Content warning: This is not going to be beautiful at all. If you read this, be prepared to face aggressive language, explicit sexual language, topics of paedophilia and child abuse, family violence, racist and intolerant language, and stories of emotional abuse and exploitation. You’re also going to witness a rare glimpse into adrians mindset, he is nearly insane and often intolerant and judgemental.
Note: Due to recent events, I’ve been forced to publish this before completion. Eventually, I’ll update this to include screenshots, missing paragraphs, and clarity. When it’s finished, I’ll delete this notice.
I’m not sure how to start, so I’ll start from the beginning.
I won’t spare any details, since so many people have asked me to do this. I am going to recount the events as comprehensively as possible. Perhaps one day in the future, a kind reader can summarise it into a digestible video for YouTube or something — but my intention here is to be complete, not brief. So bear that in mind. To make it easier, I’ve also read it aloud should you prefer to listen while doing another task like gaming or cleaning:
((insert audio clip))
4 July 2021
- How I discovered bungotaiga
- How his community rejected me
- The story of the famous $55k donation
- Why I donated large amounts
I discovered taiga on the evening of the Fourth of July as I was moving out of my condo in Austin and getting ready to move to Montréal. Outside the 39th floor window of my empty, furniture-less apartment, the city’s fireworks display was about to go off, but I was still feeling kind of bored. I turned on my smart TV and browsed for something else to watch than the usual and predictable Hollywood productions. I discovered the Twitch app on my TV, and I clicked it on impulse and in good humour. My expectations were not high, but at that moment I just felt like watching something, anything but Hollywood.
((insert video of fireworks))
I logged into my old Twitch account that I had used to watch French cooking streamers back when I was still learning to speak French in 2017. I clicked the “browse” button and filtered for “Français” to see if any of those streamers were online. That night, however, the app was glitching. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get that filter to work. English and French streams were all mixed together, and I was frustrated. When I passed a French streamer, I just looked at the thumbnail to see if he or she was cooking. I even popped in on a few streams for maybe 10 seconds to take a peek, but nothing caught my interest. “Why the fuck” I said to myself, “does everything have to be in English?
I had to jump over 5 English channels, on average, before finding a French one, and even then it wasn’t what I wanted. Why couldn’t my filters just work like they’re supposed to? WTF Twitch? That’s when it hit me… I stopped, paused for a moment, and clicked backwards a few frames…
“Is that a furry?”
This was the only animated stream among the collage of human faces. Amused, I clicked in. It was bungotaiga (whose stream is run by a young man named “Ryan Wasson”), and he was still in the “Just Chatting” phase of the stream. And it was FUN! His jokes hit me hard. I didn’t expect them. I wasn’t looking much at the screen because I was cleaning, but I ended up leaving that stream on for the rest of the evening.
Bungotaiga was far less lewd back then. I never fancied the crude, dirty jokes. I loved how deep his irony was and how it sharpened the mind to follow it. It’s not easy to entertain me. I’m bored as hell by mainstream, predictable stuff like Hollywood films, bestselling books, and chart music. You have to be a little bit deeper to capture my interest, and it was a really significant moment for me to be moved and respond and even laugh at something I was watching. I really want to highlight this now because I will come back to this theme many times throughout the story. Bungotaiga’s stream struck a chord in my soul that night that rarely sounds.
About 30 minutes into the stream, I think it’ll be fun to drop a $100 tip. I know this is a lot of money to many people. It’s more than a day’s work for someone at minimum wage in Austin. It’s not to me, and I was happy to show my appreciation. But when I tipped, something unexpected happened: bungotaiga halted his stream and gave a very thoughtful, appreciative reaction to it (see a clip below). Something so utterly insignificant to me meant so much to him. Meanwhile, as I’m listening to his stream, his humour, and the way he talks, I can clearly see he and I are on the same level. I saw an opportunity to make the world a better place, and even to be appreciated for my contribution and support.
