Fernandes initially didn’t dedicate a lot power to the issue — how would she ever discover these trolls typing away in some distant nook of the globe? — however in 2021, she discovered a couple of video wherein she gave the impression to be having intercourse with quite a few males. She determined to reply as a journalist, by investigating her digital harassers. She was stricken by these shadowy figures for years and after appreciable effort, she believed she had lastly discovered considered one of them, a person who was conducting sexually specific on-line affairs in her identify. That March night, she was prepared to show him.
The motion Fernandes was about to take would dominate the information in Germany for weeks, inciting a nationwide motion that many would examine to #MeToo within the United States. Alone in her resort suite, she ready a put up on Instagram to go up across the identical time because the publication of a serious information report about her experiences. She introduced to her quarter of one million followers that she had filed a felony grievance in Spain, the place she had been residing for the previous few years, towards a person she believed was accountable for digital and psychological abuse. “The perpetrator was (as I now know) quite close the whole time,” she wrote. “His name: Christian Ulmen.”
Fernandes first discovered in 2020 that she was being impersonated. Men started reaching out to her workforce, every with an identical, weird request: They needed to substantiate that it was, in actual fact, the true Collien Fernandes who was flirting with them on social media, who despatched them nude images and movies of herself, who was partaking in telephone intercourse with them. Fernandes began to sense the magnitude of the issue when a lunch with a producer took an odd flip — he was clearly underneath the impression they had been in some form of on-line affair. “Suddenly he was showing me photos of me in bikinis — erotic photos,” she says. Fernandes made it clear she would by no means have despatched him these sorts of images and she or he had no concept who had.
By then, Fernandes had been married for practically a decade. She and Ulman met in 2010, when he was 34 — already a well-established director and actor — and she or he was 28, a presenter on a well-liked music video channel in Germany. That spring, Fernandes had posed seductively on the duvet of the boys’s trend journal FHM Germany, which named her the sexiest lady on the planet. Soon afterward, Ulmen solid her as his spouse on a present he was making referred to as “The Snobs,” which was set over 18 holes on a golf course, with Ulmen taking part in an unbearable, self-made businessman.
Fame had made Fernandes skittish about relationship, particularly as she felt folks underestimated her due to her public picture. The tabloids usually characterised her as a “party girl,” as a result of she was continuously photographed at movie star occasions; however Fernandes thought-about herself one thing of a nerd. She was pushed, even a workaholic, an obsessive researcher with a vital eye. The community she labored for, she remembers, needed her to be bubbly, ask inane questions and preserve issues gentle, which wasn’t actually her sensibility: She had an irreverent edge, and would generally go off script on reside exhibits, which may get her into hassle with producers, even when the viewers appeared to understand it.