a version of ‘cyber Munchausen’s syndrome’,” Barberi said.
“In a sense that this seems to be the type of behaviour where you’re making somebody feel bad or need you in their life because of this behaviour.
“If at any point this became something that they [Kendra] wanted to not engage in or continue, they could have stopped.
“But rather than stop, it continued to snowball into this sophisticated plan where they tried to conceal their identity and throw the police off their tracks.”
The prosecutor said that the mother has yet to reveal a reason behind her actions, but the incident had left the two victims “distressed and broken”.
She was released on a $US5000 (NZ $7880) bond and is due back in court on December 29.
She faces up to 10 years in prison for the computer crimes charges, and five years for stalking and obstruction.
According to Australian psychology researcher Dr Evita March, the issue of cyberbullying has become far worse over time, and shows no sign of slowing down.
“Across a number of studies now over a number of years, I have found that there are two personality traits that are pretty reliably associated with trolling behaviours,” the Federation University researcher told The Daily Telegraph.
She said the first trait was “psychopathy – being callous, lacking a personal responsibility for your behaviour and lacking guilt for your actions.
“But also sadism, so enjoying causing other people’s psychological and physical harm. They have pretty reliably now emerged as strong predictors of trolling,” March said.
She added that trolling is now becoming more mainstream because it is being “normalised”.
“What I have learned is the more it becomes normalised the more likely we are to engage in it ourselves, even if we maybe didn’t wouldn’t have done that,” she said.
People who had high sadism were even prepared to risk harm to themselves, if it meant hurting someone else.
“They are intent on hurting somebody and they can be quite good at it,” March explained.
“And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that people who are trolling are going to be higher on the need for chaos. They actually quite liked creating that mayhem.”