"It nearly killed me." The first time Casey Donovan had sex was with her catfisher Olga.

It was an anonymous phone call on Australia Day which started the beginning of an ordeal that would go on to change Casey Donovan’s life forever.

In fact, it almost destroyed it.

The Australian Idol winner was subject to a cruel catfishing attack which left her besotted with a man named Campbell, who after the first out-of-the-blue phone call, she went on to speak to on the phone every day for six years.

Campbell was actually a woman named “Olga”.

In a revealing interview with Andrew Denton tonight, Casey discussed her bizarre friendship with Olga, who she believed was a friend of Campbell’s for the duration of their relationship.

Watch a snippet of the interview below. Post continues after.

“Campbell was going to pick me up from the airport, would you believe he didn’t turn up?” she told Denton on Interview. 

“He sent his friend Olga instead – I’d spoken to Olga on the phone because they were at a party. She came with a teddy bear and a big card that said ‘I love you'(from Campbell)”.

Casey quickly became friends Olga and for more than six years, considered Olga her best friend. She was her only connection to the man on the other end of the phone Casey was convinced existed.

 

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“She was like a bulldog. Like just staunch. She was a woman on a mission, but also extremely likeable, very friendly,” Casey explained of Olga’s character.

“I didn’t get a weird vibe from her… She was Campbell’s mate.”

It was Olga who Casey – who identifies as straight – had her first sexual experience with, at Campbell’s request.

An experience that to this day makes her shudder.

“I was just willing to do anything to see him,” she told Denton.

“My intuition was saying ‘this isn’t right, don’t be a d*ckhead’, but I had put so much effort and emotion and time and invested in this, that he had to be real. He had to.”

She explained that Campbell had asked her to have sex with Olga, and then tell him about it over the phone.

“The sexual encounter with Olga… he was like do that, then we’ll all get together and do that together,” she says before visibly cringing and exclaiming, “That’s too much,” to the crowd.

“But um… It was a seed. It was planted… We were in her room and then she just kind of tried it on and I was like ‘oh, this is happening’ and then ‘oh, that happened’.

“It was weird and I was… you know,” she trailed off.

“It really stuffed with my head. There were so many things happening, I didn’t know which way was up.”

What made matters worse was Campbell had asked Casey to marry him.

She trusted him, and she trusted Olga.

Little did she know this woman would throw her life into the darkest depths imaginable.

 

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“It nearly killed me. I don’t want anyone to have to go through something like that ever,” she said

“I was doing everything to prove to myself that there was the slightest chance that he could have been real.”

After a while though, things didn’t add up. Whenever Campbell didn’t answer the phone, Olga was there, and she had started to pick up on similarities between Campbell and Olga’s voices.

But when Casey confronted Olga, she gaslighted her – making her doubt her own sanity.

“She would say ‘yes of course he’s real, why would I lie? You’re my best friend, you’re like a sister to me. No one would do that. That’s not alright’,” Casey recalled.

“I even asked her mum, and cried in front of her mother, in front of her family, in front of her friends. She’d pissed all of mine away.”

When the doubt in her mind about the man she had fallen in love with became too unbearable, she opened up to her manager Jason, who took matters into his own hands and decided to knock on the door of the house Campbell had claimed was his own.

There was no Campbell at the house – which actually turned out to be a group of units.

On top of that, Casey later found a SIM card on Olga’s bedroom floor that matched Campbell’s number, leading her “best friend” to eventually admit that it was her all along.

“The night I found out this was all a lie, I sat on the edge of my parents’ bed at around 3am in the morning and they thought someone had died,” Casey said.

Casey’s shocking tale of deceit features in her tell-all autobiography Big, Beautiful & Sexy, in which she describes how the experience became the catalyst for her subsequent sex addiction.

This, she says, was a coping mechanism to deal with the dark truth behind her first experience of physical intimacy.