A woman’s story about being married to a pathological liar has enraptured TikTok, where she shared the tale in a 50-part video series.
The TikToker, who goes by Reesa Teesa, has garnered over 122 million views on the series, with each video getting over one million views. In the story titled “Who TF Did I Marry?” Reesa Teesa details the beginning of her relationship with a man she nicknames “Legion,” a reference to a Biblical character who is possessed by a swarm of demons. Over the next several dozen videos, Reesa Teesa lays out how their relationship grew and intensified over the COVID-19 pandemic, how they moved in together, how they eventually married in January 2021—and how everything began falling apart after she caught him in multiple lies.
It’s not unusual for elaborate stories to go viral on social media, making their storytellers stars in the process. The 2021 movie Zola was inspired by a viral 2015 Twitter thread by A'Ziah “Zola” King recounting a story about her two-day trip to Florida that began with the iconic tweet, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out????????”
“Who TF Did I Marry?” stands out thanks to Reesa Teesa and the way she keeps viewers engaged. On Wednesday, she said in a video that she posted the series in 50 separate videos so people could listen to her story “like an audiobook.”
“You can listen to all the times I made bad decisions, you can clearly listen to the good, the bad, the ugly, the embarrassing,” she says in the video. “But most importantly, the redemption and the forgiveness that I am trying and learning to give myself. All in all, do not be dismayed that it is 50 parts.”
How “Who TF Did I Marry?” took off on TikTok
A compelling story and storyteller go a long way on social media, but from the get-go, Reesa Teesa hooked viewers with her attention to detail and ability to keep things entertaining across the videos, each running between nine and 10 minutes. She posted a precursor to the series on Feb. 14, explaining that she would be telling the story of her marriage, a video that drew over 13 million views. The first part of the series arrived the same day, and found the largest audience of the entire series, with over 22.8 million views.
In the story, she shares that she met Legion in 2020 on two different dating apps. They began dating, and things got serious quickly. Red flags of varying sizes soon began popping up. More than once, she says, Legion would refuse to show proof of funds to realtors while they were trying to buy a house together. She began to lose hope that they would ever move into a house together.
At one point, Reesa Teesa says she became pregnant with Legion’s child. She describes going to work and having some pains, then recognizing that she was having a miscarriage. When she called Legion about this, he was unable to take her to the hospital, and one of her co-workers took her instead. She says he also lied about what he did for work (he claimed to be the vice president of a condiment company), the amount of money he had, and his relationship with his ex-wife and her children. He would also take “fake phone calls” with his employees and siblings, she says. According to Reesa Teesa, this covered about “2%” of the many lies he told her during their relationship.
Eventually, she says, she applied for a new job and needed his social security number to fill out an application. When a background check was being completed on the two of them, she noticed that the social security number he put on her application was different from the one he gave when they got their marriage license. Reesa Teesa looked into the new social security number and found out who Legion really was: According to the information, he never lived in California; he had worked as a temporary forklift driver; and his family members knew about his habit of lying and didn't speak to him. Less than a year into their marriage, she filed for divorce.
The story has become a TikTok sensation, prompting reaction videos and memes.
Reesa Teesa's comments section is filled with users who are obsessed with the story.
“I just found her story [two] hours ago and haven’t scrolled away since,” one person wrote in the comments. Another wrote, “This is the most organized story I’ve heard told on TikTok.”
The series brought in such a large audience that Reesa Teesa did a TikTok live on Monday and those 20 parts received hundreds of thousands of views each. With the videos’ reach, TikTok users began searching the internet for Legion, and one creator was able to connect the dots and leaked his information.
In that TikTok Live, Teesa said that she reached out to the creator and asked them to take the information down, KnowYourMeme.com reports, and they did. She says she has not spoken to him since their divorce and does not plan to do so ever again.
At one point in their relationship, Legion printed out an itinerary for a trip to London, because he knew it was a lifelong dream of Reesa Teesa's (he notably did not buy tickets to London, she says). In a video posted Tuesday, Reesa Teesa shared that she has now bought herself tickets to London and Paris—and will take her followers along on the journey.
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Write to Moises Mendez II at moises.mendez@time.com