((insert reaction clip here))
I never thought I would return to Ryan’s stream. I can’t remember specifically why I came back to the next stream beyond that I had such a nice time cleaning and “hanging out” with him before.
My bank records indicate that I tipped a tiny bit that next stream. I kept attending, and quickly I was hooked. I soon joined Ryan’s Discord server and met his community. By the third stream, I found myself competing against other donators to knock them all off the charts. Nobody remembers these $500 and $800 donations and their drama any more, but they were a lot of fun. About a week after July 4th, I was in NYC and halfway to Montréal, when I tipped the big $5 555 and 55 cents. That’s six fives, you read that right.
Things kind of started to suck for me at this point. Instead of appreciation from his community for supporting their favourite content creator, I got hate and ire. Jealousy. But mainly from one of Ryan’s moderation team leads, Jamie.
I don’t like Jamie, and I’m not going to lie. When I have been upset, I have called Jamie a lot of nasty names, and she’s pretty low-hanging fruit for slurs as a vain MtF trannie, faggot, communist, loser who unironically pitches SJW politics and has a criminal record longer than the trail of tears shed by her eternally disappointed parents. I have also been told that Jamie is homeless, eternally unemployed, and constantly on some type of drug yet firm in her belief that she is a genius (the typical insecure “pseudo-type”) and dreams of being a computer programmer without ever actually doing any work to make this dream a reality… Jamie had also been Ryan’s romantic partner for, as she told me, “like a year.” Holy fuck — was this person toxic.
After I dropped that $5k donation, Jamie started acting very rude to me. Mainly just comments in public. But remember, Jamie is the team lead of the moderators. They’re all good friends, so this jealousy is not insignificant. As a new member of this community, the straight-up rudeness that Jamie was laying on me was more than uncomfortable. I almost left right here. Looking back, I should have. But Ryan apologized for his friend’s behaviour and was sincere and kind. I let it all slide, and I figured I couldn’t care less what anyone but Ryan thought. I continued attending bungotaiga’s streams as usual.
It was a matter of days after that 5k donation that Jamie decided to stalk and dox me. And after sifting through years of social media posts (and there were a lot), she cherry-picked a few dumb tweets where I said “nigger,” generally in a blatantly ironic way, and used these posts as evidence that I am a racist Nazi who should be banned. Neither claim is true. I just like to say nigger on the Internet to piss people, exactly like Jamie, off. It worked. I love trolling SJWs. It literally never gets old. But as the moderator team leader, Jamie threw up an internal storm and turned a few of the other moderators against me, and Ryan himself started to doubt me:
((insert screenshots))
Jamie was not wrong that I am a troll who says offensive and provocative crap to ignite the fires of self-righteous indignation for shits and giggles. He misinterpreted my motives and intentions – but lots of people do when you are a troll. He also made up lies. For example, Jamie told Ryan that I “punched a prostitute in a brothel” a claim that he tried to justify based on this Trustpilot review from 2020:
Ryan asks me in DMs about this supposed assault. He said, “you have an entry in your criminal file.” I was actually quite alarmed at that news, so I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, but that I’d check. I hired a private investigator to do an international background check on myself (clean!), and I took the report to Ryan.
I then started to ask Ryan more seriously about what was happening. Did he not think it at best inappropriate and at worst creepy that his best friend stalked me and was revealing my personal information on the Internet? He said it was a normal problem, and he dismissed my valid concern as if he himself had not just slandered me. I don’t know how he was so calm about a member of his community and his staff attacking me.
