Nobody could have foreseen what resulted from hundreds of thousands of dollars scammed and a ban on gambling.
On September 17, 2022, popular Twitch streamer Sliker, known for gambling streams, was found to have scammed people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The total amount he scammed people for was tallied up to be greater than $250 000.
The prevalence of gambling on livestream sites like Twitch and the moral issues with promoting gambling to viewers have been ongoing discussions in live streaming communities. After the Sliker scam was revealed, Twitch finally took a stance on gambling and made a Twitter statement that banned most types of gambling on their site. Streamers’ reactions to this statement are where the gambling discussions took a turn.
When a popular streamer named Mizkif took a jab at streamers who were unhappy with Twitch’s decision to ban gambling streams in a now-deleted Tweet, a streamer named Trainwreck, who’s known for gambling large amounts of money, said:
“are you going to send maya and mitch to railroad and blackmail me like you did those girls to cover up all those sexual assaults you f**king scum bag piece of sh*t.”
He followed this Tweet with:
“let me be even more clear, mizkif didn’t assault the women, he orchestrated the cover ups for his friends.”
What used to be a debate over the merits of gambling and its impact on young audiences became a catalyst that reignited the discussion of multiple sexual assault allegations against a certain streamer named CrazySlick. Following Trainwreck’s Tweet, streamer Adrianah Lee, who had previously posted a Twitlonger explaining an incident between her and CrazySlick in July of 2021, went live on Twitch to expand upon Trainwreck’s claims.
In her livestream, Adrianah explained that after she passed out in a room during a party, CrazySlick kept coming into the room to touch her in ways she felt uncomfortable with. When planning to go public about what happened to her and the discomfort she felt around CrazySlick, Mizkif’s girlfriend at the time Maya Higa and another streamer named Mitch Jones (the Maya and Mitch mentioned in Trainwreck’s Tweet) went to her house. They encouraged her to downplay what happened to her in order to protect CrazySlick. Adrianah agreed only if they wouldn’t exclude her from their group of friends and streamers. Despite downplaying what happened with CrazySlick in her original statement on Twitlonger from a year ago, the group still stopped talking to her.
CrazySlick’s inappropriate behaviour has been consistent enough that multiple women have come forward on Twitter with stories of him either messaging them disgusting things or being touchy and forward with them. Whenever this type of inappropriate behaviour was brought up by CrazySlick’s friends, many of them played it off as “Slick just being Slick.”
Around the time Adrianah posted her Twitlonger, a clip of Mizkif downplaying Adrianah’s experience and sexual assault in general circulated. In the clip Mizkif said:
“I don’t think there’s a single person who doesn’t hang out with [CrazySlick] anymore because of what happened. […] Worst comes to worst of it, it’s f**king sexual harrassment. From what you can deem of it, it’s sexual harrassment, whatever. [It’s] on a low scale, it’s not really a big deal. I don’t think people really gave a sh*t.”
Especially in a MeToo era, this whole situation captures a lot of women’s experiences in male-dominated fields like live streaming; when women come forward with valid experiences and issues, their experiences are downplayed by the men surrounding them. Men continue to treat crimes like sexual assault as “minor drama” or “overreactions” that ruin their reputations rather than focusing on the lives of the actual victims. A lot of people surrounding the perpetrators brush allegations off by using excuses like: “this is just his personality,” “it was just a joke,” or that age-old “boys will be boys” saying. This predatory and sexist behaviour arises so often in male-dominated spaces like the Twitch gaming community, and it needs to change.