In 2009, 15-year-old TikToker Jaclyn Kraft (@jaclynkraft) met a guy on social media who actually turned out to be a girl. So, this “guy” claimed to be from Salt Lake City, and at the time, Jaclyn’s parents were planning to move their family from Southern California to Utah.
Jaclyn kept talking to this guy, and over time, they ended up falling in love. They talked for about eight or nine months before she actually moved to Utah. She lied and told her parents that she met him before while snowboarding.
She made plans to meet up with this guy. He was acting kind of suspicious beforehand and seemed kind of reluctant to see her, but he did meet up with her.
He didn’t look anything like his pictures online or the ones he had been sending her for the past nine months.
“I just turned 16; we had just moved to Utah,” said Jaclyn. “I don’t know anybody here. I don’t have any friends here. I’m literally alone. I somehow forgive this man for just straight-up lying about his appearance.”
Months later, he still never wanted to meet her parents, invite her over to his house, or bring her around his friends. He made up an excuse that he wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend during basketball season, so she couldn’t go to any of his games.
One day, when they were driving past his high school, a group of girls waved at him and called him “Elle.” Jaclyn was confused because she knew him as Dalton. He insisted that they had said, “Dal.”
A few weeks later, they went to a show at the University of Utah. When they picked up the tickets, they were under the name Elle.
This time, Jaclyn heard the name clearly and confronted him about it. They got into an argument, where he somehow convinced her that she had heard wrong.
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One day, they were at his house when his parents came back early. Jaclyn heard his dad call Elliot to help with the groceries. Jaclyn’s heart started pounding in fear.
She immediately grabbed her stuff, rushed past them, and stormed out of the house. She got in her car and called her best friend in tears.
Later, she found out that her boyfriend was really a girl. She was on the girls’ basketball team and had always grown up as a girl. Jaclyn truly didn’t know because she had never seen her undressed, and she was very masculine-presenting.
Jaclyn had even posted photos of them as a couple before online, and no one in her life had ever thought to question whether her boyfriend was a boy or a girl.
Jaclyn believes that this person may have been going through an identity crisis and might have wanted to be a boy, so they were testing it out with certain people. But that doesn’t excuse all the lies.
“Let this be a tale to all of why you don’t meet people on the internet, or if you do now, in this day and age, just do your due diligence and don’t be an idiot like I was,” concluded Jaclyn.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
