Did Mom in Unknown Number Tell the Truth? Director Reveals What She Thinks (Exclusive)

A hit Netflix documentary features an interview with the Michigan mother who infamously sent her daughter a litany of anonymous bullying text messages in which she explains why she did what she did. But was she telling the truth?

Kendra Licari pleaded guilty in 2023 to two counts of stalking a minor after she sent harassing texts to her daughter, Lauryn, and Lauryn’s boyfriend, Owen McKenny, over the course of nearly two years.

The case was the subject of Netflix’s Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, which featured interviews with Kendra, Lauryn, McKenny and several others involved.

In it, Kendra claims that she did not send the initial text messages to Lauryn, which called her relationship with McKenny into question, but did send subsequent ones that preyed on her daughter’s insecurities and even encouraged her to “kill yourself.”

Kendra says that she initially wanted to get to the bottom of who sent the opening texts — which both law enforcement and Lauryn believe to be Kendra. Then she began to “spiral.”

“It was a spiral,” Kendra says. “Kind of a snowball effect. I don’t think I knew how to stop.”

Skye Borgman, the director of Unknown Number, tells PEOPLE that Kendra was interviewed for five hours.

“I think it was important to me to get Kendra’s perspective out there, and it was more important to get the kids’ perspective out there, but to hear from her and to hear what her answers are was something that I felt was really beneficial to the documentary,” Borgman says. “Weighing whether or not those things are true or not, I can’t really judge that 100%.”

Borgman says during the interview, Kendra repeated herself multiple times and that not everything made it in to the final cut.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

“I felt like the clearest answers that she gave to things were what eventually made it into the documentary,” Borgman says.

In the documentary, Kendra claims she was in an “awful place mentally,” and said that her own previous sexual trauma began to reemerge as Lauryn got older.

“When I was 17, I was raped and as my daughter was hitting those teenage years I got scared, very scared,” Kendra says. “I didn’t want her to go through that process that I did and I think that really led to me not knowing how to handle things.”