If Maury and Catfish Were Crimes

One way to understand the Owens prosecution is to ask a question the law itself has never bothered to answer: If this conduct is criminal, why has American television spent decades treating it as entertainment?

For years, reality television has functioned as an unintentional catalog of human misrepresentation. Entire genres are built around people lying to one another about identity, intimacy, pregnancy, fidelity, money, health, and intention. Viewers are invited not to recoil in fear, but to lean in — to laugh, to judge, to argue about who is worse, and then to move on.

No one calls the police.

Consider Catfish, now more than a decade old and still running. The premise is simple: people fabricate identities, send altered photos, invent backstories, and manipulate romantic partners for emotional connection. The misrepresentations are often extensive and deliberate. Some last years. Some involve multiple false personas. Some include invented illnesses, deaths, or pregnancies. The harm can be real — emotional devastation, humiliation, lost time, occasionally lost money.

Yet when the truth is revealed, the response is not criminal. It is confrontation, explanation, sometimes outrage, sometimes empathy. The show ends not with arrests, but with the recognition that deception in intimacy occupies a morally gray space the criminal law has historically refused to enter.

That refusal is not accidental. It is foundational.

Long before Catfish, there was The Maury Povich Show. For three decades, millions of Americans watched episodes built around paternity uncertainty. Women believed a man was the father. Men denied it. DNA tests resolved the question, often to cheers or jeers. Sometimes the woman was wrong. Sometimes she had been mistaken about timing. Sometimes she had been intimate with more than one person. Sometimes she had been certain — and wrong.

None of this triggered prosecution. No one argued that a mistaken belief about pregnancy constituted fraud. No one suggested that conflicting statements about intimacy amounted to perjury. The entire premise of the show rested on the assumption that early pregnancy and paternity are areas where people are often wrong without being criminal.

That assumption was shared not just by television producers, but by courts.

The same is true of other staples of the genre. Dr. Phil has hosted countless episodes involving fabricated relationships, invented pregnancies, and exaggerated medical claims. 90 Day Fiancé routinely features people misrepresenting finances, immigration status, fidelity, and intent to marry. Viewers are encouraged to judge — sometimes harshly — but not to imagine that what they are watching belongs in a criminal courtroom.

These shows exist because the culture intuitively understands something the Owens indictment strains to deny: deception in relationships, even when manipulative or unethical, is not the same thing as fraud.

Fraud requires a specific architecture — intent to obtain money or property, reliance, and loss. Reality television thrives precisely because those elements are usually absent. The harm is emotional, not transactional. The deception is personal, not commercial. The remedy, when there is one, is social consequence, not incarceration.

What makes the Owens prosecution so disquieting is that it asks us to pretend this distinction never existed.

Under the theory advanced by the State, conduct long treated as the raw material of reality television is reclassified as a felony scheme. Private messages become evidence of criminal design. Inconsistencies common to emotionally volatile situations become perjury. Images shared between partners are recast as instruments of fraud.

If that standard were applied consistently, the implications would be staggering. Every season of Catfish would double as a police blotter. Every paternity reveal on daytime television would invite prosecutorial review. Entire archives of reality programming would retroactively become evidence reels.

The law has never worked that way because it cannot. A justice system that criminalizes relational chaos would collapse under its own weight.

What has changed is not the behavior. It is the context in which the behavior is viewed. Celebrity transformed a private dispute into public spectacle. Spectacle hardened into moral certainty. Moral certainty demanded punishment. And punishment arrived dressed as law.

The danger is not limited to one defendant. Once the boundary between private misrepresentation and criminal fraud is erased, it does not selectively reappear. It becomes available whenever a narrative is loud enough, a defendant unpopular enough, or an audience sufficiently convinced it already knows the ending.

Reality television has always depended on the idea that people can behave badly without being criminals. That distinction is what allows viewers to judge without fearing the consequences for themselves.

If the Owens prosecution succeeds in redefining that boundary, it will not just rewrite one case. It will quietly redefine the legal meaning of intimacy itself — transforming conduct long understood as human, if flawed, into something the state can punish with prison.

And that is a shift no television audience ever voted for — and no legal system should make without reckoning with what it destroys in the process.

This article relies on publicly accessible filings, testimony, and reporting. It aims to summarize and contextualize the existing record but does not purport to speak for any party involved in the litigation. All interpretations are based on documents already in the public domain.