'Watching this Hollywood actor play my love rat ex sent shivers down my spine'

Metro

27-04-2025

Nearly a decade after discovering her boyfriend was a fraud, one woman faced the bizarre experience of seeing a Hollywood star play him on screen.
In 2015, after nearly 18 months of dating former architect-turned-grazier Joe*, acclaimed journalist Stephanie Wood discovered a terrible truth – that he wasn't who he said he was.
Her story has now been turned into a TV series called Fake, which is airing on ITV in the UK, and is an unnerving watch in the modern world of online dating.
Stephanie spoke to Metro about what it was like to turn her real-life experience into a gripping drama, emphasising how 'sinister' an experience it was.
After years spent moving around the world, the journalist had settled back home in Sydney in her early 40s and decided she was ready to look for love again,
Like many others, she turned to a dating app, where soon after she matched with a man who she was hopeful could be 'the one'.
Although she was unsure if they had a connection after their first date, she gave him another chance… but would eventually discover that he was a serial scam artist.
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Her story with the love rat has since inspired the series Fake, which stars Asher Keddie (Nine Perfect Strangers) and David Wenham (The Lord of the Rings) and is released in the UK today.
It follows Birdie Bell, a magazine feature writer who thinks she's found her perfect match when she meets successful rancher Joe. But she's torn between his magnetic pull and the instinct that her boyfriend isn't all he seems.
Although Stephanie has written several magazine features and a book about her experience (Fake: A Startling True Story of Love in a World of Liars, Cheats, Narcissists, Fantasists and Phonies), she admits reliving it again on screen was somewhat unsettling.
'I was just so thrilled when I discovered David was doing the role because he's one of Australia's most well-known actors,' she told Metro.
'I went behind-the-scenes of filming last year and watching David walk across set, he doesn't look anything like my ex but the way he managed to embody the vibe and the sinister characteristics and qualities of my ex… it gave me shivers.'
As her relationship with Joe progressed, Stephanie started to question some of the things he'd been telling her.
He would cancel their plans last minute on a regular basis, making up dramatic excuses that had blatant inconsistencies… but even though she knew he was lying about something, she was convinced he couldn't be a scammer.
It was only when she dumped him that she discovered 'only about 5% of what he'd told her had been true'. The man she thought she'd been in love with didn't exist and was instead a pathological liar who had love-bombed and manipulated her.
It turned out Joe, who was bankrupt, was living a double life and was in a relationship with another woman too.
'When my story happened, it was pre-Dirty John, pre-Tinder Swindler. There had been none of those sorts of stories out there about romantic kind of scams, and I knew there was something not quite right about Joe, but he never asked me for money,' she explained.
'Enough added up that it left me blind to the stuff that didn't add up. Of course, I knew that you could lose money to horrible men, but when he wasn't asking me for that, I just wanted to hope so much that it could be a beautiful relationship.'
After writing an essay about her ex in a magazine, she was inundated with messages from women who'd had similar experiences.
Stephanie said that the 'scariest phone call she ever made in her life' was to ring the other woman who Joe was involved with.
'She didn't believe me at all to begin with. I didn't want to be confrontational and eventually she started to realise, and she got angrier, not with me but realising what he'd done,' she recalled.
'The next day I went and met her at a café near her work and showed her the article and she read it and was shaking.'
Despite their strange link, Stephanie and the woman became close friends and are still in contact years later.
Stephanie was 'a little bit nervous' when the first article came out as she was concerned about how Joe could have reacted, revealing that her works' security assessed her apartment. 'I did look over my shoulder for quite a few months. I don't do that anymore though,' she said.
Although she hasn't heard from him in about three years, after their split her ex tried to check in – but she had no desire to engage.
Now, she 'barely gives this guy a second thought' and she doesn't feel 'triggered' speaking about him anymore.
While Stephanie doesn't think that he 'hurt women financially', she said that he's 'left a trail of damage', including allegedly being involved in several failed business deals, resulting in businesspeople losing a lot of money. More Trending
There are no legal ramifications for the web of lies Joe wrapped Stephanie up in, and she acknowledged she 'escaped reasonably unscathed'.
'Many of the women who have contacted me or whose stories I've heard have spent decades with men like this. Some have had children with these men and are tied to them forever and some of them just never recover,' she said.
Stephanie is 'proud' to tell her story, and hopes by doing so, it will help other women avoid falling into similar relationships.
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Fake is now streaming on ITVX and will also air weekly from Saturday May 3 on ITV1.
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