Jeff Wittek said Toddy Smith and Zane Hijazi saved his life after he was injured swinging from an excavator

• Jeff Wittek said in a new video that Toddy Smith and Zane Hijazi "saved" his life.
• The YouTuber was in an accident that injured his face when filming for David Dobrik's vlogs.
• "I'll never forget who my real friends are," he told Insider in an interview.

YouTuber Jeff Wittek revealed that Vlog Squad members Toddy Smith and Zane Hijazi "saved his life" after he was injured swinging from an excavator controlled by David Dobrik, the leader of the Vlog Squad YouTube collective.

"I'll never forget who my real friends are," Wittek told Insider in a phone interview on Thursday.

Dobrik and his content group have recently come under fire. Seth Francois, a former member of the Vlog Squad, accused Jason Nash of sexual assault after a kissing "prank" for Dobrik's vlogs filmed in 2017, and an Insider investigation unearthed allegations of sexual assault against former member Dominykas Zeglaitis, who is better known as Durte Dom.

The allegations have raised questions about the environment created by Dobrik and the Vlog Squad.

Now, Wittek is sharing how his June 2020 facial injury, which was visible in Instagram photos of himself in the hospital at the time, came to be. Wittek, who has nearly three million YouTube subscribers, said in an April 21 video that the injury came from bashing his face into the arm of an excavator at high speed while filming a video with Dobrik.

He left his followers in the dark about what happened to his eye for almost a year, after posting the pictures with a caption that said he "got in an accident and broke my face and skull in a few places," before revealing the truth in a YouTube docuseries titled "Don't Try This at Home."

In a new video uploaded to his podcast YouTube channel on Wednesday, the 31-year-old played the blurred video from 2020's excavator incident as he provided commentary about how his friends saved him after the gruesome accident.

Wittek said in the video that he didn't understand why they were swinging on the excavator for Dobrik's vlog in the first place. "I didn't know what the point of this was," he said. "I thought it was just to go around slow, and we were gonna get the nice shot with the mountains."

When the video showed the moment he slammed into the arm of the excavator, he said, "At this moment, I screamed for my life." A loud thud is heard, and Wittek can be heard splashing into the lake.

Wittek said that he gets emotional watching the part of the video where people run and save him. He said Smith, Hijazi, Scotty Sire, and Ilya Federovich all ran to rescue him. They put him on a raft to get him to shore as he was bleeding profusely.

Wittek said Hijazi gave him a shirt to stop the bleeding and spotted Smith also trying to help. "This moment means a lot to me," Wittek said in the video. "These guys literally saved my life."

He continued, "I'll never forget that. I'll never forget these moments."

In a previous installment of the series, released on Monday, Wittek said that he began to "resent" Dobrik after the accident.

Hijazi and Smith did not immediately respond to requests for comment.