It’s one thing to get hoodwinked — “catfished,” in contemporary parlance — into going on a date based on how someone presents themselves online. It’s another thing to fall in love with a person you believe is Katy Perry over the course of six years of incessant messaging and emailing… only for that person to very definitively not be one of the world’s biggest pop stars.
But that’s just what happened to an unlucky Tennessee man on a recent episode of MTV’s dating drama reality show Catfish: The TV Show. And the real Katy Perry, singer of “Rise” and “Roar” and girlfriend to Orlando Bloom, has heard about the doomed, one-sided love affair. She even feels bad about the guy’s conundrum, calling it “really unfortunate” and “very sad” in an interview on SiriusXM radio’s The Morning Mash Up Show.
“My heart goes out to him, actually” she said on the show. “Anybody who’s been fooled like that… people have dreams and people live in different parts of the world where not everything is so accessible. We live on the coasts and we get stuff in a way that some other people don’t get, and I feel bad for him. So I didn’t really like to indulge in that because my heart, like, would die.”
We don’t recommend Perry watch the episode of the show, because the final moment of truth is pretty hard to watch unfold — even when you’re not Katy.
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Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com