The director of a shocking new Netflix documentary series has revealed why a woman who catfished her own daughter for years agreed to appear in the show.
Kendra Licardi, 44, from Michigan, served more than a year behind bars after she pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor.
She had sent her daughter, Lauryn, and the girl’s then-boyfriend, Owen McKenny, who were both 13 at the time, ‘hundreds of thousands’ of abusive and aggressive messages.
Yet when director Skye Borgman set out to create the Netflix series Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, Licardi was willing to share her side of the story.
‘It was a long process with Kendra,’ Borgman previously told Tudum, Netflix’s blog.
What ultimately appealed to Licardi was the opportunity to sit down and ‘tell her story from her perspective and that Lauryn [could] see her do that.
‘She wanted to do it, I think, for her daughter,’ Borgman explained.
The director also told Variety how Licardi was ‘nervous about going on camera because just sitting down and telling your story is a nerve-wracking thing sometimes.
Kendra Licari (pictured), 44, from Michigan, agreed to appear in a Netflix documentary about her scheme to catfish her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend for years
Lauryn Licari and her former boyfriend, Owen McKenny (pictured together), became victims to a months-long cyberbullying attack at the hands of Lauryn’s mother
When director Skye Borgman set out to create the Netflix series Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, Licardi was willing to share her side of the story
‘But she was so great and she actually ended up really loving the experience,’ Borgman continued.
‘At the end of it, she said it was kind of fun,’ the director continued. ‘She laughed about things and I think it was really an opportunity for her to think about things a little bit more in depth.
‘Every time I would ask her a question, she would really have to think about some things, and I think that was really good for her,’ she said.
In the show, Kendra sought to explain what led her to send her daughter and her then-boyfriend threatening text messages from an unknown number.
She claimed she did not send the first message in October 2020, when the couple, who had been together for a year, were added to a group chat from an unknown number.
The texter said she was going to be at a Halloween party that Lauryn had decided not to attend and said she and McKenney were ‘down to f***.’
Recalling the moment she received the text, which was from an unknown number, Lauryn said, ‘I was just really confused of who this could be’.
The texts seemed to stop after the Halloween party, and circumstances appeared to improve for Lauryn, but 11 months later, she received the following message from a different random number.
In the Netflix show, Kendra sought to explain what led her to send her daughter and her then-boyfriend threatening text messages from an unknown number
‘The messages stopped for a little bit and then they picked back up,’ Kendra recounted.
‘In my mind, I’m like, “How long do we let this go on? What do I do as a parent?”
‘Honestly, the best way would have been to stop it by shutting her cell phone down, right? But then I was like, ‘Well, why should she have to do that?’ You know? ‘Why should I have to get her a new cell phone because of someone else’s actions?’
‘I really wanted to get to the bottom of who it was,’ she claimed. ‘And that’s when I started sending the text messages to Lauryn and Owen.’
The mother-of-one continued to explain that she was messaging the teenagers ‘in hopes that maybe they would send back, asking ‘Is this somebody?’ or ‘Is this so-and-so?’ to just kind of give me something’.
She claimed that she also hoped the teenagers would discuss the messages amongst their other friends and, as a result, ‘something might come up that could help pinpoint where they were originating from’.
‘I started in the thoughts of needing some answers, and then I just kept going, it was a spiral, kind of a snowball effect, I don’t think I knew how to stop. I was somebody different in those moments. I was in an awful place mentally. It was like I had a mask on or something, I didn’t even know who I was.’
Kendra’s messages, though, proved to be more threatening.
Kendra apparently tried to rationalize her actions by saying she was protecting her daughter even as her husband was left unaware of her actions
In one she told her daughter: ‘Kill yourself now, b**ch. His life would be better if you were dead.’
She also told her to ‘jump off a bridge’ and that ‘Owen is breaking up with you. He no longer likes you and hasn’t liked you for a while.
‘It’s obvious he wants me. He laughs, smiles, and touches my hair.’ The text added, ‘We are both down to f***. You are a sweet girl but I know I can give him what he wants, sorry not sorry.’
‘I was getting at least six text messages a day,’ Lauryn recounted in the Netflix show, saying they included the following, ‘Trash b****, don’t wear leggings ain’t no one want to see your anorexic flat a**.’
‘I would question what I’d wear to school,’ Lauryn said of the message’s impact, adding, ‘It definitely affected how I thought about myself.’
The text messages caused a strain on Lauryn and Owen’s relationship, and the two eventually broke up.
Owen had hoped that the decision would give the texter what they wanted and that they would stop the messages, but after the breakup, the messages worsened.
McKenny shared how he would sometimes receive 50 text messages a day
The onslaught of text messages drove a wedge in the teens’ relationship and they eventually broke up
Lauryn received messages such as, ‘He thinks you’re ugly’, ‘He thinks you’re trash’, ‘We won’, and ‘You’re worthless.’
The texter also told Lauryn to kill herself, ‘Finish yourself or we will #bang’, among other vile messages regarding physical harm.
‘When I first read that, I was totally in shock, it made me feel bad, I was in a bad mental state,’ Lauryn said.
