A woman who simulated a pregnancy and the birth of a child using a plastic doll has explained her actions by stating she could not disclose suffering a miscarriage. Kira Cousins, 23, garnered international attention after it was revealed she deceived her boyfriend and family into believing she had been pregnant and given birth.
Ms Cousins, formerly a supermarket worker, utilized a prosthetic to simulate her pregnancy and purchased a lifelike doll, which she named Bonnie-Leigh Joyce, to represent the arrival of her "daughter." She has acknowledged her actions were wrong but maintained the ruse was a result of her inability to inform her then-partner, Jamie Gardner, about her miscarriage.
"I couldn’t tell him. I did lose a child. I’d tried to tell him when I first lost the child," Ms Cousins told the Sunday Mail. "I still have messages on my phone which said, ‘Jamie, we need to sit down’. But I couldn’t speak to him about anything."
She stated that she wore an artificial baby bump for months, shared fabricated baby scan images, and hosted a gender reveal party where the couple celebrated the supposed arrival of a daughter. Ms Cousins also posted pictures of baby clothes and gifts. She explained that she allowed Mr. Gardner to continue believing she was pregnant, and the deception escalated because she feared telling him the truth.
"I think there was a bit of fear and shock as well. I’d gone through that myself. How do you tell someone that you’ve already gone through all that by yourself?" Ms Cousins said. "Before all this, we had also fallen out and it was really bad. He hadn’t wanted the baby at first and I think that didn’t help. He had gone from that to ‘here we go, we are actually going to have it’ and then to wanting it."
Mr. Gardner, however, disputed her claims, stating he had no recollection of her attempting to tell him about a miscarriage. "If I had ever known that was really a doll, I’d have run off sooner. I’ve not got a clue what really happened to be honest," he told the newspaper.
Ms Cousins claimed to have given birth to a baby weighing 5lb 4oz, but the deception was exposed when suspicions arose about the baby never crying. "It all came out days after we had picked Jamie’s relatives up from a birthday party. The doll had been in the back of the car. I had been thinking, ‘How do I get out of this now’," she recounted.
"When the kids got out of the car, they said to their mum, ‘That was a doll’.
When she eventually revealed to Mr. Gardner that the baby was a doll, he allegedly called her a "psycho" and left, ending their relationship. Mr. Gardner has disputed that Ms. Cousins informed him directly, stating he did not learn the truth from her.
Ms Cousins also commented that those who believed she had given birth should have realized it was a doll sooner, adding, "If they didn’t, they were stupid."