Last week, a woman posting under the name Reesa Teesa started a 52-part TikTok yarn about her marriage to a man she called “a real pathological liar” and also “the United Nations of red flags.” Over the course of several days, she posted dozens of ten-minute videos unraveling how she ended up dating, marrying, and eventually divorcing a guy she claims lied about pretty much everything in his personal life. According to her account, the man — whom she’s calling Legion — relied on a convoluted network of fake phone calls, unverified paperwork, and pandemic-era logistical chaos to keep up his many charades.
y’all someone deleted the cliff notes on Who Tf Did I Marry so I ventured over to FB to get them back for us – shoutout to Janelle Simmons you are the realest one cus i wasn’t about to sit through a 50 part tiktok pic.twitter.com/x4MlmN9rVs
— Kylee💫 (@itsme_Kylee) February 19, 2024
But “Who TF Did I Marry?” is so much more than that — it is a prestige-television masterpiece, a chart-topping soap opera, a modern epic involving condiment HQ bureaucracy and two real-estate agents named Scott. (One of them may or may not be real.) To be clear, no one seems to have corroborated this woman’s story, so she is either a wildly good storyteller or a great candidate for the Nobel Prize in fiction. No matter; thousands of people have apparently taken ten hours of their precious lives to tune into her saga. Here is a drastically abbreviated version of what she claims happened. Strap in.
Reesa Teesa says she met Legion in March 2020 and they started looking for a house together the following month.
According to her videos, Reesa matched with this man on two different platforms, Facebook Dating and Hinge, though he apparently had used his full name on one and his nickname and different photos on another. (In retrospect, the first of many ominous signs.) Throughout the thread, she refers to him as Legion — as in the biblical man possessed by demons — which she says is the same name she uses to talk about him with people in her life these days. Because we are all now intimately acquainted with Teesa, we will be using that name here too.
During their first phone call, he told her he’d just moved to Georgia, where they both lived, for his job as a regional manager at a “major condiment company” (Reesa chose not to share the brand’s name) that was based there and had promised to cover his housing. He claimed he’d grown up in Philadelphia and played football for San Diego State, staying on the West Coast after graduating and marrying a woman who had two children. He said he caught her cheating on him and they divorced, though he stayed close with his two ex-stepchildren. At some point, he played something called “Arena Football,” which Reesa told him she knew nothing about, and he also claimed he worked as an IT guy at Apple during his off-seasons.
According to Reesa, a few days later, they arranged to go on their first date at the Cheesecake Factory. When Reesa’s tire blew out on the way, she says, her date met her at a gas station, changed her tire, and helped her buy a new one, before they both headed to the planned Cheesecake Factory date and talked more about his football career and the ex-wife. For the next two weeks, Reesa says she and this man kept chatting, and when Georgia went into pandemic lockdown, they decided to live together at her three-bedroom house, where she says he started covering rent and utilities. “It was intoxicating to not have to worry financially,” she said. Before long, they decided to search for a place they could move into together and raise a family.
A chaotic house-hunt, quest for a new car, and miscarriage all went haywire.
Things started to fray with their first round of house-hunting. Legion, Reesa says, claimed to have invested his Arena football earnings “really well” and showed her a Chase letter ostensibly approving him for a $750,000 mortgage. (Throughout their relationship, he claimed to have two Chase accounts, which he showed her screenshots of, a U.S. Bank account, which she never saw, and an offshore account she also never saw.) After a handful of FaceTime tours with a realtor, Legion told her he’d put in an offer and they were set to do a “virtual closing” in June. When their realtor called Reesa asking what they’d thought of the house, he then told her he made the offer through a different realtor, who was a friend of his. When she saw the house go into contract on realtor.com, she assumed it was their own contract, and they went shopping for appliances and furniture. Legion, she says, put down deposits for the furniture in front of her, But the “inspection” kept getting postponed.
Then in May, amid the real-estate back-and-forth, Reesa found out she was pregnant. In early June, the house was taken off the market though they had never closed, and Reesa contacted the real-estate agent listed for the seller, who informed her it had gone to a different couple.Pregnant and excited about marrying him, she told herself she’d let him wiggle out of his lie. “Most women in their right mind would have been, like, I’m out,” she said. “And I didn’t.” Sure enough, a few days later Legion told her something was “going on with the interest rate,” and she said, “If the interest rate isn’t good, we should let this house go.”
