Twitch streamers are sharing their stories of violent stalkers to spread awareness of how to seek help

Lindsay DodgsonSep 19, 2020, 00:31 IST

Insider

A streamer known as Sweet Anita says she has been dealing with a violent stalker since November.sweet_anita / Twitch

Twitch streamers are telling their stories of being harassed and abused by violent stalkers to increase awareness and help other victims.
Three streamers spoke to Insider about what they went through — or are still going through — with fans who they say became obsessive and dangerous.
One streamer known as Sweet Anita said she has had a stalker for many months who has waited outside her house, followed her home, and threatened to kill her, her mother, and her pets.
Another, LadyDevann, said her stalker stopped harassing her with hundreds of messages a day only after she filed a peace order, a type of restraining order available in Maryland.
Streamers say that a major concern is that online harassment and doxxing are rarely taken seriously, even when they take their cases to law enforcement.

When a fan became obsessed with Meg Turney, a gaming YouTuber, in 2018, he drove 11 hours to her house with a handgun, intending to kill her husband, Gavin Free. The man, later identified as Christopher Giles, broke in and searched the house while Turney and Free hid in a closet, terrified. By the time the police arrived 10 minutes later, Giles had died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Just over a year later, Bianca Devins, 17, who was growing a following online as a gamer girl, was killed in a jealous fit of rage by a 21-year-old man she met online. A friend of Devins told Rolling Stone that the man's messages and behavior toward Devins had been obsessive.

These are just two stories that demonstrate the way the parasocial relationship between creators and fans can cross boundaries and have devastating consequences.

Though Devins' and Turney's stories were widely reported, streamers say online stalking and harassment are still not treated with the gravity they deserve.

Three Twitch streamers told Insider about how they dealt with stalkers and took matters into their own hands when law enforcement seemed unwilling or unable to help them.

'I slept on my couch so I could watch the door'

Stalkers are a terrifying but shockingly common part of having an influential online platform. Both men and women have to deal with obsessive fans, but women are particularly affected on the internet. Threatening messages are troubling enough, but the possibility of injury or even death means online creators can't simply dismiss them as harmless trolling.

Abigail, a Twitch streamer who asked to remain anonymous and have her name changed, told Insider she noticed she was getting a lot of messages from one Twitter user in 2018. She said she would block them, but the user would always return with a new anonymous account, steadily becoming more obsessed with where she was and who she was with at all times.

She said that the stalker found her apartment and showed up with flowers and that he would work out her location from identifiers in the background of her Instagram photos. She said he would periodically send screenshots of her location on Google Maps to prove he knew where she was.

"It was very, very, very disruptive to my life and very, very, very disruptive to my mental health," Abigail said. "I had bars on my doors. I had a door jammer just in case somebody broke in. I slept on my couch so I could watch the door. I had a Nest Cam."

She added, "I couldn't handle it."

She said she didn't receive sufficient help from the police and a specialist lawyer, so she hired an investigator out of her own pocket to research the stalker and find out who he was. It was only when the investigator conducted a deep dive into the stalker's identity and found his sister's information that he finally apologized and promised to leave Abigail alone, she said.

"We actually got a photo of him holding a piece of paper that says 'I will stop harassing Abigail,'" she said. Insider has seen the photo.

"After a year and a half of this person destroying my life, seeing that photo and just, like, putting a face and a name and knowing who this a--hole is, there's so many mixed emotions about it. It's crazy."

The internet has opened the stalking floodgates

Dr. Darrel Turner, a clinical and forensic psychologist who's an expert in criminal cases, told Insider that stalking is a lot more prevalent than people may realize. He said some people, most often men, are predisposed to this type of behavior, "and now the internet has really opened the floodgates."

"Prior to the internet, the majority of these individuals may have had the urge to do this, but they were inhibited by the risk of getting caught," he said. "The internet has almost completely eliminated that risk, making it incredibly easy and safe for them to do this and get away with it."

Turner said that because stalkers often conceal their identities and can be anyone from anywhere, it's particularly tricky for local law enforcement to handle.

"The federal government is in the best position to provide advanced technical capabilities and other resources when it comes to unmasking these individuals and identifying their true locations," he said.