After news gets out that I am allegedly a “Nazi racist”, the second-top tipper reached out to me, with a curious question! This multi-thousand dollar donator, BigDaddyGoblin, introduced himself to me by straight up asking “Are you redpilled?” and for my thoughts on “the Jews.” I’m a troll, and I enjoy doing the unexpected. I decided to be nice. After I politely told him that I don’t mind Jews as they seem kind enough, we had a more normal conversation. He shared personal details and his life plans, and I shared some of mine. He seemed decent enough, and it was nice chatting with someone on my level both in terms of money available to do things like support a streamer and in terms of what I find entertaining. I pegged him a fellow troll because he insisted on “hot topics.” I was surprisingly forthright in this conversation when I look back. I told him that while I am critical of feminism, I am a total feminist, but probably for all the wrong reasons. He responded to my comments as the ironic banter they were, but he also screenshotted our DMs and passed them on to Jamie. To this very day, she accuses me of being a misogynist. What is more, apparently BigDaddyGoblin, who opened with his questions about red pills and “the Jews,” was so offended by my opinions that he left taiga’s server forever. Ryan holds me responsible for his departure and says that I “cost him thousands of dollars” in lost tips with that crack about feminism. You can pause here to let that irony sink in.
Nevertheless, I kept attending streams, believing that Ryan liked me and appreciated the support. I am a 30-year-old dude, rich, accomplished, experienced, and bright. There is very little that a community full of homosexual teenage males, fanbois of a Twitch streamer with almost no life experience, can offer. I generally minded my manners in the community, tried to be helpful, teach, and solve problems. I often had members of his community reach out via DMs to ask for advice, which I always gave. The way I saw it, if they came to me of all people, some dude they didn’t know in a Twitch community, they must be desperate.
In general chat I was an angel, except for my first days on bungotaiga’s stream when I trolled just a bit. But I quickly realised that a $5k donation had set me up as a role model (Ryan was hard as nails on me for this) and I had to be a picture-perfect member of the community. I was always honest, but I kept everything SJW-approved.
((insert demand from Ryan to be a role model))
Nevertheless, Ryan and the moderators started to blame me whenever a community member left. But then they’d never tell me who, why, nor how I had caused it. Ryan told me I made “hot takes” in my DMs. I have since re-read every single private message I ever sent to anyone in his community. Aside from BigDaddyGoblin, mentioned above, I have found neither hot takes nor trolling. I disabled my DMs regardless, because I didn’t want to be a scapegoat for the stream’s or Jamie’s problems.
One day in July 2021, I had an epiphany as to why I was still embroiled in this dramatic mess while negotiating the sale of four lots of land that I owned in Texas.
I caught myself hard-lining to the price of $960k during negotiations. My agent, reason, common sense… everything and everyone was telling me to flex a little bit. The property was getting offers mostly in the $700k range, but I turned them down and held fast…. WHY????
BECAUSE I WANTED TO DONATE TO BUNGOTAIGA!!!!!!
It wasn’t greed because the prices we were getting were absurd and well above appraisal and comps. The driving force behind my decision was MY LOVE FOR A CREATURE THAT DOES NOT EVEN EXIST.
It hit me: the real value of the stream that Ryan runs is that he was giving me a creature, albeit a virtual one, worthy of being loved and that love with a virtual character was adding real value to my life. I worked just a PINCH harder because I had plans to share the money. When we eventually closed the deal at $960k… I decided to give Ryan his “cut” of the sale — the part of the sale that I WOULD HAVE NEVER OTHERWISE EARNED had it not been for taiga’s existence.
Upon getting my fat check on 2 August, I made a donation on the very next stream on 4 August for $55555 and 55 cents. I was so happy to do it. I had held in my heart a yearning to reward him for weeks. A beautiful creature (which I know doesn’t exist — remember the unconscious mind makes no distinctions!) loved me and loves money, and all I wanted to do was make this creature happy.
Rationally, I can see all this as unhealthy. Emotionally, this stuff happens on its own. You can’t control 95% of your brain, and that’s a lot of the space where your motivations and emotions lie.
That’s when I thought up a plan and invited Ryan to participate.
