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The consensus on TikTok was that we shall be needing more popcorn. ‘This will be the next Netflix drama,’ one poster commented this week, mind blown after trying (and surely failing) to keep track of the plot. The saga that has had everyone agog? The curious case of the baby who never existed, and the ‘mum’ who hoodwinked not just the entire online community but possibly her own family too. A story of a woman who pretended to be pregnant, using a prosthetic baby bump, and who followed up the ruse with a lifelike plastic doll, which she paraded around for everyone to coo over. Even the ‘baby’s’ father was taken in, apparently. Implausible? Many would say so. In fact, those gripped by the drama are asking whether the story of baby Bonnie-Leigh is one of the biggest hoaxes of our age. It certainly may be, although – as we shall discover – there is also a real baby at the heart of this mess, which takes the whole sorry debacle out of the realm of entertainment and into much darker territory. To begin with, the tale of Kira Cousins, a 23-year-old supermarket worker from Caldercruix, a small village near Airdrie in the west of Scotland, followed a trajectory familiar to expectant mothers across the country in the digital age. As she posted every detail of her ‘pregnancy’ on social media her friends swooped in with heart emojis and good wishes. Here she was, glowing in a white bodycon dress at her gender reveal party, having spent goodness knows how long blowing up balloons. And here she was, sharing scan photos, health updates, gushingly laying out little outfits and thanking her mum and gran for forking out £1,000 on a pram and baby seat. Bless! Then – with the stage set – along came the star of the show: little Bonnie-Leigh Joyce Gardner herself, ‘born’ on October 10, weighing 5lb 4oz. What a cutie she was, with her little button nose and bendy baby legs. Kira didn’t just show her baby off on social media, gathering up all the love and validation offered, but by all accounts in person too, taking Bonnie-Leigh – sleeping and bundled up in that expensive pram – to meet her work colleagues. Like many new mums who might be worried about infection, she asked them not to touch her. How daft they feel now – knowing that they cooed not over a genuine newborn but a ‘sleeping’ plastic doll. For this week, a terrible truth emerged. Bonnie-Leigh had never existed. Kira had never been pregnant. The baby was a lifelike Reborn doll – hand-made and painted to look eerily human. What’s more, even Kira’s own family – and Bonnie-Leigh’s ‘dad’ Jamie – had been duped, victims themselves of the most extraordinary and elaborate deception. It is believed to have been Kira herself who came clean on – where else – social media. In a now deleted post on Instagram on Tuesday morning, thought to have been posted after she was challenged by reporters, she wrote: ‘I’m so sorry. I wasn’t pregnant. There was no baby. I made it up and kept it going way too far. I faked scans, messages, a whole birth story and acted like a doll was a real baby. ‘I know how bad it is. I f***ed up. I just didn’t know how to stop once I started.’ Fulsome in her apologies, she stressed how easy it is to deceive and be deceived. ‘In everyone’s defence, the doll could move. You could change the facial features, arms and legs. You could feed the doll, making it pee or poo.’ She also explained that it was her mother who’d finally rumbled her, when she discovered her granddaughter was, in fact, a lump of moulded plastic and insisted her family had not known what she had done. As to why she ha done it... that’s still anyone’s guess. There is a much used phrase in the west of Scotland of things being the ‘talk of the steamie’ – a reference to the old communal laundries where women would gossip about local goings-on. This one wasn’t just the talk of the steamie but of the whole of Scotland – and the world. Quicker than you can say ‘moveable parts’, the saga of the fake baby went viral, causing a frenzy of speculation. In some parts there was horror, an acknowledgement of the grotesque world we now live in, where the line between what is real and what is fake online has become so blurred as to be non-existent. Concern, too, for Kira and her motives for inventing a whole pregnancy and baby. But there was also a feeding frenzy. Fake accounts, some purporting to be from Kira herself, presenting her as some sort of modern day Virgin Mary, popped up on TikTok and there were claims that she was about to issue a statement. These turned out to be as fake as Bonnie-Leigh. The jokes piled up, along with the disbelief. ‘Did the birth certificate say “Born in China”,’ asked one wag. In the middle of it, the police became involved, with officers from Police Scotland visiting Kira at her home after online abuse prompted concerns for her safety. Locals in Caldercruix were reeling this week as news spread of what had taken place in their midst. Kira grew up and went to primary school here and it is also where she met Jamie. She lives with her family in an end-of-terrace property in a council estate north of the train tracks; a woman there declined to comment on what had happened. Jamie appeared in the doorway of his home with his father but asked reporters to leave. None of the family has commented directly since the scandal broke. What we do know now is that it was a friend, Neave McRobert, who first sounded alarm bells outside the family unit. Neave had attended the gender reveal party (how silly she feels now, she said in an online post), and been party to various messages about the new baby’s health issues. She had even ‘met’ the baby, although she too had been warned off touching her. But it was when Kira started to edit her social media content – deleting all reference to Bonnie-Leigh – that Neave began to realise something very strange was going on. Shee told the Scottish Daily Record: ‘I noticed Kira had deleted every picture and video of Bonnie-Leigh from our chats. ‘I asked her why and she ignored me. I think I asked the baby’s dad, “is this a doll?” and he said, “yes, it’s a doll’’.’ According to Neave, Kira had panicked about keeping the deception going and had invented a whole elaborate back story about Bonnie-Leigh being rushed to hospital. She had even texted her partner to tell him: ‘Bonnie-Leigh died.’ ‘I can’t imagine how he must feel right now and everyone else who has been lied to for months and months,’ said Neave. ‘Everybody believed her. She posted scan photos and even said the baby had a hole in its heart. Then she texted me saying the baby was born. We were all so happy.’ The timescale suggests Kira managed to keep the charade up for a whole week after the supposed ‘birth’. Did her own mother not question why she hadn’t been allowed to hold the baby? Why this child made no sound? Perhaps all these questions will be answered in a Netflix documentary one day but Kira’s own social media posts insist that her mother found the doll (it has been suggested while Kira was in the shower) drawing an end to the deception. Her reaction on discovering this can only be guessed at – if indeed that is how it all went down. The furore, however, marked the beginning of a nightmare for another young woman in Kira’s home village. This week a former Facebook friend agreed to talk to us. She claims that this was not the first time Kira attempted to fake a baby. The last time, in 2023, she did not use a doll but ‘stolen’ images of a child that did not belong to her and used them to announce her happy arrival to certain friends. ‘It was my baby. She stole pictures of my child off my Facebook page and passed them off as her own.’ We have agreed not to identify this young woman, to protect her toddler daughter, but let’s call her Laura. Laura and Kira both grew up in Caldercruix but went to different primary schools. They were Facebook friends but only fleeting acquaintances. ‘I’ve only spoken to her a couple of times, if even that, which is why I have been so shocked to discover what I now have.’ Like everyone else locally, she was astounded when news of the fake baby scandal broke but a few days later, ‘after it started going viral everywhere’ she was contacted by a friend. The friend forwarded screenshots of messages that had been sent by Kira to another friend, back in 2023, showing off a photo of ‘her daughter’ with a caption along the lines of her baby not wanting her to leave for work that day. ‘My friend said, “isn’t this your daughter?”’ Laura was floored. The baby image she was looking at was indeed her own baby girl. ‘I honestly felt sick after seeing it.’ After this, Laura’s partner opened TikTok to find his daughter’s face all over reports about the case, with people questioning whether Kira had faked motherhood before, in 2023, again with a doll. ‘I then commented on Facebook that it wasn’t a doll. This was my daughter.’ Laura started to communicate with this friend of Kira’s, who had been the recipient of the phone message containing pictures of her child. A whole sub-plot was starting to emerge. In 2023, Kira had shared the happy news with her friend, that she’d had a baby girl, called Aurora Rae, and asked her to be godmother. Joyful updates had followed, supported by more glossy pictures. Laura says: ‘I got in touch with this girl, explaining to her that it was my child [in the pictures] and that I had no idea about it. ‘I asked how many photos she had been sent. ‘She said she’d received about 15 or 20 pictures from Kira, starting with images taken from the hospital bed when “her” baby was born, up until she was maybe four or five months old. She sent me loads of the screenshots.’ To her utter horror, every photograph purporting to be of Aurora Rae was actually of Laura’s own child, each image showing her baby a little older. Laura realised that every image had been originally posted, by her, on Facebook. ‘I have a private account and don’t accept people I don’t know but I’d had Kira on it for years and never thought for a second anything bad would come about from it. ‘I don’t know how long Kira had kept this up for but I’ve since discovered that Kira had been sending pictures of my daughter to others too. I have no idea of how many different people received images of my baby and have fallen victim to Kira’s lies. ‘I’ve tried to reach out to Kira for answers but I know she’s never going to answer me and give me a truthful response anyway, so I suppose I’m always going to be left in the dark about the rest of what’s gone on.’ Screenshots of the Facebook images in question have been seen by the Daily Mail and they are identical to the ones on Laura’s own social media pages, including professional baby pictures. ‘This is theft and I hate that my child’s innocent little face has now been dragged into this horrible drama. But my dad’s friend is in the police and they’ve said there is nothing I can do about it,’ says Laura. The law around unauthorised use of other people’s images which have been shared on social media is indeed tricky, unless it can be proved that the images were used for malicious reasons. Yet even having to piece together what has happened here has been deeply traumatic. ‘I’ve had nothing but anxiety about my child’s safety since this has come out, knowing Kira lives so close and I could pass her on the street at any time,’ says Laura. ‘I don’t know what this girl is capable of. I don’t know whether she is ill or...’ Without knowing her story, it’s impossible to know whether Kira needs to be helped – or held to account. She has, as far as we know, never given a full explanation for her actions. One thing is clear, however. This isn’t just a fake baby story that broke the internet. It happened in a small village full of real people.