Eventually, Lauryn and Owen’s friends and family banded together to try to figure out who was responsible for the messages, and due to the details included in the texts, they thought it must be someone in their circle.
Her parents reassured her that everything was fine, while Owen’s parents took his phone away every night and read the messages, which sometimes totaled 50 per day.
One year after Lauryn and Owen received the first message, the four parents went into the school in the hopes that they might find the perpetrator.
By that April, the local sheriff’s office requested the help of the FBI in putting an end to the case, and presented the pages of messages to a liaison, which finally led the months-long search to Lauryn’s mother, who has a background in IT.
FBI liaison Peter Bradley was ultimately able to track down the IP addresses and link it to Kendra’s devices. ‘I really didn’t know what to say,’ Bradley said.
A full 22 months after Lauryn and Owen received the messages, police secured a search warrant and questioned Kendra, who admitted to sending the messages.
Police confronted Kendra about the messages after they traced the anonymous calls and texts to her phone number
Her admission to the crimes caused shockwaves in Lauryn’s family
The admission caused shockwaves in Lauryn’s family, including for her father, who had no idea about his wife’s actions, as well as Owen’s parents, who became close friends with Kendra.
‘I was just speechless, I didn’t know how to handle it,’ Owen recounted. ‘My head was spinning. How could a mum do such a thing? It’s crazy that someone so close could do something like that to me, but also to her own daughter.’
His mother added, ‘I think she became obsessed with Owen, which is hard being a mom and that she’s a grown woman but I think that there’s some kind of relationship that she wanted to have with Owen that obviously is not acceptable at her age.’
‘She would randomly just text him and try to keep a connection with him, she came to all of his sporting events even after him and Lauryn broke up. This is disgusting.’
Owen agreed, saying, ‘It felt like she was attracted to me. She was super friendly.’ He added, ‘It wasn’t like it was my girlfriend’s mum, it felt like it was something more. She would do things for me, she would cut my own steak for me, it was too weird.’
Kendra served more than a year behind bars after she pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor
School Superintendent Bill Chillman (pictured) branded the messages that the students received as ‘vulgar’
Kendra later admitted to her family that she had lost both of her jobs while she was sending Lauryn and Owen the messages.
She said in the Netflix show that she would spend anywhere between an hour to eight hours a day texting the children. ‘I let it consume me,’ she said.
‘I think it was more of an escape. It took me kind of out of real life, in a sense, even though it was real life. So when I was doing that and I wasn’t myself, it removed me from my everyday life. Just kept going and going.’
Kendra also addressed the messages where she referred to her daughter’s body type and said, ‘Lauryn knows she’s skinny, she knows she’s petite, she knows she’s thin, so I might have kind of picked up on some of her insecurities.
‘But honestly, the messages weren’t really targeted at her insecurities,’ she said. The director asked if she was actually sending the messages to herself, to which Kendra replied: ‘That is very well possibly [sic] because I was way too thin. I was not eating. So you could put me in that anorexic category.’
When she was then asked if she was afraid Lauryn would hurt herself, because some of the messages Kendra had sent told the young girl to ‘kill herself’, the former IT worker said: ‘So, I can say I was not scared of her hurting herself.
‘I know some people may question that or diminish that or whatever. But I know Lauryn and I know the conversations that her and I have. But if I didn’t know her as well as I did, it might be different.’
Recalling the moment she was exposed as the perpetrator of the abusive messages, Kendra said: ‘It was a very emotional day in our house.
‘A day of confusion, unknown answers, shock, a day of not even knowing how we move forward to the next day, so it was a hard day, but at the same time, it was an end.’
She added: ‘Every single one of us makes mistakes, not a single one of us has lived a perfect life, and realistically a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught.’
Lauryn, who is now in college studying criminology, said she still longs to have a relationship with her mother
But the decision to feature Kendra so prominently in the show has led to backlash on X, with viewers claiming that the streaming giant failed to properly challenge the mother.
One wrote, ‘Netflix is platforming predators in documentaries without challenging them. I don’t appreciate how she was allowed to present herself in the first half. They didn’t expand on the fact she’s a predator and not just a stalker. She lied multiple times.’
A second user wrote, ‘Netflix has mastered the art of turning trauma into content, and this is just another example. By letting her control her own framing, they blurred the line between exposing truth and platforming manipulation.’
‘They downplayed her and the whole situation way too much for me,’ ‘said a third user, continuing, ‘What she did was beyond sick and foul…like I can’t even find the words.’
‘They never have any trouble busting up anyone else’s lives… I wonder what the difference was here,’ said another.
School Superintendent Bill Chillman told the documentary that he believed the whole incident was a ‘cyber Munchausen’s case’.
He explained: ‘[Kendra] wanted her daughter to need her in such a way that she was willing to hurt her, and this is the way she chose to do that, versus physically trying to make her ill, which is typical Munchausen’s behavior.’
Kendra is not currently allowed to see her daughter but hopes to have a relationship with her in the future.
Lauryn, who is now in college studying criminology, also said she longs to have a relationship with her mother.
‘Not having a relationship with my mom, I just don’t feel like myself,’ she said. ‘I really need her in my life.’
