Kira Cousins is a 23-year-old young woman from Scotland. She’s surrounded by a loving family, friends, and even followers on social media who seemingly just want the best for her and her… doll. Kira reportedly ran a ridiculous almost year-long ruse to convince them that the doll was actually a baby named Bonnie-Leigh Joyce.
Nobody in her inner circle understands why Kira would ever do this, but they would be lying if they said there weren’t signs. The first person to notice something strange was Kira’s friend Neave McRobert. Neave said the first strike was that nobody actually ever heard the baby cry, and even on their text chat, whenever Kira sent a video or photo of Bonnie-Leigh, she later deleted it. Which prompted her to ask Kira’s partner and “father” of the doll if Bonnie-Leigh is, in fact, a doll — to which he reportedly bravely responded, “Yes, it’s a doll.”
Kira started off her journey with a prosthetic baby bump — the kind they’d use in a film like the latest Fantastic Four movie. From this point on, Kira decided that if she was going to go ahead with this lie, then she better do the whole nine yards. Fake hospital visits followed, fake baby scans, and to top it all off she even had a gender reveal where her entire family were led to believe that they’re adding another girl to their clan.
It’s at that point where she went to get a plastic doll and named it. But for Kira, that’s where the deception got harder to maintain — mostly because babies tend to move occasionally, and maybe cause a fuss here and there.
In a statement acknowledging the bizarre behavior but never quite getting to an apology, according to NDTV, she told her TikTok followers, “In my own words let’s set this straight. I was in bed when my mother came into my room and found it to be a doll. Prior to this, I had been keeping myself away from literally everyone. The next thing I know, I was confronted by all the family. Don’t for one minute think they let me away with this, they haven’t. And none of them knew. Neither did the dad and his family.”
The people waiting for an explanation as to why she did this would probably just have to join the queue behind Kira’s family and friends. In her TikTok comments, there were people who suggested that she seek medical help — and it’s hard to argue with that because this is probably more confusing than anything depicted in Netflix’s Baby Reindeer.
While there are certainly worse things people see families do around each other these days that include actual physical violence — this is arguably almost just as bad. The psychological torment of telling your family that a child they’ve been trying to bond with and have awaited for so many months is, in fact, plastic and battery-free, is immeasurable.
Kira’s friend instead was more concerned about the supposed father of the child, who also had no idea. Neave made the educated guess that he must be inconsolable at the moment. As for Kira, perhaps she needs to release a follow-up statement on her TikTok page.
