Pearl says she may sue her Black former podcast co-host who quit for comments likening her YouTube business to a 'plantation'

• Podcaster and commentator Sa Ra Garvey cut ties with anti-feminist creator Pearl.
• He accused her of having a "colonialist" mindset, and not paying her Black co-hosts appropriately.

Anti-feminist podcaster Pearl says she may sue her former co-host Sa Ra Garvey after he dramatically cut ties with her last week.

In a 20-minute video posted on Friday, Garvey alleged that Pearl underpays the Black creators on her podcast "The Pregame," and has a "colonialist" mindset. He compared her content business to a "plantation."

In a message to Insider, Pearl described Garvey's claims about how she pays people as "defamatory and false" and suggested she intends to pursue legal action against him. She said Garvey has "had an agenda against me for months."

The claim and Pearl's response shines a light on a contentious part of the creator economy, where people often work outside of normal employee-employer relationships. Hannah Pearl Davis, who is known as just Pearl to her audience, is a prominent but controversial creator whose reach has boomed in recent months, as detailed in a recent profile by Insider.

Garvey, who is British, said in the video that he and Davis decided to make a podcast together when she moved to London from Chicago.

He said he agreed because she was making content similar to that of the controversial dating YouTuber Kevin Samuels, who he admired, and who died last year. Garvey said that death left "a vacuum within the manosphere space" for Davis to fill.

He said he used to work for Davis on a pay-per-appearance basis, but had recently been offered a different arrangement.

He said Davis proposed that he work 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. days in exchange for 30% of the videos' ad revenue, but no fixed salary. He said he considered the offer too little.

He did not provide any proof of the arrangement. He did not respond to Insider's requests for comment, but in a subsequent interview with YouTuber Anton Daniels he alluded to sharing more information soon.

Garvey said he considered the figure too low, and further alleged that Davis offered other Black creators less, though he didn't provide evidence of those claims.

"I may be a lot of things, but I'm not an idiot," Garvey said, characterizing the contracts. "Pearl has people working on her, quote unquote, plantation for absolute pittance."

Davis told Insider that Garvey's statements about her employees' contracts were "defamatory and false," and that Garvey "made assumptions based on of little information." She declined to share any details herself, citing the privacy of the people concerned.

"We do not take defamation lightly and we will be pursuing this to the fullest extent of the law," she said. "Due to that I may have to wait on my video."

Davis said she would not share information about the contracts "as that is private information of my employees."

"However this will be shown in court and it will be easy to prove that this it is false," she said.

Davis also appeared on Daniels' podcast. She said she couldn't offer salaries because he company is expensive to run and "cash poor."

"It's fine if you don't want to do that kind of deal, it's not for everybody," she said. "And if you don't want to do that, that's fine. He's more than welcome to go start something on his own. My question is — why haven't you?"

Davis also told Insider she would be issuing a public statement soon.

In his video, Garvey also took issue with Davis's recent interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, claiming she was over-friendly with him, "laughed with him," and seemed to "agree with a lot of his points."

Davis apologized for the interview in a video last Monday after backlash from several Black creators, saying she was not educated on the topics Fuentes brought up.

"I just really like to give people the benefit of the doubt when I interview them, I don't go into interviews trying to interrogate someone. I just more try to listen and see where they're coming from," she said. "In hindsight that wasn't smart."