With the release of the new Netflix documentary, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish on August 29, the case of 13-year-old Lauryn Licari being cyberbullied by her mother has come to light. The documentary shows how Lauryn and her boyfriend Owen were subject to a huge number of violently abusive texts, which were sent by Lauryn’s mother.
It started back in October 2020 when Owen was attending a Halloween party and Lauryn got a text that told her that Owen was going to break up with her. These texts, however, stopped after a while, but then again started to pour in from September 2021, and the contents of those messages were extremely abusive and commented on Lauryn’s looks, life, and her relationship.
The most concerning part about those texts was the fact that they mentioned things that were only possible to be known by someone close to the teenager. This naturally worried Lauryn’s teachers and neighbors ,and gradually, after an investigation involving the FBI, it came to light that it was her own mother, Kendra Licari ,who was sending those horrible texts to her daughter and her boyfriend.
The revelation naturally shocked everyone, as this is not something that is expected of a mother. After being put on trial, Kendra pleaded guilty to a couple of charges regarding assaulting a minor and was given a prison sentence of 19 months to five years.
After she got out of prison in 2024, Kendra also appeared in Unknown Number: The High School Catfish to talk about her actions and why she thinks she committed such a heinous act. Kendra mentioned that while she did not send the initial abusive texts, she did carry them forward when they started happening again.
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Talking about her actions, Kendra said, “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.”
She further added, “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. I let it consume me. 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’s texts included messages like, “He thinks you’re ugly’, ‘He thinks you’re trash’, and ‘You’re worthless.” as Mail Online mentioned. Her texts consistently belittled Lauryn and her relationship with Owen, which naturally made the teenage girl question her choices and also affected her confidence badly.
My face when you find out who is sending those messages.
Sick, sick bitch #UnknownNumberTheHighSchoolCatfish #Netflix pic.twitter.com/lMzuSZiJG3— Allie 💙 🏴 (@Allie_Thomas_94) August 29, 2025
Skye Borgman, the director of the documentary, talked to Tudum about her opinion on the whole case. Skye said, “She does mention in the documentary an assault that happened [to her] when she was right around Lauryn’s age.
She added, “She talks about how scary that was for her to see her only child, her little girl, growing up, and that’s what she really relates to and that’s what she believes led her to sending these text messages and trying to keep Lauryn close.”
