Lakers Twitter Discovered Possible Catfish After Podcaster Disappeared From Twitter For a Few Hours

The Laker Point Podcast debuted on March 23, hosted by Los Angeles Lakers fans Josh Toussaint (@josh2saint) and Vivian Flores (@Butterfly_424). There have been three episodes of the podcast recorded, but a fourth seems unlikely because "Vivian" has been accused of being a catfish and even if that's not a problem for the hosts, listeners are probably going to need a definitive answer before smashing that subscribe button. Lakers Twitter, and then NBA Twitter, has understandably become consumed by this story over the last 24 hours.

I watched some of this happen live last night and it is a lot to take in. More than any normal person whose brain has not already been rotted by the Internet would care to, but this could go down as a moment on par with Meet Me In Temecula when it is all said and done. With that in mind I will try my best to explain it with a huge help from BroBible, whose Jorge Alonso (@gifdsports) went to unspeakable lengths to understand this himself.

"Vivian's" @Butterfly_424 account tweets a lot, including 11 times on Sunday up to and including a tweet on Sunday night at 8:25pm Eastern. She also writes and tweets for Lakerfanatics.net; coincidentally, a post went up on the website today for the first time in three months. Before midnight on the West coast, Toussaint had tweeted that "Vivian" was missing and responding to people trying to help. She hadn't even been off Twitter for eight hours at that point. Toussaint posted a video of his DM's showing that Vivian's family had contacted him through Twitter to say she had been missing for hours. This was apparently just over three hours since she last messaged him.

At 2:35am Eastern, O'Shea Jackson Jr. even retweeted Toussaint asking for help.

Toussaint was apparently in contact with Lakers security via DM and said he drove from Van Nuys to West Hollywood to try and find her.

Presumably "Vivian's" family was concerned because she has leukemia. When the account next tweeted, less than 26 hours after the previous tweet, "Vivian" said she had "passed out from treatment."

Toussaint was eventually convinced that "Vivian" was safe, but during that time period something else happened. Twitter user @ItsKingsBruh said he had been catfished by Vivian. He revealed this in a Twitter Spaces session, and yes, because it was happening on Twitter Kevin Durant was there.

Then someone tweeted that "Vivian" had also been a member of Raiders Twitter under a different name and another person claiming the account went back 11 years. Then people started looking at "Vivian's" pictures, which appear to be photoshops.

So attention then turned to Toussaint who suddenly had to prove that he himself was real. He provided proof of life on a live Twitter broadcast, something which "Vivian" has not yet done.

Toussaint and Vivian both continue to maintain their innocence on Twitter.

So what do we really know? Well, the person running Josh Toussaint's Twitter appears to be a person going by Josh Toussaint who resembles the person in his profile picture. And that's about it!

We still don't know who "Vivian" is. Or who was on the podcast. One person tried to change the pitch on "Vivian's" voice and decided the person might be Australian. NFL Network's Patrick Claybon believes Toussaint might have created Vivian so he would have a cohost for the podcast.

The point is, if she's really the young Lakers fan from those photos she can just jump on any social video platform and prove her own existence. Since she hasn't, the catfishing story seems somewhere between plausible and the actual truth. It certainly seems like Lakers Twitter has their very own Sarah Phillips situation. The only question is who is running that account? And when is the next podcast dropping?

UPDATE: "Vivian" attempted to prove she was real in a video, but misspelled the name "Vivian" and subsequently deleted the account the video was tweeted from.