Devann Winters, a Twitch streamer known as LadyDevann, contacted the FBI for help with an obsessive stalker.LadyDevann / Twitch

But when Devann McCarthy, a streamer known as LadyDevann on Twitch, where she has nearly 60,000 followers, went to the police and the FBI after a stalker's behavior got steadily more erratic, she was told nothing could be done.

"The FBI straight up told me there's no laws to protect you against somebody that you don't actually know," she told Insider. "They stopped responding to me."

An FBI representative did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

McCarthy said problems began when the stalker bought one of her cosplay prints and asked her to sign it for his brother who had died. He became obsessed, she said, but it was when he was barred from her Twitch channel that things took a turn for the worse.

"He would try tweeting at people and telling them that I was being held hostage by my moderators and that my boyfriend was pimping me out for blow jobs or something like that," McCarthy said. "He tried saying that he invented NASA and that I invented cheering on Twitch and it was my idea to come up with the Amazon merger."

'If something doesn't happen I'm going to die by this guy's hands'

She said that the delusions turned sinister and that he came to the conclusion that it was McCarthy' fault his brother died. His obsession turned to wanting revenge and ruining her life, calling her a rapist, a murderer, and a pedophile, McCarthy told Insider. McCarthy said she had over a terabyte worth of screenshots of his threats that he sent over email and social media, tweeting pretty much on the minute every minute. Insider has seen these screenshots.

"He thought that I was, like, paying people to go and rape and murder him, like he was coming back to life repeatedly," she said. "Sometimes I would wake up to like 200 emails from him just, like, going off on a tangent, just replying to himself in his own emails over and over again."

McCarthy said she had anxiety attacks and would pull out of events because she feared her stalker would show up. She said he once told her he was going to walk to her workplace, then disappeared from the internet for as long as he said it would take him to get there. She said she was beside herself.

"He was saying things like he was going to chop me up and mail me to my parents so that I could be fed to their dogs," she said. "It was crazy ... I was like, this is definitely on a path of escalation right now where if something doesn't happen I'm going to die by this guy's hands."

It wasn't until a colleague told her about peace orders — a specific kind of restraining order available in Maryland for harassment and stalking — that McCarthy started seeing some progress on her case.

She said that while the stalker didn't honor the order she filed, he did start harassing and threatening the judge and the detective on the case, leading to further investigations that ended with him being put in prison for several months. Insider has seen confirmation that the stalker was incarcerated.

"This last year that he's been locked up and away from the internet has been, like, the most free that I've felt in like five years now," McCarthy said.

Stalkers have a desire for control, power, and possession

Turner said people who behave this way generally have a desire for control, power, and possession. They feel insecure about themselves and their social standing and lack of dating success, and they may have been shunned, picked on, or bullied in their lives, he said.

In more extreme cases, stalking can be a means of "deriving an actual sadistic pleasure from instilling fear in another person," he said. What's most concerning about this is that the perpetrator will need to keep "upping the ante" to maintain the excitement of terrorizing another person. For a streamer, this can mean violent threats in messages leading to real-world incidents, such as the stalker turning up to every meet-and-greet or breaking into their homes.

"In the case of the sadistic stalker, this person's pleasure and excitement is further enhanced by any reaction he can glean from the victim," Turner said.

Penn Badgley portrayed a violent, dangerous stalker on the Netflix show "You."Netflix

Dr. Sarah Vinson, a triple board-certified psychiatrist in forensic, adult, and child psychiatry and the founder of Lorio Forensics, told Insider that many gaming sites and online communities are male-oriented and that the misogynistic undercurrent of so much of this violent behavior could easily thrive there. Just look back to the vicious attack on Zoe Quinn in 2014, now known as Gamergate, where 4chan users threatened to give the gamer "a crippling injury that's never going to fully heal."

"We're seeing what happens in larger societies re-created in virtual spaces," Vinson said, "which is that if you are a minority — in this case it would be women — things that disproportionately impact you aren't given the same attention, aren't responded to in the same way."

Concerns are often dismissed as an overreaction or attributed to the person who is being mistreated rather than to the environment or the mistreater, she said. In other words: victim-blaming.

Vinson said online threats should be treated with the same severity as ones made in person. For example, if someone were harassing women in a bar, calling them names and being inappropriate, the owner would hopefully remove them and ban them. In an online forum, there's the same responsibility to make sure the space is safe.

