Abbie Draper was once a finalist in the Miss Scotland beauty pageant before starting a career as an airline steward.
Her life was nothing out of the ordinary, until a Facebook friend request she received in 2014 reshaped the next decade of her life.
What did Adele Rennie do?
Nurse Adele pretended to be a doctor named David Graham, using the alias to catfish women on social media.
She contacted Abbie on Facebook in 2014, pretending to be David, just after Abbie’s grandfather had been admitted to hospital with a stroke.
Adele set up David’s profile with a photo of a handsome man, and made it look authentic with the profile having a list of friends, photos from the hospital where he supposedly worked, and videos of his niece.
However, when Abbie showed her mum David’s picture, she said she’d never seen him at the hospital.
When Abbie later started a dance group and shared videos from it to social media, David Graham got in touch to ask if she’d dance at a charity ball he was organising, being held in Glasgow.
After agreeing and sharing promotional material for the event he’d sent her online, Abbie received an alarming message warning her David wasn’t to be trusted.
Phoning the venue of the ball, she was told they had no record of it. Doing some digging on David Graham, she found he wasn’t registered as a doctor.
Now very suspicious, Abbie began asking around to find out if any other women had been contacted by the person calling themselves David Graham.
She began a Facebook group chat named 007, and one member who’d had contact from David suggested she’d once been on the phone to him when he’d asked her to speak to a friend he was with, named Adele.
Doing a deeper dive into local women called Adele, Abbie found a familiar face in a Facebook profile – a nurse she recognised from the ward where her grandad had been a patient.
(Image credit: STV Studios Factual/BBC/Alana McVerry)
With the findings she’d made, Abbie phoned the hospital where Adele Rennie worked, to let them know a staff member was posing as a doctor – they didn’t believe her.
She then went to the police, but was told Adele hadn’t committed a criminal offence. Abbie was told that pretending to be somebody else by itself wasn’t criminal, and they’d only get involved if fraud was an issue, or the person was issuing threats.
Abbie created a social media post to publicly let others know David Graham couldn’t be trusted, as he didn’t exist and was actually a woman named Adele.
She was soon bombarded with messages from other women who’d been contacted by David Graham, and it’s thought that up to 100 women were affected by catfishing from his profile.
Pretending to be David, Adele became one of Scotland’s most notorious catfishers, and in some cases, carried out ‘sextortion,’ or procuring intimate pictures from victims, using these to make threats if they didn’t do as she asked.
A victim whose name has been changed features in the documentary. Samantha can be seen describing her experiences with David.
Samantha recalls that David would phone and text her constantly, and would get angry if she wasn’t always available to speak or reply. Adele used voice-changing apps to make her sound like a man during the many calls.
“He would get angry if I didn’t answer the phone,” she says, adding, “And then it would be messages asking, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ What are you doing?’
“I realised that’s not normal,” she says. David would also send Samantha lots of gifts, including flowers and food sent to her house and place of work. The same ‘florist’ delivering the flowers was actually Adele.
David always had excuses not to meet Samantha in person, and growing ever more suspicious, she once asked him to deliver a present to her mother’s house, where her mum waited with the lights off to see who brought it.
She managed to get the car registration of the person leaving the gift, and Samantha went to the hospital car park where David worked and waited for the car whose registration she had to arrive.
She was shocked to see the ‘florist’ get out of the car, realising it was a woman pretending to be her boyfriend.
(Image credit: STV Studios Factual/BBC/Alana McVerry)
According to the BBC, Adele was then visited by police, but later created the new alias of Matthew Mancini and began catfishing again.
After an investigation, Adele Rennie was arrested in November 2015 and pleaded guilty to 18 charges involving 10 victims.
She was accused of four counts of indecent communication, four of sexual coercion, and 10 of stalking. In December 2017, she was sentenced to 22 months in prison and placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years.
On her release, she quickly came back to the attention of police once more, this time pretending to be a lawyer. In 2019, she was jailed for another three years.
Adele still didn’t seem able to stop, and in 2024 was arrested again, this time charged with stalking, deception, and sexual coercion. She was sent back to prison for a third time.
In January 2025, Adele was released from her third stint in prison after serving half her sentence, but was arrested for a fourth time 10 days later.
Breaching the conditions of her release, she went back to prison for a fourth time to serve the remainder of her sentence with 100 days added.
Where is Adele Rennie now?
Adele Rennie remains in prison and is due to be released in March. She gave a statement for the documentary, apologising to the “innocent women being targeted and traumatised”.
“I should never have projected my inner turmoil and insecurities onto others to cause them harm… I am very sorry for my actions over the years,” she adds.
Adele’s mum, Christine, also contributed to the documentary to express shock at her daughter’s actions.
“I have gone through every emotion because it is just not the girl we know,” she says, continuing, “It’s quite hard to accept. You don’t want to believe that your child is capable of these kinds of things.”
Adele is accepting psychological help in prison, and her mum has highlighted some issues possibly contributing to her poor mental health.
Christine suggests her first marriage was abusive, but she thought she was shielding her children from witnessing physical violence.
Adele’s dad later took his own life when she was six. Christine says, “I did go through a guilt thing that staying in that relationship had a profound effect on her,” adding, “You just don’t know what someone’s going through and how they are going to react.”
All three episodes of The Beauty Queen and the Catfish are currently on BBC iPlayer.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.womanandhome.com ’
