Amala Ekpunobi

Dr. Disrespect ADMITS The Disturbing Reason Twitch Banned Him

Mega-popular gaming streamer Dr. Disrespect has confirmed allegations of inappropriate communication with a minor and now seems to be losing everything. Many jumped the gun in support of and in condemnation of Dr. Disrespect without evidence—let’s talk about what we can learn from this horrible situation.

Dr. Disrespect Statement https://twitter.com/DrDisrespect/status/1805668256088572089

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Duration:: 16m
Broadcast on:: 27 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify. The global commerce platform that supercharges your selling, wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/tech, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/tech. A popular streamer by the name of Dr. Disrespect has been accused of messaging a minor inappropriately. And recently, he's confirmed it. This has led to the loss of friends, fans and followers, sponsorships, business deals, and even a seat at a company that he co-founded. Let's talk about it. ♪ Yeah, you better ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ Yeah, you better ♪ All right, guys, let's unpack this Dr. Disrespect situation. I gotta admit, I am new to this space and realm. We talk about gaming a little bit on this channel, but not from this angle. And we're gonna talk about Dr. Disrespect, who was a formerly popular Twitch streamer, who was actually banned from the platform in 2020, with I think about 4 million followers on the platform. Now, people had no reason why exactly he was banned. Many speculated that it was politically motivated, but now we're getting some answers and slowly but surely, the story is developing and getting crazier as it goes on. Now, as I said before, the story is developing and constantly changing, so I hope I'm getting the story on the proper timeline here. But as far as I can tell, this story starts with a former Twitch employee by the name Cody Connors. Now, Cody was apparently around at Twitch when Dr. Disrespect was banned in 2020, and he's been teasing letting the public know why exactly he was banned as they had no idea why. In 2023, Cody was apparently in a band. He was hopping on Twitter telling people that if they sold out his band's shows, he would let them know why Dr. Disrespect was banned off Twitch. Here are the tweets. (upbeat music) A really weird thing to do considering how this story is developing and the fact that it involves inappropriate messages between a minor and a grown man, but I digress. Cody Connors hopped back onto Twitter this month in 2024 saying Dr. Disrespect was banned because he was sexting a minor. The tweet says he got banned because he got caught sexting a minor in the then existing Twitch whispers product. He was trying to meet up with her at Twitch Conn. The powers that be could read in plain text. Case closed gang. So as you can see, that's a crazy allegation that not only was he sexting a minor, but that he had intention to meet up with that minor at an event known as Twitch Conn. And we all know how the story goes when the predator meets up with the minor that he is messaging. But at this point, we had no evidence toward this allegation. So then the public and people who were interested in this story split, some decided to completely disavow Dr. Disrespect without evidence. Others decided to defend him saying that this was politically motivated, that somebody was just coming after Dr. Disrespect because they didn't like him and they didn't like his views. Now, the story takes a turn on the 24th of June. Dr. Disrespect is streaming. He gets a text message and he sort of abruptly ends the stream. And during the stream, he's talking about feeling burnout, wanting to quit social media and possibly indefinitely. - Yeah, no. (beep) like this happens over the weekend. And it just kind of, it's like how many times can I, just, I don't, like I'm actually tired of being on social media. And I've, and I've expressed that over the years chance. So I just, you know, I've always kind of hinted like had be nice to get off and just completely separate, right? - Now that very same day, almost right after that stream, a gaming studio by the name of Midnight Society that was co-founded by Dr. Disrespect, cuts ties with him in a tweet. It reads on Friday evening, we became aware of an allegation against one of our co-founders, Guy Beam, aka Dr. Disrespect. We assumed his innocence and began speaking with parties involved. And in order to maintain our principles and standards as a studio and individuals, we needed to act. For this reason, we are terminating our relationship with Guy Beam immediately. While these facts are difficult to hear and even more difficult to accept, it is our duty to act with dignity on behalf of all individuals involved, especially the 55 developers and families we have employed along with our community of players. So essentially they said they heard the allegations, but they held off on making a judgment until they could find evidence to support these allegations. It seems as though they've alluded to the fact in this tweet that they did find evidence and then decided to cut ties with Dr. Disrespect. That says a lot, but they did an investigation, they seemingly found proof and decided to cut ties with him. It would be nice to have actual evidence posted on the internet, but I guess that's a luxury that not all can get. Now the next day on the 