'I dated a man with a fake identity for about four and a half months': NYC women share stories about alleged 'scammer' date on TikTok
Several women on TikTok have come out to share their stories about Kyle Deschanel — the mysterious man they’d gone on dates with who seemed to have A-list friends and a lot of money to spend.
Except, as they all found out, none of it was true.
Deschanel’s dating history is a little more sinister than the “West Elm Caleb” saga that dominated TikTok in January 2022. Then, a group of women discovered they were dating the same man — an alleged 25-year-old furniture designer for West Elm who would love bomb women on dating apps before ghosting them. Deschanel, however, as one accuser put it, had “scammed a lot of people in downtown New York City for money.”
Who is the man behind ‘Kyle Deschanel’?
According to an investigation by the Daily Beast, Deschanel is actually 35-year-old Aryeh Dodelson. A member of an Orthodox Jewish community in Lakewood, N.J., told the publication that Dodelson had been a “prominent, respected figure.” A 2013 bulletin from the West Side Institutional Synagogue lists Dodelson as a rabbi at Khal Netzach Yehoshua and describes him as living in Lakewood with his wife and their son.
What are people saying about Kyle Deschanel on TikTok?
Eva Evans, a New York-based filmmaker, was one of the first people to come out about Deschanel in a TikTok post.
“I found out that my ex-boyfriend had a wife and a son and another name and was actually another person,” Evans claimed in a video posted on June 17. “I dated a man with a fake identity for about four and a half months.”
In a comment, Evans specified that the boyfriend she was referring to was named “Kyle.”
“Over the course of the time that we were dating, I knew there was something up,” she said. “But me and my friends thought he was a spy.”
A few days after Evans posted her video, another TikTok user named Olivia Mitros shared a response video with the caption “Apparently I also went out w a scammer!?!?”
Mitros claimed that she originally connected with Deschanel over the dating app Hinge in January. She said that on their first (and only) date, he immediately told her he liked to meet first dates in public to avoid being catfished.
“He took me to a house in SoHo that he claimed used to belong to Enrique Iglesias,” Mitros recalled. The Daily Beast confirmed with Mitros and another anonymous source who claimed to have dated Deschanel that it was a townhouse at 514 Broome St.
“All day he kept saying that he had all of these famous friends and he kept trying to invite them and ‘no one would respond.'”
Mitros said she went into the house and described the situation as “a little sketchy.” She said there was no interior design to the place, and she said she “knew something was off.”
Property records report that the townhouse has been owned by an attorney since May 2015. The townhouse was put on the market several times over the last few years, the most recent relisting being in May 2023. It’s unclear how Deschanel was able to allegedly fake residence there.
One thing Deschanel allegedly told Mitros that she was able to fact-check immediately was that he used to be in politics. In a follow-up TikTok post, Mitros claimed that her whole family is in politics, so she immediately texted her aunt to see if she knew him. She didn’t.
“He was saying that he knew the congressman who my aunt was chief of staff for, so I knew something was a little bit up,” Mitros said.
In a second follow-up video, Mitros said they went to a couple of restaurants for a few dates and Deschanel acted as if he knew everyone. Mitros added that he claimed to be good friends with an actor on the NBC medical drama New Amsterdam and that he kept saying he ran “one of the largest meme accounts on Instagram,” but he wouldn’t tell her the name of it.
After hanging out with some of his friends, Mitros said he asked to come over to her apartment to “meet her dog” and she agreed, but she didn’t want him to spend the night.
“He left very mad about that,” she recalled. She said she stopped texting him and didn’t see him again after that.
“I feel bad for anyone else who had a longer situation with him than I did,” Mitros concluded. “I got very lucky.”
It wasn’t just dates — friendships were ruined over his fake identity
Another New York-based woman, Tracy Sokat, said she was shocked when she found out about Deschanel. In a video she uploaded on June 28, Sokat said there was a point earlier in 2023 when she would’ve considered Deschanel one of her closest friends.
“This man, Kyle, pretty much lied about his entire identity for the past few years in New York, fooling men, women, the entire New York City nightlife scene,” Sokat claimed. “He swindled people out of money, he held after-parties at a house that apparently didn’t belong to him and he dated countless women in New York City while having a wife and a child.”
Sokat claimed that Deschanel had helped her get through a breakup and described one day when the two walked from SoHo to the Upper West Side in Manhattan just sharing childhood stories. She said he would share photos of someone he claimed was his godson, but who Sokat now believes may have been his actual son.
“We used to make jokes about growing up Catholic and what that was like, and he is literally a rabbi,” she said. “I’m just processing that a friend of mine literally doesn’t exist.”
How to spot a scammer
Callisto Adams is an L.A.-based marriage and family therapist, as well as a dating and relationship expert. In terms of seeing someone like Deschanel exactly for who he is, Adams says, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
“If things are moving very fast and it seems like you’re invited into this person’s life with a sense of urgency because they’re having so much fun yet don’t have much time for the nitty-gritty, then you’ve got to take a step back,” she told In The Know by Yahoo.
Adams recommends doing background checks — even as simple as Googling the person and searching for them on social media — and remembering to take it slow while asking them questions.
“Something during their false narrative will eventually slip,” she said. “Avoid engaging any further the moment you spot a red flag.”
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