In 2020, Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm, near the height of his fame, suddenly got banned from Twitch. At the time, the livestreaming giant did not provide a reason. The Twitch community was baffled. This set off a chain reaction of reporters – myself included – digging desperately to unearth the cause of Beahm’s sudden exile. For years, however, authentic confirmation proved impossible to come by. Then, last Friday, a former Twitch employee just tweeted it out. A couple follow up reports from The Verge and Bloomberg later, Beahm admitted to everything on Twitter.
The former Twitch employee’s tweets, as well as the reports, backed up a story I’d heard from several secondhand sources over the years: Beahm exchanged explicit messages with a minor via Twitch’s DM-like “whisper” system in 2017. When Twitch caught wind of this years after the fact in 2020, the company moved swiftly to ban him. This, in part, is why the explanation was so hard to verify: Sources have told me over the years that Twitch did not execute Beahm’s ban through standard channels, and only a small handful of employees were present when the decision was made. Documentation was also exceedingly scant. Without access to firsthand sources – who could have given away their identity simply by being the lone person out of such a small group to speak – these accusations were too severe to publish. They did not pass legal muster and involved a victim who could potentially be endangered, which left reporters in the difficult situation of knowing about something without being able to state it publicly. What followed was a long, frustrating holding pattern.
When former Twitch employee Cody Conners tweeted about the reason for the ban on Friday, the machine whirred back to life. Though Conners was not a firsthand source, a version of the story was out there, which motivated sources with actual knowledge of the situation to speak more candidly. After that, dominos fell in short order. Midnight Society, the video game developer Beahm helped found, cut ties with him yesterday. Today, Beahm addressed the accusations.
"Lets cut the fucking bullshit, as you know there's no filter with me,” began the 42-year-old streamer who’d spent previous days denying all wrongdoing and previous months accusing Twitch of being “slithery disgusting purple snakes” for banning him. “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 crimes 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 ever been brought against me.”
Beahm went on to take responsibility from a “moral standpoint,” saying that he never should have “entertained these conversations to begin with” as an “adult, a husband, and a father,” but then later on he vociferously decried claims that this makes him a “fucking predator or pedophile.” And despite grandiose proclamations about potentially driving off “into the sunset” during a stream yesterday, he added in his statement that he’s “not fucking going anywhere.” Instead, he’s going to go on an “extended” vacation with his family and then resume doing his thing.
All of this raises the question: Is Dr Disrespect cooked? Yes and no.
Companies will want to distance themselves from him. Some already have. In addition to Midnight Society, Turtle Beach – which partnered with Beahm on a headset and whose logo he displayed prominently during his streams – has removed all mentions of him from its website. “We will not be continuing our partnership with Guy Beahm/DrDisRespect,” a Turtle Beach representative told Aftermath. A representative of FanDuel, another company whose logo adorns Beahm’s streams, told Aftermath that its agreement with Beahm ended in May. Over the years, Beahm has also partnered with larger, more mainstream organizations like the San Francisco 49ers and Mountain Dew, the latter of which told Bloomberg that it hasn’t worked with him “in some time.” While I do not have inside information here, I would be extremely surprised if either organization decided to collaborate with him again in the future. Big companies have a line when it comes to scandals, and indiscretions involving minors tend to cross it.
But ardent Dr Disrespect fans – as well as the portion of the Twitter commentariat that always appears during moments like these as though cursed by the gods with the Sisyphian task of defending every predator ever to walk the earth – have repeatedly sought to discredit claims against their favorite middle-aged man who yells at video games. At every turn, they’ve asked for more evidence, even as companies with a vested financial interest in keeping Beahm around have conducted their own investigations and dropped him. The truth is, no amount of evidence will ever satisfy these people. If reporters manage to confirm documentation that’s been circulating through back channels, fans will say it’s falsified. If the DMs in question leak, they’ll probably say those are fake too – or that they’re not actually that bad, or some other variation on that theme. If the victim comes forward, they’ll be harassed endlessly.
These fans will continue working ‘round the clock to discredit claims against a man they perceive to be Their Boy, who in turn barely perceives them at all. In his own way, Beahm has joined them, copping to the substance of the allegations but vehemently denying the severity. He just had a little grooming, as a treat. It was mutual, even though a minor cannot consent. It is somehow not the same thing as predation.
Other big content creators have been accused of grooming and/or additional scandalous actions. Despite this, they have maintained sizable fandoms. And this isn’t even Beahm’s first rodeo, though previous incidents were nowhere near as severe. In 2017 he was caught cheating on his wife and had to publicly apologize while out of character. In 2019 he and his crew brought a camera into an E3 bathroom and filmed others without their permission, in violation of both Twitch’s rules and, potentially, the law. Diehard fans barely batted an eyelash. Many ate it up.
This is part of a larger pattern online. Content creators with sufficiently large audiences get near-infinite chances. In part, it’s the reason platforms like Kick and Rumble exist. They provide a home to content creators who’ve taken things too far on or off Twitch; they keep streamers around despite overt racism, sexism, and homophobia and even after incidents that nearly constitute crimes.
Now, with that said, Kick is much more ban-happy than it was during its laissez faire early days, and it recently banned two streamers for allegedly soliciting minors. On top of that, YouTube, Beahm’s current platform of choice, has yet to comment on his actions and may not even ban or discipline him. There is a very real chance that, whenever Beahm decides to return from vacation, we might be looking at a business-as-usual situation on the world’s biggest online video platform.
But the Kick ecosystem is evidence that certain audiences accept – and even applaud – boundary-pushing behavior in defiance of social norms and acceptable treatment of others. On Kick, Rumble, and in certain corners of YouTube, there’s something akin to an alternate universe of streamers, one that grew out of Twitch’s earlier, edgier tendencies but which that company has since sought to squelch. The core appeal of these creators is their ability to get away with shit. To harass and bother, to say the most out-of-pocket things they can think of, to push limits until all lines in the sand have eroded.
There’s obvious trainwreck appeal here, but some fans also look to these creators aspirationally, as a sort of avatar. If a big content creator can embrace an unhinged lifestyle and get whatever they want, maybe viewers can too. These sorts of viewers will always support somebody like Beahm, a 42-year-old man who behaves like a 16-year-old boy, because they see themselves in him. And though Beahm will probably lose viewership over this in aggregate regardless of whether he stays on YouTube or ends up somewhere else, the viewers who stick around will likely become bigger fans than ever. Because ultimately, this is not about morals or principles; it’s about people forming such a strong attachment to a creator that they feel like attacks against him are attacks against them as well and platforms that recognize they’ll make more money than they’ll lose by harnessing that ugly energy.
So Dr Disrespect is cooked in that he’s losing deals, sponsors, and an entire company, as well as his reputation as somebody who has not engaged in inappropriate conversation with a minor, a stunningly low bar to clear. He’s cooked in the mainstream sense. But he’s made a calculation that he can step away, take a breather, and return to an online audience large enough to continue supporting him. And he’s probably right.