Meanwhile, Reesa and Legion were test-driving cars that he claimed he wanted to buy. His company had purportedly agreed to cover the cost of a car, and he also wanted to get Reesa one with money from his alleged “offshore account.” She had her heart set on a dark-blue BMW X5 with cognac interiors, a string of words I have now permanently committed to memory. At one point, they spent hours at a BMW dealership while he arranged a wire transfer over the phone, only to find out the person who could physically put the transfer through had allegedly gone home for the day. Reesa spent another day waiting at home for an Audi that was supposed to be delivered and never came. “I believe he enjoyed watching me test-drive a car and get excited about it knowing I was not going to get it,” she said.
In mid-June, Reesa says she had a miscarriage and ended up needing D&C surgery the following month. Legion, who claimed to be up for a big promotion at work, couldn’t bring her to the procedure because of an alleged business meeting. By the fall of 2020, Reesa was under the impression he’d been promoted to VP of his company. Still, he wore T-shirts to work, which he said was due to the fact that he was “constantly walking the production floor.” After three more house purchases fell through — one of which involved Legion visibly signing a large cash bid and then getting into a stalemate with the sellers when they asked for proof of funds — their real-estate agent, Scott, told the couple he couldn’t work with them until they showed his agency proof of funds.
Despite it all, Reesa and Legion got married in early 2021.
Legion and Reesa agreed to pause both the house and car hunts and got married in January 2021. But by the end of that month, Reesa says, “I kinda knew I was in trouble.” Legion started making bizarre claims that their neighbor was hitting on him. After returning from work at 4 p.m. sharp for nearly a year, he was suddenly getting home at six or seven. He claimed to be looking at houses again with his realtor friend, who was weirdly also named Scott? At one point, he made up a story about an ex of Reesa’s coming to her house looking for her. After one of their dinner dates, he pointed out a building he claimed his company had purchased, and when she asked to see his office he started driving there but then found out on an alleged phone call with the security guard that the building was closed and his badge wouldn’t work.
At this point in the TikTok series, Reesa starts doing demonstrations of how Legion performed what we later find out are fake phone conversations with literally no one on the other line. These impressions are really good, and also kind of convincing??
In April, after Reesa found Facebook messages of him flirting and sexting with other women, they started couple’s counseling with a pastor and his wife, who promptly told them they didn’t think the marriage would even last a year. I think a lot of people could have told them that, but apparently this pastor and his wife were brave enough to say it out loud. In light of this news, Reesa and Legion did not look into separation but instead started yet another round of house-hunting, this time with a realtor named Amber. Reesa quickly made the executive call to bow out when Amber asked for proof of funds as part of a standard pre-approval process.
Sometime in 2021, Reesa went into full P.I. mode.
Toward the end of April, Reesa says, she started looking for a new job, hoping to get a higher salary so she could pay off her car without Legion’s help. One potential employer asked her to fill out a background-check packet, which included questions about her spouse. When Legion filled in his Social Security number, she says, she noticed it looked different from the one listed on their marriage license — and when she ran her own background check on this new number, no California addresses showed up. She also couldn’t find any San Diego State football rosters with his name listed, and when she called the school, they had no records of his Social Security number. Reesa confronted Legion about this mystery, and he told her his father had paid for him to be a “private citizen,” which meant the school didn’t record his name or Social Security number. Around this time, he also told Reesa his ex-stepdaughter had died suddenly of COVID, and he wanted to send his ex-wife $2,000 for the funeral.
In May, Reesa says she ran a background check with a different company and was able to dig up open records from Legion’s divorce, where she found that he had married and divorced in the state of Georgia — so not San Diego — and his ex-wife had been the one to file, prompting him to be served at his job at a grocery store. She called the ex-wife, whose number was listed on the divorce documents, who told Reesa that Legion was a “master manipulator” and warned her, “Whatever he tells you is a lie.” Based on what she said, she and her children don’t communicate with Legion at all, they’ve always lived in Georgia, and her daughter was alive and well. On top of that, this wasn’t the first call she’d gotten from a new girlfriend. Legion’s previous ex, whose address was listed on his license, had also been in touch.
