Laura received a message from a recruiter on LinkedIn. Then her whole life fell apart.

It started innocently enough. A LinkedIn notification, a message from a recruiter, a conversation which eventually led to the exchange of personal contact details.

A fairly regular exchange for the professional media platform, it seemed.

Until it took a dark turn.

Casey Donovan opens up about being catfished. Post continues after video.

Little did Laura know the seemingly innocuous LinkedIn message would become the start of months of deranged online torture at the hands of an ex-best friend determined to ruin her life.

Laura was the victim of a cruel catfishing attack by a woman who had her sights set on destroying her career, reputation, marriage and family.

She had attempted to convince her colleagues and manager that Laura had a drug addiction, among other salacious rumours she spread throughout Laura’s network.

Next, she moved on to Laura’s husband, who she tried to convince Laura was having an affair.

To make matters worse, Laura was pregnant the entire time.

The story of Laura’s catfishing nightmare comes secondhand from the culprit’s husband – who in turn, has also become a victim of his wife’s actions.

Having lost her job following the incident and the legal battle which ensued, the husband had not only been stuck with his wife’s monumental legal fees; he was debating whether or not to leave her.

He admits he was unaware she had been leading a double life while attempting to ruin Laura’s. Now, understandably, he’s feeling some “resentment” towards her.

Here’s his account of what Laura endured, as posted to the relationship advice page on Reddit (be warned: it’s a wild ride):

“(My wife) used LinkedIn to find her former ex best friend, she ended up creating a realistic looking fake LinkedIn profile with a vague occupation of ‘recruiter’,” the man explained.

“My wife ended up sending this ex-best friend, “Laura” a few messages pretending to be a recruiter in her line of work. Laura finally responded thinking that this recruiter was real, my wife wanted her phone number but Laura gave her a personal email address instead.”

Then, the web of lies spread wider: “My wife created a second fake LinkedIn profile and started to send messages to people with similar titles as Laura at her company. These messages said derogatory things about Laura, a mixture of truthful things but embarrassing and just fabricated bullsh*t to make Laura look bad.

“Her manager got one of these messages that claimed that Laura was a heavy drug user. Laura’s manager talked to her about these messages and he felt like the messages were bizarre and seemed like someone was trying to troll or harass Laura… Laura requested that she be drug tested anyway, to provide further evidence that she was clean. My wife didn’t know this at this point, but Laura was pregnant.”

But the failed sabotage of Laura’s career was just the beginning. Eventually, the man’s wife found other ways to contact and harass Laura.

“Using the personal email address she got from the fake recruiter profile, she was able to find a few social media platforms Laura was on and was able to figure out her husbands’ name.

“She did some more internet sleuthing and found Laura’s husband on Facebook. Laura’s husband didn’t have much on his Facebook profile, but you could see his business email address on it. My wife sent him an email claiming that Laura was cheating on him.”

It became clear to Laura and her husband that this was the work of a troll.

They decided to work together to find out who it could be – “catfishing the catfish” – and making sure they had saved enough of the messages to support a legal case should it get that far.

And it did.

LISTEN: A TV Star Was Used To Stalk Women. Now One Of Them Is Dead. Post continues after audio…

“The husband confronted Laura about this email and Laura encouraged him to keep responding to this person, and save the messages, as well as to start asking specific questions about this supposed affair. My wife thought she was being clever and ended up telling the husband that Laura was cheating on him during the work week, she even gave him specific dates.

“Laura had her husband keep responding as much as possible to my wife and to backup all correspondence.”

The woman’s quest to make Laura’s life a living hell eventually led to her tracking down the date and location of her baby shower – which she gatecrashed in an effort to embarrass Laura in front of her friends and family.

This was her undoing.

“My wife was able to find out when and where the baby shower was going to be. One of Laura friends had created a public registry for her and had the invitation online. My wife decided to show up unannounced.

“She did not make herself known immediately. Instead she looked for patrons that were entering and exiting the rented-out room. She was able to get the attention of a few guests that had never met her and tried to gossip about Laura – my wife was telling people that Laura didn’t actually know who the father was, among other things. This was at an event where her husband was at as well. The word got back around to Laura and she spotted my wife and apparently immediately put together all the pieces of what happened.”

The man continued:

“I’m leaving a fair amount of information out – my wife was able to find phone numbers, social media accounts and emails for other people in Laura’s circle and sent them messages about Laura on multiple occasions. All the messages were trying to paint Laura in an extremely derogatory light. All the events I’ve mentioned so far took place over a year or so. My wife didn’t think to mask her IP address, so it was pretty easy to find out that all of these made up messages came from the same IP address, ours. Many of Laura’s friends and family testified on her behalf, Laura had everyone save as much digital evidence as possible – and it was a lot.”

Laura’s online attacker suffered the consequences, but her husband, it seems, has inadvertently been punished as well:

“Laura and her husband hired a lawyer and decided to sue to my wife. They had ample evidence against her. All the saved messages, close friends and even her manager spoke on her behalf, she showed that she went to see a therapist once all the harassment started because she was depressed and anxious, she showed that she and her husband went to counselling after the accusations of her cheating. She even went above and beyond and had more drug tests done to show she was clean and my wife’s accusations were 100% false, and even had a paternity test done to show that my wife was again wrong and chose to lie.

“I honestly felt awful for Laura, there were lots of tears on her end. You could tell how much emotional stress she had gone through. She said that being pregnant during the majority of this was absolutely horrific and was worried the stress and anxiety would somehow hurt her baby. She was pained that her one and only baby shower was ruined by my wife and that was something that could never be truly repaid or made up for. And that my wife’s harassment continued even after Laura gave birth and was trying to manage a newborn child.”

Now, he’s feeling stuck, admitting he’s had to empty out his savings and sell his possessions to fund the legal battle:

“I need help managing my resentment towards my wife and to move past this,” he told the forum.

“Until now I’ve always felt like we were a partnership in our marriage.

“My wife has never done anything this crazy before. I knew she could be a little petty and jealous of others, especially people she use to be friends with in the past, but it was only talk – no action. We’ve had a very happy marriage otherwise, we rarely fight, have a lot in common, we have a lot of fun together. But, she really f*cked up this time. I don’t know how to move forward. I know someone is going to suggest therapy, but I really want to start building up an emergency fund again. We’re pretty screwed financially for a while… What can we do to move forward?”

We… we don’t even know what to say.