- Migha Mohan is not loyal
- World Service, BBC
When the documentary “The Tinder Swindler” premiered on Netflix in February 2022, Simon Lefive’s mistress stood by him. Now, she says, she felt she had no other choice because she was under his emotional control.
A blonde young woman sits on the edge of the bed with her left foot clutched in her hand as she talks on her phone. A few strands of her hair stuck to her tear-soaked face.
You can see a cut on the heel of her foot, her face is red and her eyes are red. But her voice was clear as she gave the person on the phone instructions on how to get to her apartment. In front of her on the floor is a suitcase full and open.
It all appears in a video clip filmed by phone on the night of March 29, 2022. The man filming the video raises his voice as he says, “This is nonsense! She’s not hurt.”
The man is Simon Levyfe, a convicted fraudster who was the focus of the Netflix documentary “Tinder Scammer”. The young woman is the 23-year-old Israeli model Kate Conlin, who was his girlfriend at the time.
Fife sent the video to the BBC, as well as other videos and documents dealing with their relationship.
“She lies and never stops lying,” he wrote.
“Of course he would call me a liar,” Kate Conlin told the BBC.
“He called every woman who brought him up a liar. He doesn’t want me to tell my story, the story of my emotional abuse.”
At first, Conlin’s friends are smitten with Five.
Kate recalls that they would tell her he was “too perfect, a little bit creepy”.
Shimon Hayada Hayot (who officially changed his name to Simon Lefive) started messaging her on Instagram in 2020, and within weeks they became lovers.
“In the beginning, it was like a love bomb,” Conlin says. “He was obsessed with me.”
Fife used to go with her to the photo sessions in which she was participating as a model, and he would wait until she finished her work. He would clean her house and send her sweet love letters.
It was an overwhelming love, and it was identical to the young woman’s perceptions of ideal love.
But after a while, the bickering started.
Conlin says he was critical of her appearance, clothes, weight, and skin (she sometimes has acne), which led to her starting to lose her self-confidence.
“I felt I had to be careful with my words and my actions,” she adds.
She saw fewer and fewer friends during the 18 months she spent with him, and when she saw them, they noticed she was no longer the fun, sociable, energetic young woman they had once known.
“They were saying I was getting ‘dull’,” Conlin says, looking down at her hands.
After a few months, Five began asking her to lend him some money, which Conlin says totaled $150,000. By this time Conlin was already an international model, appearing on the covers of such famous magazines as the Japanese edition of Vogue, Italy’s Grazia Itali, and the UK’s Wallpaper. Her financial situation was good, and she says he knew it.
Conlin sent the BBC more than 10 audio messages from Fife. He usually speaks to her in a loud and sharp tone, and asks her for loans, saying that his money is tied up in investments.
In one of those letters, he yells while explaining why he hasn’t paid her: “Kate, I’m a millionaire, and it’s true! But right now, I’m in trouble. Do you understand? I’m in trouble, Kate. I didn’t steal from you. You gave it to me.” Of your own free will. You lent me that money, and now I’m in trouble, that’s all.”
image copyright Kate Konlin
Despite the judiciary’s conviction, Simon Levyfe still has thousands of followers on social media
“Tinder Swindler”, which became the most watched documentary on Netflix in 90 countries when it was shown in February 2022, alleged that Simon Levyve defrauded women he met on the dating app “Tinder” out of an estimated $10 million. Levy denies the allegations.
Koonen says she watched the documentary while sitting on the couch next to him.
“I knew it was all true.”
But she adds that she felt compelled to accept his version of events. He was controlling her, she says, and it was easy for him to persuade her to defend him publicly, for example on Inside Edition, the US news programme.
“He told me, ‘If you support me, people will believe me, because you are a woman.'”
Meanwhile, her Instagram inbox was brimming with criticism from people who saw her photos at the end of the Tinder scammer documentary.
“People would tell me they wished I had cancer or that I would get run over by a car, and that I deserve the worst in life because I had an affair with him,” says Conlin.
The fights and bickering intensified between the two, and on March 29, it all came to an end.
“I told him, ‘It’s over, and I’m going. I can’t take it anymore,'” Conlin says. “And I packed up.”
Conlin says that the quarrel between them became violent, and that he pushed her, which led to a wound on her foot after it hit a sharp edge that slashed it.
“I was bleeding,” she says. “I felt dead. I wanted to kill myself.”
This stopped the quarrel. Then, he filmed Five Conlin calling the ambulance, and he yelled that she hadn’t been hurt.
After going to the hospital, I filed a police report against Five.
image copyright Kate Konlin
Conlin says Fife’s criticism of her has undermined her confidence
When we asked L5 to respond to the allegations, he sent us nine emails within 45 minutes, and two more direct messages via Cameo to stream videos over the following days.
He sent us several screenshots of his WhatsApp messages, and a video of Conlin grabbing him tightly and screaming.
LeFife says he never physically harmed a woman.
Jane Starling, an anti-domestic violence campaigner, says Conlin’s picture of her relationship with Fife follows a familiar pattern.
“Compulsive control is something that happens every day and it seems so normal. It just goes unnoticed.”
“Many abusive men do not practice physical violence against their female partners in life..but they control and control them severely, criticize and underestimate them severely, and even threaten them.”
“We should not look at physical violence alone as the determining factor in whether or not a relationship is abusive.”
We asked Levive to respond to Conlin’s many allegations about his behavior, including his coercive control over her, and he replied that she was lying.
Despite his conviction for fraud, the Five still has thousands of followers on social media. He also still posts videos of himself driving expensive cars and spending time with beautiful women. In some of the videos, people ask to take pictures with him, as if he were a celebrity. Five gets $100 for filming a video message addressed to a specific person, and about $200 for making a call.
Its popularity is of concern to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization in the United States.
“We’re seeing here a polishing of misogynistic and masculine people and their lifestyle, targeting vulnerable people, especially young boys in their pre-teen years,” said Jessica Reeves, editorial director of the organization’s Counter-Extremism Center.
“It’s very dangerous because what is being said is ‘you too can have a lifestyle like that, and by the way, part of that lifestyle is the dehumanization of women, or the hatred of women in general’.”
We asked Fife if he would accept this description of his social media posts, but he did not respond.
image copyright Kate Konlin
Conlin laughs and says she was probably the only model in the world who felt happy when she gained weight – she says her weight had dropped to a much lower rate due to the stress and anxiety of her time with Five.
After about a year in which she did not receive any job offers in the wake of the “Tinder Swindler” documentary, her work is starting to return to its former state. Conlin wants to tell young women what a miserable, inner-dominated relationship can look like.
“If a woman in a similar situation sees what I went through and how I managed to escape, and how today I am stronger and more beautiful than I was during my relationship with him, I hope she realizes that she can also end that relationship.”
