It didn’t take much for Wohl and Burkman’s manipulation to fall apart. Even before the press conference at the Holiday Inn, a law professor had already come forward to say that someone at Surefire contacted her seeking allegations against Mueller. Another woman, “Lorraine Parsons,” emailed journalists to say she was pursued by Surefire, too, and offered $20,000 for allegations; she wasn’t a real person, but someone Wohl later claimed to have invented to continue drumming up interest in their smear. NBC News found that Surefire was only recently registered by Wohl. The “employee” pages on LinkedIn included poorly edited photos of the model Bar Refaeli, actor Christoph Waltz, and Wohl himself, posing as agency director “Matthew Cohen.” The phone number on Surefire’s site referred callers to a line that belonged to Wohl’s mother. And it turns out Wohl had scammed money from at least one other person under the moniker “Matthew Cohen”: Julienne Adams from Vancouver, WA, came forward to the Daily Beast about how “Cohen” had promised to obtain a stolen Hummer in exchange for a $1,200 fee. He allegedly took the cash and didn’t do any of the work.

Wohl sent out the selfie he’d snapped of him and Cass at the airport. Though her face was blurred, people online were able to perform reverse edits on the image to obtain the original. Message boards and internet sleuths hunted down images from society events in New York City and videos she’d appeared in over the years. Cass says reporters swarmed her family’s home in Dallas, thinking she might be hiding out there.

“I was really mad they were doing this to me, but there was nothing I could do,” Cass says of Wohl and Burkman. “It was like a wildfire, and I had a cup of water to put it out with.” She waited out the storm at B’s place for five days before returning to California. “She finally understood the gravity of what was happening,” B says.

In retrospect, Cass says she should have stopped communicating with Wohl as soon as he dragged her name through the mud at the presser. Instead, at his request, they met up for lunch at a cafe in Beverly Hills shortly after her return from New York City. She wanted an apology, an explanation, something, anything. But he never even explained why he’d posed as “Matthew Cohen,” though he did start responding to the name Jacob. He spent their meeting asking strange, romantic questions, such as whether she’d considered marriage in her future. She could’ve walked away; instead, she doubled down on her resolve to figure out what was really going on with Wohl.

“A part of me loved him, but he’s a fraudster.”

Finding out about Wohl’s real identity, age, and social media accounts — which are filled with pro-Trump and extreme right-wing material — didn’t bother her. In fact, seeing many of the harshly negative responses on his posts made her feel sympathy, even pity, for Wohl. “What I saw was so full of awful stuff,” she says. “All of his dirty laundry, making mean comments about his appearance, saying that he had acne. I was like, ‘Wow, maybe this kid is just really lonely.’”

The two kept in touch for months after the Mueller debacle. She even went to Wohl’s place in Irvine a few days after their lunch meeting, where Cass says he pressed her to come forward with the false Mueller accusations (she refused), and she pressed him to refund her the money she’d paid for his PI services and some of the $50,000 payout he’d promised for her involvement in the scheme (she recalls him scoffing, “I won’t give you free money”). She says they still had sex that night. Looking back on the encounter, Cass has a hard time finding words for what made her want to stay by Wohl’s side, except that she felt desperate to believe that he was more like good-guy “Matthew Cohen” than Jacob Wohl; that despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, he did really care for her.

In the end, it was Wohl who broke things off, saying he could never tell his friends he was dating a 34-year-old. Then Cass spoke to USA Today, which broke the news that Wohl had misrepresented himself to her as “Matthew Cohen.” In the piece, Wohl himself also said he created fake Twitter accounts to manipulate the election — an admission that got him banned from Twitter within hours of the story’s publication. “I think he was totally in shock that this didn’t go the way he thought,” Cass says. She feels like he took that frustration out on her. “A part of me loved him, and I still do,” she says, “but he’s a fraudster.”

Fame is a fickle monster in the internet age. You’re only as good as your latest viral moment. Despite his permanent Twitter ban, Wohl carries on hatching new plots, determined to keep the spotlight trained on himself. In that same USA Today interview, he admitted to waging a full-scale war of deception: “I’ll literally hear one thing,” he said, “and I’ll flip it 180 degrees.” In February, he went to Minnesota with two fellow provocateurs to “prove” the baseless claim that Representative Ilhan Omar, a Muslim woman, had married her brother for immigration purposes. In late April, the Daily Beast reported that Wohl and Burkman tried to recruit several gay Republican men to level false rape allegations against presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (again by posting on Medium), a scheme that included another faux PI firm. This one was called “Potomac Intelligence Group.”

Cass never did get that refund from Wohl for his Surefire retainer. And, in case you’re wondering, DeSando still hasn’t paid up, either. “She’ll have to dig my body out of the ground to get it from me,” he says.

Cass says strange things began happening after her split from Wohl. Aggressive drivers ran her off the road, internet trolls impersonated her on Twitter and tried to hack her private Instagram account. The more Cass struggles against Wohl’s web, the more entangled she seems to become.

So in March, she called Michael Avenatti — yes, that Michael Avenatti. The onetime lawyer for Stormy Daniels was publicly on the hunt for Wohl. Less than two hours after they spoke, Avenatti claimed in a tweet that Wohl was under investigation for possessing illegal firearms, information Cass says he only could have gleaned from their call. (These assertions haven’t been confirmed; the LAPD doesn’t comment on information that could jeopardize a potential active investigation.) Five days later, Avenatti was arrested for embezzling from clients and attempting to extort Nike for more than $20 million, and is now under investigation for embezzling $300,000 from Daniels, too. (In May, Avenatti denied the claims about Cass in an email to me: “I never disclosed anything we spoke about and I certainly did not learn anything from her that I didn’t already know.”)

“I’m like a feral cat being backed into a corner by scary dudes who all seem to have law licenses and political connections,” Cass says. Though she’s sought legal representation, she says no one will touch her case.

Yet, even after all of this, Cass is not immune to the allure of fame. She still refers to herself as a “pop star” and takes vocal lessons, though she knows her involvement with Wohl has done irrevocable damage. She’s considered releasing music under an alias. “My life has been ruined. My family’s been harassed, my life’s been attacked, my social reputation is ruined,” Cass says. “No reputable person even wants to talk to me right now. What they’ve done to me is beyond repair.”

I last met Cass at a cafe in an airy Hollywood hotel in April. Over iced coffee, I asked what she wanted to do next. Would she take these experiences and turn them into songs? No, she said. She didn’t find the things that had happened to her inspiring in any way. “It really killed my joy, it really depressed me, it really terrified me,” she says. “It really made me feel like a fucking idiot, you know?” Nor was she interested in speaking about what she would be doing next. Every time she’d talked about her hopes, she felt she’d been sabotaged. Despite her pop star ambitions, she’ll be laying low, at least for now.

That may be the best move she’s made yet.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that a law professor was offered $30,000 in exchange for allegations Robert Mueller. Though she was offered money in exchange for allegations, a specific amount was never stated.