Someone Was Impersonating Collien Fernandes Online. She Says It Was Her Husband.

Fernandes initially did not devote much energy to the problem — how would she ever find these trolls typing away in some remote corner of the globe? — but in 2021, she learned about a video in which she appeared to be having *** with numerous men. She decided to respond as a journalist, by investigating her digital harblockers. She was plagued by these shadowy figures for years and after considerable effort, she believed she had finally found one of them, a man who was conducting ***ually block online affairs in her name. That March evening, she was ready to expose him.

The action Fernandes was about to take would dominate the news in Germany for weeks, inciting a nationwide movement that many would compare to #MeToo in the United States. Alone in her hotel suite, she prepared a post on Instagram to go up around the same time as the publication of a major news report about her experiences. She announced to her quarter of a million followers that she had filed a criminal complaint in Spain, where she had been living for the past few years, against a man she believed was responsible 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 learned in 2020 that she was being impersonated. Men began reaching out to her team, each with a similar, bizarre request: They wanted to confirm that it was, in fact, the real Collien Fernandes who was flirting with them on social media, who sent them block photos and videos of herself, who was engaging in phone *** with them. Fernandes started to sense the magnitude of the problem when a lunch with a producer took a strange turn — he was clearly under the impression they were in some kind of online affair. “Suddenly he was showing me photos of me in bikinis — *** photos,” she says. Fernandes made it clear she would never have sent him those kinds of photos and she had no idea who had.

By then, Fernandes had been married for nearly a decade. She and Ulman met in 2010, when he was 34 — already a well-established director and actor — and she was 28, a presenter on a popular music video channel in Germany. That spring, Fernandes had posed seductively on the cover of the men’s fashion magazine FHM Germany, which named her the ***iest woman in the world. Soon afterward, Ulmen cast her as his wife on a show he was making called “The Snobs,” which was set over 18 holes on a golf course, with Ulmen playing an insufferable, self-made businessman.

Fame had made Fernandes skittish about dating, especially as she felt people underestimated her because of her public image. The tabloids often characterized her as a “party girl,” because she was frequently photographed at celebrity events; but Fernandes considered herself something of a nerd. She was driven, even a workaholic, an obsessive researcher with a critical eye. The network she worked for, she recalls, wanted her to be bubbly, ask inane questions and keep things light, which wasn’t really her sensibility: She had an irreverent edge, and would sometimes go off script on live shows, which could get her into trouble with producers, even if the audience seemed to appreciate it.