What a difference a scandal and a few months can make …
Alex Day, current internet pariah, has just dropped a doozy of a video on YouTube. It’s an interesting sort of thing — he looks like he’s aged considerably, if that means anything, and it’s long. 31:21 is excessive for any sort of video unless there is some real soul searching going on, which, in this case, is ultimately debatable. It’s not NMR’s job to forgive or absolve anyone (though sometimes we condemn them — we’re like Torquemada that way), but at the very least we figured we could break down what Alex has to say into digestable chunks so you could make up your own mind as to what’s to be done with all this mess.
If you’re unfamiliar with Alex’s story specifically, here is the short of it: Around March, when Tom Milsom’s story was making headlines about a relationship with an underage girl, Alex Day voluntarily had himself removed from The Vlog Bros. record label for mysterious issues of a similar nature. Eventually it came out on Tumblr that a few different young girls felt like they’d been pressured by Alex into sexual acts.
Does the internet community at large forgive? Should it? Do you? Here is the breakdown of this massive video; decide for yourself:
1:46 — Alex admits he hasn’t wanted to talk about his side of the story. This is both good and bad — a LOT of time has passed since March, when all this started going down. Maybe it’s been reflective, but it sounds like he was just waiting for the internet’s rage to pass. Rage shouldn’t just “go away” on things like this.
2:16 — Alex explains what happened in the vaguest of terms.
2:53 — “I’ve never really cared what you think of me … if you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe.” Oof.
3:08 — His best friend Charlie McDonnell quit on him and decided he couldn’t call Alex a friend anymore. That sounds like a pretty serious condemnation from someone incredibly close to the situation.
3:44 — “I don’t feel like my defense will really be listened to…”
4:03 — “What I’ve learned …” Okay, good start. “… over the last two weeks …” Oooh, not as good.
4:42 — Sarcasm alert! This video is already so off the rails I would have tuned out a long time ago. There is a lot of humility yet to be gained.
5:37 — Finally we get down to the meat of what happened.
7:35 — First “I’m sorry” — to one of the Tumblr posters.
9:38 — “If that seems like I was hitting on her, that sucks. But I just had her best video-making intentions at heart.” (Editorial cough)
10:20 — “I don’t remember hitting on her at all … she’s 15 …” “She’s a lovely person, but I’m not attracted to her.”
12:10 — “A dozen women have said that it happened so he (Alex) must be a massive rapist.” Alex defends himself by saying the actual sexual assault stories just get lumped in with stories where he allegedly merely hit on girls on Facebook and was rebuffed. And it goes on like this.
14:43 — Okay, we’re halfway in and we’ve still only heard two stories about girls where absolutely nothing physical happened. His choosing to concentrate on these two stories makes me wonder how bad the other stories must be that he doesn’t actionably try to explain them.
15:08 — “There are three people who said — not that I had sex with them, but we ‘did stuff.’ I’m not going to go into detail about that.”
15:24 — “All I can say to that is I didn’t mean to make anyone feel pressured and that I’m really sorry for making anyone feel pressured.”
15:38 — “The only thing I can do at this point is think about it and learn from it … as I’ve already started to.”
16:14 — “To go into detail about those experiences (actual sexual accusations) makes me very uncomfortable.”
16:41 — Alex declares that the “proof” he has that he didn’t actually sexually harass/assault anyone isn’t the “point of this video.”
17:03 — “It doesn’t matter.” (Apparently in reference to that “proof stuff.”)
17:28 — “If they say they felt pressured (the accusors) … then that’s how they felt. … I could believe that they were lying …”
14:48 — “In most cases, it feels pretty reciprocal, man.” (The key word there is “most.”)
18:12 — “I refuse to believe they’re just lying about it for attention or whatever …”
18:24 — “I wish they’d told me (that they felt that way), instead of the internet. In a couple of cases they did … but obviously those conversations were not to those people’s satisfactions.”
18:40 — “They thought I was just a monster that wasn’t learning my lesson and the only way for me to learn it was to make it this public shameful thing and I’ve definitely learned it now so … that helped, in that sense.”
18:52 — “I’m grateful for everything that I’ve gone through … what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all of that bollocks.”
19:03 — “I feel good about my life.”
19:31 — “People focus on what consent is and how to tell when someone is being consensual — I’ll go into that another time.”
19:35 — “What I think is important is more educating people on how to treat each other … the biggest thing I’ve learned is I’m not just going to try and have sex with people.”
20:08 — “I’ve made a few YouTube videos about how I’ve been a shitty person in the past.”
20:44 — “I hadn’t done anything new that was awful … on that scale anyway …”
21:18 — “When I stopped seeing people as ‘What can I get from them?’ there were some people I realized I didn’t want to be friends with any more.”
22:15 — “There are going to be many, many people who don’t think this (explanation? apology? defense?) is going to be good enough.”