In perhaps her wisest move to date, Reesa decided not to confront her husband about all this, and let things go on as usual while she kept digging. She found a handful of family obituaries for relatives he’d claimed died during their relationship but had passed away over a decade earlier. Those records listed Legion and two brothers he’d talked about, but he’d claimed to also have two sisters and two half-brothers on his father’s side, none of whom were accounted for. One obituary named an entirely different wife, leading her to track down divorce records from a first marriage that had ended in 2016. One day while Legion was asleep she went through what she thought was his old work phone and found text messages with a sex worker named Peaches whose services he had clearly used multiple times. In the beginning of June 2021, Reesa told the pastor that had been counseling them, “I have no idea who that man is.”
She kicked him out in June 2021 and began the divorce process.
On June 17 — which just so happened to be Legion’s birthday, because why not? — Reesa confronted him about everything she’d found. At this point he was living in the guest bedroom due to a mysterious knee injury that had gotten so bad he was on the verge of being bedridden. Eventually he called an aunt who told him she’d send him some money so he could leave the house and come to Philadelphia. Reesa says she promptly had her locks changed, threw out the belongings Legion hadn’t packed up, and got her divorce documents in order.
While Legion was back in Philadelphia, even more intel flooded in. Reesa got a message from one of his cousins there, who was suspicious of the story he was telling the family — that his wife cheated on him with a policeman who kicked him out of the house with his gun — due to his noted history of lying all the time. On a phone call, this cousin also told her that more family members who had, according to Legion, died suddenly of COVID in the past year had been dead for ages.
Reesa also had a lengthy chat with Legion’s older brother Chris, who she thought she’d heard Legion talking on the phone with every morning. Chris, it turns out, hasn’t spoken to his brother since 2015, so as far as we know Legion was faking one side of a phone conversation every day for over a year. Their third brother, the twin, was also not in frequent contact, and just so happened to have a life a lot like the one Legion was attempting to create for himself via lying: He is actually his company’s VP, drives a luxury car, is married, and lives in a four-bedroom house in Nashville.
A few weeks later, a woman Reesa previously believed to be his aunt (actually just an old friend of his mother’s, per Chris) called asking about their nonexistent baby — she was under the impression a son had arrived in January.
During this time, Reesa says she also went through what Legion had claimed was his old work phone — really, a second personal phone he was loading with prepaid minutes — where she found deleted images he’d shown her of his bank accounts, company car, and former house in San Diego. A reverse google image search yielded all of these images, which he had apparently pulled from the internet.
Legion was arrested a few months later and had stopped all contact by 2022.
After going silent for a few weeks, Legion apparently started harassing Reesa, claiming he was legally allowed to come back to her house and wanted to come get his things. After a lot of back-and-forth with law enforcement, Reesa claims she found out that, yes, he could legally come back, but also there was a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation, and she could have him detained whenever he came back.
The day he said he was returning, she drove back from work to find his car in her driveway, drove past the house, and called the police, who she claims came to arrest him as promised. She says she moved in August 2021, right around the time she says Legion was released from jail because his warrant was actually expired. She didn’t hear from him until December 2021, when he contacted her job and family members trying to find her. Their last communication happened that month: She texted him threatening to get a restraining order if he didn’t stop contacting her, and says she hasn’t heard from him since.
Reesa’s story has taken over TikTok.
Two years and millions of followers later, Reesa seems to be doing okay. After her series blew up, she dedicated an hours-long follow-up livestream to answering the flood of questions. Other videos on her account go into more detail about how this man was able to pull off so many enormous lies. If you personally have upward of ten hours of your life to spare, I strongly recommend tuning into pretty much all of it. Reesa has generously arranged it all in chronological order in a playlist pinned to the top of her page, and is urging people to take it all in “as an audiobook.” See you on the other side!
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Danielle Cohen , 2024-02-21 22:44:33
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