"It's one of those things where there have to be boundaries, there have to be limits, there have to be consequences," she said. "Online, there's a reluctance to do things like that. But the people who are the online hosts — or the online bar-owner equivalent — really have an obligation to monitor what's going on and to make it an environment that is safe for everybody."

'He's fallen asleep outside my house watching it'

Sweet Anita, a UK-based Twitch streamer with 900,000 followers, told Insider about a stalker who has been sending her threatening messages and coming to her house since last November. Sweet Anita is very protective of her private life and did not want to disclose her real name or location to Insider.

Sweet Anita said that while she filed a restraining order against the stalker last year, he didn't honor it. Since then, the police have told her it's not in the public interest to investigate further and have started ignoring her calls, she said.

"He's assaulted me. He's been on the way to my house with a knife. He's made threats to kill me whilst I've been streaming," she said. "He's fallen asleep outside my house watching it. He's woken up and spent hours knocking on my front door. He keeps promising to stop messaging me then messages me. He leaves clues. He shows in as many ways possible he's still watching."

She said that one day the stalker sent a message saying he was coming over to kill her in 15 minutes. The police called back half an hour later and never actually came to her house, she said.

She said that not a single police officer she had dealt with understood her job or what doxxing is: revealing someone's personal and identifying information online without their consent. Their advice is to stop streaming, she said, "but the problem isn't with my job — the problem is that they don't do theirs."

Insider could not contact the police department for comment because Sweet Anita did not tell Insider where in the UK she lives. Twitch confirmed that it was aware of her case and had worked with her and the police since she reported it.

Twitch said that appropriate measures, from permanent bans to escalation to law enforcement, are taken when any incident of harassment occurs but that it is unable to do anything about off-platform behavior.

Police forces don't fully understand online stalking

The FBI's website describes cyberstalking as a "specific federal crime" that falls under a federal stalking statute as part of the Violence Against Women Act of 2005. It includes any form of electronic communication that leads someone to fear that they are in danger of serious bodily injury or death or that causes "substantial emotional distress."

"The law was amended in 2013 to include stalking by the internet or by telephone and no longer requires that the perpetrator and victim live in different legal jurisdictions," the website reads. Cyberstalking can result in a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000; if cyberstalking results in a death, it can come with a life sentence.

However, in the UK, Detective Inspector Lee Barnard from the Metropolitan Police's Stalking Threat Assessment Centre told Insider that the challenge for law enforcement is that some people on the force still think you can't commit the offense of stalking purely online.

"Stalking is a relatively new social construct — it's only been in legislation since late 2012, so it's only been around as an offense for seven years," he said. "The police know what they're doing with assault and the older legislation, but stalking, because it's quite new, everyone is new to the game, and not everyone has the level of expertise my team have, because we've had specialist training."

'Would it even be enough if I did die?'

Earlier this month, Sweet Anita posted a YouTube video including interviews with several other streamers who have dealt with stalkers and urged people to spread awareness.

"My safety is in my own hands," she said. "He has threatened to kill my mum and my animals before me, and every day I wake up wondering if it's my last."

Abigail, the Twitch streamer who hired an investigator to track down her stalker, told Insider that her advice to anyone going through the same thing is to document everything — every message, every conversation, every email, every tweet.

"If you post something or you take videos when you're out somewhere, maybe hang on to them and post them after you've left," she said. "Or if you're taking a video driving somewhere and it's around an area that you don't want people to know that you're in, don't post any street signs."

Barnard added that when a stalker starts making violent threats, it's best not to block them, as this can escalate their behavior.

"If you do block someone, they will try another method to contact you," he said. "So they will either try to find your address to send you a letter personally, or they may come find you."

But when they reach a breaking point, streamers like Sweet Anita and Abigail have to choose between risking their lives to do a job they love or walking away from the internet.

Abigail told a few close friends about her stalker but never spoke about it publicly. She stopped streaming for almost the entirety of 2018 and never told her followers why.

"I didn't want to give him the satisfaction," she said. "I didn't want him to know how badly and how deeply he was disrupting my life."

Sweet Anita said she woke up every day wondering if stalking will be taken seriously before she pays the price with her life.

"If I die because of this, will anything change? Would it even be enough if I did die?" she said. "One streamer lost their life. Another they tried to murder her husband. I don't understand why nobody cares."

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