The comedian was targeted by a hacker who tricked male celebrities into exposing themselves before capturing the footage
The Masked Singer host Joel Dommett(Image: ITV)
The Masked Singer star Joel Dommett revealed that he dated a woman who was targeted by the same catfish as him.
Joel rose to fame after leaving viewers in hysterics through his appearances on the comedy current affairs show Russell Howard’s Good News. From here, Joel went on to take part in I’m A Celebrity in 2016, where he finished runner-up to Scarlett Moffatt.
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These days Joel can be found presenting the annual National Television Awards and has been the face for The Masked Singer since it launched on ITV back in 2020. Joel will next be seen on his new prank show Celebrity Sabotage with Sam Thompson, Judi Love and GK Barry.
Joel found himself the victim of a catfishing scam 2016 and was left horrified after being duped into having Skype sex with a woman online. He didn’t realise that the woman, who called herself ‘Staci’, was actually a recording that a hacker had used to trick male celebrities into exposing themselves before capturing the footage.
Appearing on the latest episode of Begin Again With Davina McCall, Joel looked back on the incident he previously said was ‘genuinely horrific’ and left him battling trauma.
“I want to talk to you about Catfish Gate… because people get cancelled,” Davina said. To which Joel replied: “I think everybody has an abject terror of being cancelled for something or something really bad happening that could have a cataclysmic effect on their career. And what you did was skilfully navigate a catastrophe.”
Recalling what happened, Joel continued: “I was single, I was contacted on Twitter by some person. They were attractive… I talked to them and they were like do you want to have Skype sex with me and, it was like, I think I’ve told you this, there’s this guy who made a documentary about the same catfish, and he once asked me for an interview, and he sat me down…
Joel Dommett on This Morning(Image: ITV)
“He said, ‘I was talking to this catfish lady for about 18 months before I finally trusted her to be able to sort of have Skype sex with her. How long did it take you, Joel?’ I had to look this man in the eyes and go ‘about 15 minutes’… I remember doing it and being like that was weird.”
Noting that the catfish ‘saw something in him’ due to him being on the telly, Joel admitted that they ‘waited years before they released’ the content online.
“They contacted me and went ‘give us money, we’ve got these pictures’… Fully naked and with a beanie on. Take the beanie off… And, there was no doubt that it was me because I had a massive poster of me behind my head…
“My Edinburgh poster behind me with my reviews on it. And I remember doing it and being like that was weird. All right. Cool. That was odd. Then years later, they got in touch with me because my career had moved on a bit…
“So this person messages me. We have Skype sex. I figured out it’s a catfish. It’s all fake. They’ve got a video of me. I’m like, oh, God. Oh, God,” he noted.
Joel added: “And then I write an Edinburgh show about it, but I’ve got no ending because that’s basically all that’s happened so far. It’s happened and I can’t find them. I try everything to try and find out who they are… I can’t find them, who the real person is. I go to the police, they can’t do anything’.”
Joel decided to meet the woman whose face was used in the sex tape, revealing to Davina that they ended up dating for several months.
“I put a Google image search of the person whose profile picture it is, who they’d stolen. I was like, well, let’s talk to the real person whose photo they’ve stolen… It turns out that this person is a real person and I go, hey, just to let you know, someone’s stealing your photos and pretending to be you…
“And, they’re like, oh, yeah, it’s been happening a few times. I tell them to take them down and they come back up and blah, blah. And I mean, just out of interest this is going to sound weird, I would love to just get a photo with you…
“So I’ve got something for a show. I was like, where do you live? Which is a creepy thing to say to anyone and she went ‘I live in Greenwich’ and I lived in Brockley at the time, which is literally like a mile down the road,” he said.
He went on to tell Davina: “I was like, I live in Brockley. We have to meet up… So we met up and so I meet this girl in Greenwich and again I didn’t even realise it at that point, but it’s a date. We get on really well, we go on another date, and actually we get on well and we end up dating for like six months…
“So I ended up dating the person whose face I thought I was masturbating to in the first place. And then this is the mad part, she’s half Russian, she moves back to Russia, I then have Skype sex with her. How mental is that?”
Joel met his wife Hannah in 2016 after she sent him a ‘cat with the heart eye emoji’ in an Instagram direct message. They then tied the knot in 2022 and in September 2023 the couple shared that they’d had a baby boy, Wilde Cooper-Dommett.
