In early 2025, a woman posted on Reddit’s r/whatdoIdo forum describing a disorienting sequence: her boyfriend staged a fake cheating scenario, mocked her for being upset, and then turned out to have been cheating on her for real the entire time. The post, which drew hundreds of responses, became a reference point for a pattern that relationship therapists and online communities have been tracking with growing alarm: partners who use “prank” infidelity as entertainment, as deflection, or as outright cover for genuine betrayal.
The trend is not new, but its visibility has surged. Fake cheating pranks have been a staple of YouTube and TikTok content for years, and by 2025, Reddit’s relationship forums were fielding a steady stream of accounts from people blindsided by staged betrayals that turned out to be more real than advertised. The stories differ in detail but share a recognizable emotional arc: the prank is staged, the hurt partner reacts, and the prankster insists the reaction is the problem.
The prank that hid a real betrayal
In the Reddit post that prompted much of this conversation, the woman described how her boyfriend orchestrated a fake cheating scene designed to provoke her, then used her distress as evidence that she was insecure and irrational. The setup functioned as a distraction: while she was processing the manufactured crisis, his actual infidelity stayed hidden. When she eventually discovered the real cheating, the earlier stunt no longer looked like a misjudged joke. It looked like a deliberate smokescreen. Commenters on the update thread urged her to cut contact entirely, arguing that someone willing to layer deception that deliberately was not worth the emotional cost of reconciliation.
The account resonated in part because it matched other stories circulating on the same forums. In a separate AITA post from late 2024, a man described coming home to find his girlfriend and a male friend in a staged cheating tableau that involved partial nudity and physical contact. The girlfriend and friend had planned the scene without telling anyone and expected him to laugh. He did not. “I felt completely betrayed,” he wrote, describing the moment he walked in on what looked indistinguishable from actual infidelity. In a final update, he confirmed that neither his girlfriend nor the friend had warned him in advance, and that both still insisted it was funny after the fact. He ended the relationship.
Why therapists call it gaslighting, not comedy
What makes these stunts psychologically damaging is not just the initial shock. It is what happens afterward. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, gaslighting involves “an abusive person leading you to question your own reality,” and the organization lists dismissing a partner’s emotional response and reframing hurtful behavior as a joke among its recognized tactics. When a partner stages a fake betrayal and then insists the hurt person is “too sensitive” or “can’t take a joke,” the dynamic fits that definition closely.
Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and one of the most widely cited experts on narcissistic abuse, has described this kind of behavior as a form of “future faking and reality distortion,” in which a manipulative partner controls the narrative by deciding what counts as real and what the other person is allowed to feel. In the Reddit case where the boyfriend faked cheating while actually cheating, the manipulation was layered: by engineering a crisis and then resolving it on his terms, he conditioned his girlfriend to distrust her own instincts. When the real infidelity surfaced, she had already been trained to second-guess her perception of betrayal.
The physiological impact is real, too. Research on betrayal trauma, including work by psychologist Jennifer Freyd at the University of Oregon, has shown that discovering a partner’s infidelity activates the body’s stress response in ways that mirror other forms of trauma. The brain does not distinguish cleanly between a “real” betrayal and one that feels real in the moment. A staged cheating scene that triggers genuine panic and grief leaves a physiological footprint whether or not the infidelity actually happened.
When the gap between public image and private betrayal goes viral
The dynamic is not confined to anonymous forums. In May 2025, influencer Elizabeth Filips, known online as The Wizard Liz, told her followers that her fiancé, Landon Nickerson, had cheated on her while she was pregnant. Filips, who had built a large audience around self-improvement and confidence content, announced on Instagram that she had broken off the engagement after a woman contacted one of her friends with information about Nickerson’s infidelity, as reported by Hindustan Times.
The story struck a nerve because of the contrast between Filips’s public brand and her private experience. Coverage in Evie Magazine described how fans struggled to reconcile the empowerment messaging with the revelation that the relationship behind it had been marked by dishonesty. Filips’s case did not involve a staged prank, but it illustrated the same core dissonance: the person being deceived is often the last to know, and the gap between the projected relationship and the real one can be enormous. For followers who had watched the couple’s content and assumed it reflected reality, the betrayal felt personal.
Why “just a prank” is not a defense
At the core of these stories is a question about consent in emotional life. Most people enter relationships with a baseline expectation that their partner will not deliberately simulate a devastating betrayal for entertainment or content. When someone stages a cheating scene without warning, they are making a unilateral decision to put another person through the shock and grief of infidelity, regardless of whether the betrayal is real. That choice becomes especially difficult to forgive when the prank involves physical intimacy with a third party, as in the AITA account where the girlfriend and friend stripped down to sell the illusion.
Labeling the stunt “just a prank” does not undo the damage. The stress response has already fired. The trust has already cracked. And in cases where the prank turns out to have been a smokescreen for real cheating, the target is left processing two betrayals at once: the manufactured one they were told to laugh off, and the genuine one they were never supposed to discover. That combination is what moves these incidents out of the category of bad judgment and into territory that therapists and advocates increasingly describe as emotional abuse.
How people on the receiving end are pushing back
Despite the harm, many of the people targeted by these stunts are refusing to stay silent. The Reddit users who documented their experiences in detail, including the man who walked away after the staged nudity prank and the woman who discovered her boyfriend’s real infidelity behind the fake one, used public forums not just to ask whether they were overreacting, but to create a record. Their posts have been read by hundreds of thousands of people, and the comment sections consistently validate the same conclusion: staging a fake betrayal is not a prank. It is a choice to prioritize your own amusement over your partner’s emotional safety.
Filips took a similar approach on a larger stage, using her platform to name what happened and to reject the idea that her public image obligated her to stay quiet. The willingness of these individuals to describe exactly what they experienced, how it felt, and why they chose to leave is building a body of firsthand testimony that makes it harder for anyone to dismiss these incidents as harmless fun.
As of April 2026, fake cheating prank videos continue to circulate on TikTok and YouTube, many of them racking up millions of views. But the conversation around them has shifted. The comments sections that once rewarded shock value increasingly push back, and the stories of people who lived through the aftermath are harder to ignore. The line between a prank and a betrayal was never as clear as the people staging them wanted to believe.
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