Who TF Did I Marry? The viral explosion of Reesa Teesa
In February 2024 a woman calling herself “Reesa Teesa” began uploading videos to TikTok where she talked about her bad marriage: it was titled “Who TF Did I Marry?” The videos kept coming… and coming… and coming. Reesa Teesa, whoever she really was, was a born storyteller and she knew how to keep people engaged. But the story itself was disturbing: what happened once it was over?
Legion
Reesa began her story on February 14: Valentine’s Day. She didn’t refer to her husband by his real name, but instead called him Legion — a reference to a Bible story where a man is possessed by demons.
It’s fair to say that the way she told it, her life with Legion soon turned into a nightmare. But let’s start at the very beginning and let Reesa herself walk you through her story.
The good, the bad, the ugly
There are 50 parts to Reesa’s tale, and she deliberately chose to tell the story that way. “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.
“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.” And people weren’t dismayed — far from it!
Matching
Reesa had met her future husband in March 2020 just as the COVID pandemic was spreading across the world. She was matched with him on both the Facebook dating site and on Hinge.
“I did not realize he was on both, under two different names,” she says on TikTok. “One was his actual name and the other one was a variation, like a nickname, that he called himself. It is so many red flags; you would’ve thought I was colorblind, because I ignored all of them.”
First date
The couple had their first date, and it went pretty well. Reesa’s car had broken down on their way to Cheesecake Factory and Legion immediately changed the tire for her. Reesa was impressed.
“The vibe was good,” she admits on her TikTok video. But unfortunately, it wouldn’t remain good for very long. Reesa fell in love with Legion, but after that things went downhill fast.
Moving in
Legion appeared to be wealthy enough to provide for Reesa, and he also seemed to be close with his family. He spent a lot of time on the phone talking to his loved ones.
The couple moved in together during the pandemic. Things were unpredictable at that point, but manageable. The pair began looking for a nice house in which they could share a life together.
Money
Legion seemed perfectly willing to buy a house, and to buy a car for Reesa too, but there was always something getting in the way of a purchase actually going through.
Legion claimed to have multiple bank accounts, but Reesa only ever saw screenshots of a few of them. There were more and more red flags, but by her own admission Reesa had been, as she said, “colorblind” to them.
Pregnancy
Then Reesa fell pregnant. She wanted to marry Legion and settle down in a house of their own, but she claimed Legion just kept making excuses: he told her things were “going on with the interest rate.”
To an outside observer it might probably have seemed fairly plain that Legion was taking advantage of Reesa, but like countless other women who’ve been in a similar position, she was blinded by love: she just kept going.
Things get worse
Reesa’s pregnancy sadly ended in a miscarriage, and she had to have surgery on her womb. Legion didn’t drive her to the hospital to have the procedure done, reportedly claiming he was in an unavoidable business meeting.
And there was no luck buying a house, either. As she tells it, Legion claimed that he had been promoted to vice president of his company, but he was unable to provide proof of funds to the couple’s real-estate agent.
Lies
Reesa married Legion at the beginning of 2021… and unfortunately she soon began to feel that she’d made a huge mistake. By her account, Legion showed multiple signs of being a pathological liar.
He reportedly started to claim that an ex of Reesa’s had come to their house looking for her, even though there was zero evidence this was true. Reesa checked with a neighbor who had a security camera: it showed no-one coming to the house around the alleged time of the visit.
Controlling and cheating
Legion apparently began to exhibit behavior which seemed more and more controlling in nature. As she tells it, he hated it when Reesa spent time around other men, even if it was just for work, and he started to complain about the clothes she wore.
Then Reesa says she came across a series of text messages on Legion’s phone: he’d been sexting with other women. Reesa was desperate at this point and the couple went to marriage counseling.
SIN number
But the professional relationship advice did not seem to help; Reesa was getting more and more uncomfortable. She felt as though she’d become trapped in a truly horrible situation, and it seemed to be constantly getting worse.
She attempted to apply for a second job in a bid to increase her income, but she had to provide her husband’s Social Insurance Number (SIN) for the application. And it turned out this SIN was different to the one which had been supplied on the couple’s marriage license.
More lies
Reesa did some digging and it seemed as though Legion had been lying about his identity for a long time. He tried to explain it away by claiming he was a “private citizen” with no records of his social security number.
But then came yet another twist. He apparently told Reesa that his ex-wife’s child, his ex-stepdaughter, had died of COVID. And he got Reesa to send the family money for the funeral.
The ex-wife
Finally Reesa started to unravel the web of apparent deceit in which she’d found herself. She managed to track down Legion’s ex-wife and called her up: the daughter was alive and well, not dead from COVID at all.
The ex reportedly told Reesa, “Whatever he tells you is a lie,” and warned her about the abusive situation she was in. Reesa began digging more and more into the life of her husband and discovered she had never really known him.