25th, Dr. Disrespect hopped on X and made a post admitting that these allegations were true. We're gonna read part of it. It's very lengthy, so you guys can check it out. It'll be linked in the description. Everyone has been wanting to know why I was banned from Twitch, but for reasons outside of my control, I was not allowed to say anything for the last several years. Now that two former Twitch employees have publicly disclosed the accusations, I can now tell you my side of the story regarding the ban. Were there Twitch whisper messages with an individual minor back in 2017? The answer is yes. Were there real intentions behind these messages? The answer is absolutely not. These were casual mutual conversations that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more. Nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no cries were committed. I never even met the individual. I went through a lengthy arbitration regarding a civil dispute with Twitch, and that case was resolved by a settlement. Let me be clear, it was not a criminal case against me, and no criminal charges have been brought against me. So there you go, you have confirmation, and it makes total sense to me why this man was banned off Twitch. You cannot message minors in an inappropriate fashion as a grown ass man, and think that you're going to get away with it. So bye-bye, Dr. Disrespect. With that being said, I find it interesting that we really don't have that many details in this story. We don't know the gender of the individual, the age of the individual, how inappropriate the messages were, and what was truly going on in their conversations. And that would be good to know, considering that this guy is being dragged out into the public square right now, and being flogged for all to see. He says that nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, and no crimes were committed, and I would love to see whether or not that's actually the case, especially since you had the allegation from the former Twitch employee, that Dr. Disrespect was trying to meet up with this minor at TwitchCon. Now, when his message, Dr. Disrespect says there were no real intentions, but what does that mean if you're allegedly trying to set up a time in place to meet with a minor? Again, allegedly. And this is not the first time that Dr. Disrespect has found himself in hot water. In 2017, the very same year that we now know, since he's admitted, he was messaging that minor, he admitted to cheating on his wife in a huge public scandal. - Kind of have a little bit of an announcement. I just want to be completely transparent with you guys. As you guys know, I have a beautiful family, and a wife and kid, and I want to be transparent that I've been unfaithful, and I'm probably going to be taking some time away, time off to focus on what's going on in this guy's life around 2017. - Now, mind you, I want to be very clear in saying that cheating on your wife and inappropriately messaging a minor are two separate things that I think we weigh very differently in our society. I just want to give you a view of the timeline of what's going on in this guy's life around 2017. And since his admission online, things have not been going well for this man. Of course, naturally, as this news comes out, your friends are going to start to publicly disown you and disavow your actions, and that has started for him most definitely. Kai Sinat dramatically unfollowed him while he was streaming on Twitch. - An individual minor back in 2017. The answer is, yeah. - Whoa! What the (beep) - He's looking up how old he is, 42 years old. - 20, 24, 3, 7, 42, minus 7, it's 35, this niggas! What the (beep) - Kai, of course, went on to publicly unfollowed Dr. Disrespect while he was streaming so that all could see he did not support that behavior. Then we have Tim the Tapman, who is a friend of Dr. Disrespect, making his own video to disavow him. - Wow, this is absolutely insane, bro. Everything I'm seeing. I have known Doc for a while now. We've played games for years, and seeing everything that is spiraling right now is a very difficult thing for me personally, and I'm sure for a lot of y'all out there. I think for me, I know a lot of you are asking, Tim, what are you feeling, Tim, what are you feeling? My bottom line, I think, is if what he is saying, where he said that he was messaging a minor and it would sometimes lead to teeter on inappropriate, if he knew that was a minor, and those were the messages being sent. I cannot support that. - And then lastly, just to give you a full picture, a streamer by the name of Nick Merx also made his own video about Dr. Disrespect, and Nick Merx has long defended Dr. Disrespect, so here's his take. - Here we go, checking in. I'm seeing everything on Twitter, and I read through Doc's tweet, and in that very tweet, he basically confirms that he was texting an underage girl and it went weird sometimes, and look, just to be blind and straightforward, man, that's inexcusable, it's unacceptable, right? There's no excuse for something like that, and I can't support it. Hang on, honey, doing this, I'm talking to Twitter. I can't support it, I can't defend it, and look, the boys and I are torn up over it too, man, because we played a lot of games with a guy and it feels a little weird, but what can you do, you know? - And of course from there, he's lost a ton of business deals, including a business deal that he had with the 49ers, people who had different Dr. Disrespect