22:55 — “I guess you can say, (for) maybe a few people, me making this video has made their lives worse.”
23:05 — “My hope is that more people will be eased by it.”
23:20 — “I’m sick of standing by and not trying to ease it, not trying to make things a little bit clearer.”
23:25 — “I’m not a rapist … I’m not a sexual predator. I’ve never forced anyone to do anything if I understood they didn’t want to.”
23:45 — “Lindsey Williams is sort of the main person who champions my dismantlement from YouTube … my removal from your existences … used to be one of my best friends. And I still care about her a lot.” (dog barks, Alex grins) “The universe is objecting to me saying this.”
24:24 — “I definitely took her for granted in a lot of ways … and, uh, I would never do that again.”
25:04 — (rehashing Lindsay’s 2nd Tumblr post) “I know that if I’d said ‘no,’ that he (Alex) would have stopped … The point is that she felt like she couldn’t.”
25:56 — “What do we do from here? We can either keep complaining about this forever, umm, or we can try and figure out what we can learn from it. And I’d like to start there.”
26:10 — “At some point soon, I’m going to make a video about where we can go from here … as a community …”
26:48 — (after saying he was going to post this online) “I’m not going to read the comments, you can say whatever you like …”
26:53 — “I’d like to clear something up briefly and I probably shouldn’t be saying this … because it’s like well-kept secret of the perpetrators of YouTube … but, um, a lot of people have come under scrutiny for deleting YouTube comments. Like a lot of people think I delete my YouTube comments if anyone mentions ‘the scandal’ or stuff like that … If you’ve ever watched my videos, you should know I don’t care enough to spend my time doing that … I don’t want to sit for hours on the internet trying to censor people … so YouTube has this feature called a ‘Blacklist.’ Basically how it works is that you put words into the comment section, like you put banned words, basically, and if anyone comments with those words … they won’t show up. Like their comments will automatically become ‘pending for approval’ … So if you wrote a comment calling me an asshole, and it didn’t show up, that’s probably why. It’s not because I saw it and deleted it, it’s because I got YouTube to sort of do it for me.”
28:15 — “I’m going to keep making videos as long as I have things to say … and I do have more things to say.”
28:32 — “I didn’t script it (his video) or think about what I was going to say, really.”
28:50 — “At some point you just have to start sticking up for yourself.”
29:15 — “Someone that I care about a lot recently said to me that I shouldn’t be on the internet because I make people feel vulnerable … I make people feel unsafe. And I realized, ‘that’s my fault.’ It’s not their fault for saying I’m like this awful person, it’s my fault for not trying to correct them. And I didn’t correct them because I didn’t care.”
29:35 — “I keep losing friends, people are constantly unfriending me every day or every week and they don’t tell me why. I suddenly had this moment of insight where I thought, ‘It’s my fault.’ They don’t hear anything to go on — they hear all these awful things about me and they just have nothing in my defense.”
30:24 — “If you’re upset by this or offended by this or of you’re angry by this, then I’m really sorry. I think the best thing to do would be to not watch my videos again … it’s probably not going to get any better for you. But I didn’t mean any harm … as always.”
Wow, half an hour and a total of three “sorrys.” And there were at least 13 incidents that he could find of issue, so there you go. Sometimes if you give someone enough rope, I guess they hang themselves. The YouTube community has already supplied a whole bag of “nopes” over this video — many won’t even bother watching it:
I haven’t watched Alex Day’s new video but nope nope nope nope. You are not a part of this community anymore. What. The. Hell.
— Hannah Witton (@hannahwitton) October 5, 2014
Alex Day belittled, pressured and generally exploited me when I was at my most vulnerable. so STOP telling me how I should feel.
— Lex (@lexcanroar) October 6, 2014
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t post a link to Connor Manning’s response to the vid. Several Tumblr accounts are posting full transcripts of Alex’s response so as not to contribute views. It’s up to you if you want to go that route, but make sure you don’t take the above quotes completely out of the context (for better or worse) that Alex makes them in.
Probably some consideration should have gone into his comments — because a lot of them come off as … icky. I don’t know if redemption is available in this case, but with the Sam Pepper stuff running concurrently … this feels like it’s not a great time to have this discussion. Alex probably should have waited a while longer. But, ultimately, that’s for you to decide.
Share this article because it continues that discussion Alex feels our community apparently needs to have.
Oh, and by the way, I have even seen one of the people who said he shouldn’t come back into the YouTube community share one of their videos with a former friend of one of my bullies from the past.