Unravelling
She says she discovered that Legion had been lying about his family — he had fewer siblings than he’d claimed to have — and he had been less-than-honest about other things too. For starters, he’d been faking all the phone calls with his family.
As the TikTok episodes unfolded, Reesa revealed her hubby had apparently also been cheating on her physically. While going through Legion’s phone, she says she found messages from a woman whom her partner had been paying for sex.
Out
At this point, Legion was off work due to an injury he said he had sustained playing football. Reesa says he’d claimed to be working at Apple, but as it turned out, this wasn’t true either.
Eventually, on his birthday, Reesa relates how she finally confronted him with all the lies he’d told her and threw him out. After he left, she’d found a bunch of urine-filled bottles in the guest room. Weirdly, he’d been peeing in them instead of using the bathroom.
Wild claims
After that, one of Legion’s cousins got in touch with her. By her account, Legion had returned to his family and reportedly he’d started telling still more lies. He’d claimed that Reesa had cheated on him with a cop.
What’s more, he’d also claimed that he and Reesa had welcomed a baby into the world. Considering the earlier miscarriage, that would have been a particularly cruel lie for him to have spread around.
Twin brother
It turned out that Legion had a twin brother who he’d never mentioned, and he’d borrowed many details of his twin brother’s life to pass off as his own. But while his brother did indeed have a high-paying job, Legion had for all that time been working as a forklift truck driver.
Reesa says when she approached Legion to ask him to sign the divorce papers, she discovered that he was living in his car. None of his family members had wanted to take him in!
Legion’s crimes
Eventually there came one last horrible twist of the knife. Legion kept calling Reesa, insisting he was still entitled to live in the same home as her. At this point, Reesa apparently discovered there had been a warrant out for his arrest.
It transpired that Legion was suspected of having committed a series of crimes, including impersonating a police officer. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising, then, that he’d claimed Reesa had specifically cheated on him with a cop.
Restraining order
As she tells it, eventually one day Reesa returned from work to find Legion’s car in her driveway: she was understandably scared. She drove past the house and called the cops, who arrested him.
After that, Reesa moved out of the house she’d shared with Legion. When he got out of prison, he immediately began trying to contact her, and she had to threaten him with a restraining order to get him to stop.
Cruelty
Reesa had been through a terrible ordeal, but talking about it seemed to help. “There is a level of cruelty to my ex-husband that I have never experienced before, and God knows I pray I never experience that again,” she says in the final part of her series.
But virtually as soon as this episodic tale hit TikTok, it went viral, and fame beckoned for Reesa. People were obsessed with her story. Its clever narrative structure had captured the imagination so well that online viewers couldn’t get enough of it.
Money
As the level of interest around Reesa’s videos grew and grew, there was speculation that she’d made a lot of money from her videos. TikTok pays some of its creators, after all. But Reesa herself posted a video claiming that was untrue.
“I am merely making these videos from the heart,” she said. “For the people who think I’ve made $80k, $100k, $300k, I am so sorry to disappoint you but the actual number is nowhere near. I am not quitting my day job.”
First interview
All the same, by now the story was a viral sensation that just wouldn’t stop. Reesa’s follower count went higher and higher and it’s currently sitting at roughly 2.3 million. It seemed as though everyone was talking about her and Legion.
At this point Reesa decided it was time to speak to the media. Her first interview took place with NBC News on February 22, roughly a week after her dramatic story had first begun captivating a global audience.
“Very hard”
Reesa told NBC News, “I already knew this story was not going to always make me look good at all. But I also felt like the story was bigger than me in a way.”
Reflecting on her emotional roller-coaster ride, she went on, “In other words, it was worth some embarrassment. But it was cathartic and it was also very emotional, and very hard at times.”
Creating conversation
The primary motive in creating the series, Reesa said, had been to connect with other people. “Whether you agree with me and my decisions or not, I wanted it to create conversation about the things that we ignore because we want what we want or we’re in a hurry,”
“I’ve started giving myself grace as I’m reading messages from other women who’ve gone through the same thing,” she went on. “Because for the longest time after the story was released, it did feel like I was the only one who fell for this.”
Legion revealed
But what about Legion? Who was this alleged serial liar in real life? For her part, Reesa was clear in her follow-up videos that she didn’t want anybody to try and track him down.
But fate had different plans: yes, Legion ended up identifying himself. His name was Jerome McCoy, he said, while Reesa’s real name was Tareasa Johnson. And he denied just about every single thing she had claimed about him.
Legion’s side
In one video, Legion tells Reesa, “Please stop lying to these people.” What’s more, he goes on to insist, “You can tell them the real reason I left you: you cheated.”
“We went to marriage counseling, didn’t work, and we broke up,” he claims. But it seems few people have been believing him, especially after other people involved in the story also came forward.
