A Catfish Had Lakers Twitter In Shambles And Somehow KD Even Got Involved In The Drama

The Lakers lost to the Jazz on Monday night, but it was a game that fell to the backburner on Twitter, as Lakers fans had a much different focus. The story that follows is a wild ride that probably is not even at its conclusion, but we are going to try our best to explain what took place on Lakers Twitter on April 19.

Many of you may have very well seen tweets in the morning about a missing Lakers fan named Vivian, who’s @butterfly_424 handle had 15,000-plus followers, as many prominent Lakers fans on Twitter like O’Shea Jackson Jr. and even Markieff Morris retweeted to try and amplify the situation. The tweet about her being missing has since been deleted by Josh Toussaint, who plays a potentially much bigger role in this story.

Later in the day, Toussaint announced that Vivian had been found, and everyone was happy to learn she was OK.

https://twitter.com/OsheaJacksonJr/status/1384251637502341130

However, things took a very strange turn from there. After people started looking into the account more, they started to notice some things weren’t quite right about photos she had posted and one person said he had been texting with “Vivian” for some time. Then, when he tried to FaceTime with her, she refused and he started to think something was fishy.

Things moved quickly from there, and at one point Kevin Durant hopped on Twitter Spaces with The ETCs co-host Eddie Gonzalez, who had the aforementioned text relationship with Vivian, and others to discuss the entire thing as word of a long-time catfish having infiltrated Lakers Twitter started trending.

(WARNING: NSFW LANGUAGE)

The thing that tipped many folks off was when they started looking more closely at the very clearly photoshopped images of “Vivian” and recognized shenanigans were afoot.

The account had been active for over a decade, and some other incongruities became apparent.

The focus turned back to Toussaint, who had claimed to have been in touch with Vivian’s family and also claimed to have DM’d with the Lakers about the situation in since-deleted tweets, which were of course screenshotted and brought back at him.

Adding to the weirdness, Toussaint had a podcast where Vivian was a guest multiple times that quickly came under scrutiny for what seemed like some odd editing.

However, people on podcasts talk over each other all the time, so it might be as Toussaint says and is an actual catfish situation — someone modulated the Vivian voice down to what it would sound like on a lower frequency if someone was using a voice modulator and came up with this.

There are still more questions than answers about this whole thing, but it’s pretty clear that “Vivian” isn’t a real person. Who has been running the account, why they’ve been doing that, and a lot more remain unanswered, but if nothing else, it made for a wild night on Twitter and led to some very funny reactions from some very famous people that you don’t normally see involved in Twitter nonsense. For example, O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s journey into learning about all of this was, basically, the process everyone else went through.

The jokes, if nothing else, were tremendous as the story blew up.