Although I hate the idea of Alex Day doing what he was accused of doing, I will continue to watch any more videos that he makes as I will judge them for how good they are as videos without judging him as a person. If a girl had been accused of this all, then I doubt she would have difficulty being forgiven straight away. Anyway, I understand why some people have stopped watching him, and I don’t even have a YouTube account myself. But I was bullied for a lot of my life by people who most people probably thought of as ordinary people, and seriously, the sense of anger that made me feel is still with me, and will never leave me. Fortunately, I had friends who could be with me so that these bullies would stop picking on me because they could see that I was on my own, but for some time that wasn’t the case. But the people who bullied me are probably now living completely normal lives, being liked by most people and happy to hate Alex Day if they have heard of him just as much as anyone who has never bullied anybody is. They weren’t people thought to be bad people, just normal ordinary people to most people. People who were trusted because of things that made them look good in society, like, as a couple of examples, their middle class accents or that they came from families who had a decent amount of money. A person with videos on You Tube, who I hadn’t thought until then had usually spoke about these kinds of matters on You Tube from London, which is where I’m from, who ironically I think I first came across through a comment on one of Alex Day’s videos, maybe because one of the people who liked one of her videos had commented on it, made a video saying we should all not watch people who were accused of certain abuse. I envy people who say that if have the privilege to be able to make decisions like that, instead of thinking about how many people live ordinary lives having bullied people, not doing anything as serious as what Alex Day was accused of, but to me it is still serious enough to matter. I doubt those people have experienced that bullying, and would have probably done it to me too, it’s hard to imagine many people not doing it. But they would have probably just not realised the seriousness of it.
The question of forgiveness is an interesting and complex one. I don’t know if I have the right to forgive or not forgive Day. I’m not his victim. I have the right not to like or trust him again, however. I don’t think that Day can ever become a “good” or “decent” person – it’s too late for that, he’s an abuser – but since we don’t currently have the death penalty for all sexual offences, we’re going to have to live alongside him as society. This doesn’t mean he has to be forgiven. it does mean that we have to work out what it means to live alongside sexual offenders, unless we choose to increase all sentencing for such crimes to live imprisonment or execution.
Does Day deserve live imprisonment or execution? I don’t know. I don’t know what to be done. I do think there are a lot more young men like him than we would want to readily admit, though. The vast, vast majority of which go unpunished and never ever have to self-reflect, especially if their actions (such a pressuring a girlfriend) don’t fall under the legal definition of rape, or is too subtle for their girlfriends / boyfriends to clearly identify as abuse.
Maybe it was just at my high school where there was the guy who “jokingly” grabbed girls’ breasts; the teenage boys who would pressure their girlfriends into make out with each other; the photos of girls send around without their permission; bets made on when people would lose their virginity; people having sex under the age of 18… IDK.
A large difference, and why we’re taking such an extended focus and strong stance against these people, is that, if allowed, they are directly connected to their audience 24/7 and will meet with them in public 100x more than, say, Matt Damon. They are much, much closer to their audience than the celebrities of other mediums.
That means the accountability has to be that much more stringent, and outlets like ourselves have to be much more vocal and zero-tolerance. It’s a tide of bad behavior, but there’s a much larger group of people in the YouTube community who are adults –including YouTube itself!– and who simply need to consistently tell the kids that there are consequences to their actions.
That is a very good point – it is a very different community and form of interaction to those previously known. I’m absolutely all for the community never letting Day back into the fold and I think there should (ideally) be legal repercussions to his behaviour. Personally, I’m still uncomfortable with the idea that anyone outside of Day’s individuals have the right to ‘forgive’ him or not… the only time I think that makes sense at a collective level is a crime like genocide. Rather, I think the issue is one of trust. You and much of the Youtube community (including myself) don’t trust Day to enter back into the community… I think that is absolutely fair. We also have the right to not like, even to hate, Day. Samantha Geimer has forgiven Roman Polanski. That doesn’t mean I have to think of him as anything other than a loathsome human being, whose career I refuse to support. I don’t know if I can say that I personally don’t forgive Polanski though, his his crime(s) – however heinous – did not directly effect me.
I agree that people from my high school who pressured girlfriends, groped, or generally harassed or abused, are not in the public light to the degree (if whatsoever) that Alex Day is. I’d be all for more bullying victims and those who have suffered abuse from partners to testify in court, though I can also understand why this so rarely happens, especially when the victim can’t even be sure whether offences will meet a legal criteria.
I do know that in the absence of execution for sex offences, some portion of society will have to live alongside Alex Day. Hopefully this won’t be the Youtube community. But the young man himself will continue, for the moment at least, to exist. I think accountability is absolutely the first prerogative. I would like to think that Day might come to a place where he has the self-awareness to realise the true heinousness of his actions and reach a place of appropriate guilt and shame in which he steps back and never repeats his behaviour. I could see an argument that he has crossed the moral event horizon. Certainly, I don’t think he can ever become a *good* or a *nice* person, but hopefully he can become a human being who deserves some kind of legitimate place in the society outside of Youtube. In the short-time, I think punishment and shaming are important. In the long-term, I think accountability must be balanced with compassion. He is a human being, not a monster. Just a very shitty one.
Good article, thank you