LaToya Averett
A woman named LaToya Averett came forward claiming to be Legion’s first wife, the one Reesa hadn’t known about. She too posted a whole TikTok video about her experiences.
By and large this story seemed to corroborate large elements of Reesa’s own TikTok tale. “Legion, as y'all call him, is a despicable, nasty, and vile individual,” she alleges in it. “I, too, fell for the trap over ten years ago.”
Diagnosis
On February 26 Reesa shared a video revealing that she had spoken with Legion’s brother: it wasn’t a happy update. Apparently the brothers had last seen each other at their father’s funeral, where they had fought.
“At one point, [the family] were taking him to different therapists and psychologists,” Reesa reveals in this TikTok post. “He’s been diagnosed with bipolar [disorder] and schizophrenia. I did not know this.”
New interview
Then, on March 2, Legion did an interview with the YouTube channel Simply Wavy. The video was two hours long and it covered a lot. First, Legion claims that his family members are being harassed as a result of the unfolding TikTok saga.
He then goes on to again deny everything Reesa had said about him. But in the comments section of the video, it was clear that just about no-one was giving much credence to this latest string of rebuttals.
Body shaming
By this point Reesa was experiencing full-on fame, but inevitably that experience was coming with some major pitfalls of its own. On March 4 she went on the Tamron Hall talk show and shared some of them.
Yes, Reesa declared that she had already experienced body shaming from people online. “I can already admit I’m self-conscious as a heavier woman. I feel like how I look should not dictate whether or not I deserve what happened,” she said.
Terrified
One thing by which Reesa had been particularly hurt was that Legion had abandoned her while she was having a miscarriage. And she addressed the issue directly while she was on Tamron Hall.
“You did not have a business meeting when I had to go to the hospital. You simply were not there,” Teesa said. “So when I was texting you and I was terrified, I’m texting you that I was in pre-op at Northside Hospital and I’m so scared because I just don’t know what’s going to happen… you really left me hanging when I needed you the most.”
500 minutes
Reesa was happy that so many people had watched her story, though. “When I hear someone that said, ‘Girl, I watched all 50 parts,’ I genuinely am humbled that someone took 500 minutes out of their life and watched the story that I went through,” she said.
She also had some advice for people who were looking to get married. Her hard-won nugget of wisdom ran, “Look, it costs nothing to verify, but if you don’t verify, honey, it may cost you everything.”
Stripped away
The same day, Reesa appeared on Good Morning America and revealed just how much of a mental toll the relationship had taken on her. “I don’t really get excited anymore,” she said.
“I am terrified to get excited, because I went through a whole year and some change of getting excited, only for it to be stripped away.” But she did add, “I do still believe in love.”
Therapy
Those concerned for Reesa’s welfare would doubtless have been heartened to learn another piece of news, too. On that show the viral TikTok star also revealed that she was going into therapy to try to heal herself.
“It is still very much a journey of healing, self-reflection and simply, loving myself way more than to put myself through that, or anything even like that, ever again,” Reesa said.
Surreal
Later, website The Cut released an interview with Reesa chronicling how she was adjusting to her new life as a viral internet star. She was already being recognized in airports, she said.
This had been despite her best attempts to hide under headgear! “Dammit, so the hat didn’t work,” she admitted, going on to add, “To say it’s overwhelming and it’s surreal is an understatement.”
Feelings
Reesa was self-deprecating in The Cut interview. “I can’t sit here and say that I don’t still blame myself. The feelings that I had in 2021, those feelings are trying to come back in 2024,” she said.
She was also quick to point out, again, that she wasn’t making anywhere near the amount of money from her story that people assumed she was. For example, while Etsy sellers were using quotes from her videos to sell merchandise, she wasn’t seeing any of that income.
Legal action
The Cut had called up Legion for the interview, and he’d had a new claim to make about Reesa. According to him, she had told him previously, “If you don’t take me back, I’m gonna do something to destroy your life.”
He revealed that he was also planning to take legal action against her. Reesa claimed she was okay with that though: she had retained the services of two lawyers herself since her story had gone viral.
No “passes”
Asked whether she saw Legion any differently after learning he had reportedly been diagnosed with serious mental-health issues, Reesa said, “There are people who struggle with mental health who were not diabolical in how they lied to you. So I don’t give him a pass.”
Now she has to move on with her life, but the early signs are that it will be a very different one from now on. In the first week of March she officially signed with the CAA talent agency.
Not alone
“I am excited to join the CAA family in what has become an extraordinary and life-changing opportunity. I hope to bring this story and personal experiences to an even bigger platform with the hope of helping those in similar circumstances know they are not alone,” Reesa said.
Doubtless in the weeks and months to come large sections of the online world will excitedly be turning in to learn about the latest addition to her life story to see where it goes next. They’ll be hoping she’ll heal emotionally and get her own happy ending.