things going on in their games or getting rid of those different features. He's also, of course, lost his company, Midnight Society that he co-founded, and I'm sure there will be more in the wake of all this news coming out, and it makes sense, if you are a grown man, especially a married grown man with children, you probably should not be engaging with minors on the internet. And to have known that you were messaging a minor, and to have allowed those messages to lean into an inappropriate nature is insane to me. But as I said before, I would still like to know more information about this case before making a conclusive statement about this man. You have people on the internet who are running around throwing out the word pedo or a pedophile when we don't even know the age of the individual that he was engaging with. Accusing somebody of being a pedophile is an extremely strong allegation. And while I am happy to see that we as a society can come together against predators, we need to be accurate in our statements about people and in our judgments of their actions. And so far, we don't know too much about his actions, yet we are making these allegations, and to me, that is insane. And of course, there's some hypocrisy here as well. Twitch as a streaming platform allows a lot of sexual content from both men and women to exist on the platform. And this sexual content is peddled out to minors. I'm not sure what they have to say about that. Also, many are making the statement that if the young person that Dr. Disrespect was speaking to happen to be 17 and 11 months, we would call him a predator. While the day she turned 18, society would be cheering her on if she published and only fans. These are interesting and valid criticisms that I feel like open up a broader conversation about our culture and our sexualization of young people. However, they do not absolve Dr. Disrespect of his actions. He engaged with a minor. He allowed those conversations to turn inappropriate, and that's what matters. And of course, there are varying degrees as to how bad of an action that actually is, but none of us have the evidence to talk about it. So it is so wild to me that people are coming out, calling him a pedophile or defending his actions or saying the girl was only 17 or she was too young to be on the internet. We don't know, we don't have any evidence. Nobody's seen the messages outside of, I'm sure, Dr. Disrespect and the Twitch employees who went over his case and made the decision to have him banned. And that's about all I can say about Dr. Disrespect himself given that I don't have any evidence. I have not seen the messages. I do not know what he was doing or who he was engaging with. And what's really interesting about this story is that before we even had his admission posted on X, people were jumping into two band wagons. One was backing the allegations, calling him a pedophile, calling him a predator, saying he deserved to be banned. The other was just vehemently defending him and saying that he had done nothing wrong. And this was a politically motivated attack on Dr. Disrespect. How is it possible that we got these two groups of people formed without having any evidence as to what happened? It's because people tend to jump to conclusions based on their own personal bias and their own personal blinders. And maybe we should wait and hold off until we have actual information before making such a large judgment on a person. And we need to be even handed in the justice that we dole out to people. There are men and women all over the internet right now who are engaging in this sort of behavior or even worse and yet they are flying under the radar or they're being acknowledged and allowed to continue their actions on the internet. We need to continue to protect and advocate for minors who are experiencing this sort of stuff on the internet because it is a rampant problem. And while I'm glad that we've all decided that this is a horrible thing and that these minors deserve justice, we need to make sure that we are actually handing out that justice to people who deserve it. In this case, given the admission from Dr. Disrespect, it seems like the justice was evenly handed out. But you can't go jumping on bandwagon in other cases where you don't have evidence. And that implies for both parties, people who wanna bring the person down and people who want to support them in the wake of allegations, just wait. I don't know what the issue is with people being able to wait on the internet. I don't know where you guys are watching from, but in this country, you are innocent until proven guilty. So if you don't have any information or evidence in either direction, maybe you should shut the fuck up. And you know what guys? I think I'm just gonna end my little rant there. As I said, this is not a space that I particularly am familiar with, but I figured since this was such a big story, I would weigh in a little bit with the little information that I have. If you have thoughts on this, drop them in the comments down below. As always, I encourage healthy debate on this platform. So if you disagree with anything said in this video, duke it out, but do so respectfully. And if you like this video, like, subscribe, click the notification bell to be notified every single time I post a video for you guys, which is every day, and I will see you next time. Bye, guys. ♪ Yeah, you better ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ Yeah, you better ♪