After that donation, Ryan and I played Minecraft together for three hours. I told Ryan why I did it, how I could afford it, and why I felt that I had actually GAINED money by watching his stream. I stressed the value he brought to my life and offer him a deal:
“You sell me a creature, being taiga, just something to love. Give me something to love, a beautiful fantasy, which is more entertaining than any date with a woman, and obviously (for anime reasons) more beautiful than any woman. Never mind I’m straight; you act feminine enough, apparently, to yank my heartstrings. I like all that I accomplished this month, and you obviously love getting paid loads of money. Do you think you can offer me this? Can you protect this image, this fantasy, moving forward and lets see how far we can get together?”
He said yes, but only after clarifying that he’ll “do anything for money.” This should have been another red flag, I admit. I was not thinking clearly. I just wanted this motivation that I otherwise couldn’t feel. I can hold my own breath when I go underwater, I can use my hand and bring myself to ejaculate, I can push myself to run a marathon despite all the physical dread I need to overcome — but I cannot experience a social emotion alone. I always sorta knew this, but meeting Ryan illuminated it so clearly. I knew I needed someone, and someone GOOD… A GENIUS. A genius like Ryan. I can’t stand going on dates with normie chicks. The last time I had felt this much love was back in 2015, and after donating $55k to Ryan, I started to think back on this past relationship a lot. I also worked insanely hard while we were dating, 24hr days sometimes. I made SO MUCH money back then. Was it all because of her?
I am already a multimillionaire. I already fuck literal models, but I was bored and unmotivated to be my best. I needed something, and taiga (the character) was that something. Ryan was a puppetmaster I was prepared to pay handsomely to keep taiga alive.
Ryan accepted my offer over a phone call, but I reminded him later on when he was feeling lost one day:
We kept this deal going for maybe a month while I worked. But behind the scenes, Jamie was annoying Ryan and the mods daily about me, telling him to cut me off. Jamie randomly banned me from the Discord, banned me from the stream several times, and banned me from other streams, for which she is a mod, that I didn’t even watch. Jamie is jealous that I have money to support streamers as well as a lot of other skills she values: I am a good programmer, an intelligent person, and most importantly someone that taiga likes. I broke Jamie’s image as I’m apparently the only person in the community who was willing to acknowledge just how terrible of a programmer she is. And that scared her. Jamie, if you’re so talented, then why is it so difficult for you to find a job? Sorry, but you’re a failure.
Anyway, while I am working away, inspired by my promise to share my gains with taiga, Jamie and Ryan would smoke weed and watch films. Jamie exploited these times to complain about me all the time, so much so that Ryan himself said he was put off by how obsessively and intensely Jamie hated me. Jamie recoloured everything I said into a terrible light until, despite being nearly perfect in the community, Ryan couldn’t see that I am a good person. Jamie whispered hate into his ear to convince him that I am evil.
enter 9 October 2021
- Story and reaction of the $186k donation
- Bungotaiga ghosted me
- The events leading up to abuse
I earned a fat paycheque (over $500k) for September 2021, and I reserved half of that for Ryan. I’d have never made this money if it weren’t for his (or rather, taiga’s) influence. This was all an experiment to see if I could love a fantasy creature and feel motivation in life as if I had a girlfriend, a partner, or a family with whom to share my successes. Maybe I wasn’t really the lone wolf that I always considered myself to be?
In two short streams, I donated $186k.
Ryan broke his end of our deal.
After receiving the $186k, Ryan ghosted me for a week. Just vanished. Our habit until this point had been to celebrate large donations by playing Minecraft together, but my invitation was ignored.
taiga also started to give me the cold shoulder on stream. When we spoke, it was always distant and forced for the first few minutes. On 18 October I accepted that Ryan was intentionally ignoring me. I left the community. The experiment was a success. I understood what motivates me better. I was disappointed, but I told myself it didn’t matter.
Unexpectedly, Ryan did not let me walk away. Instead, he popped up in my DMs, where we chatted most of the night:
As you can see, this conversation was only at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance (poppy), who knew what was happening and went behind my back to message Ryan and urge him to keep me as a community supporter.
Reflecting on this now, I feel like such a fool.
In short, he begged me to stay, and I did.
Our deal, however, had ended.
Ryan and I became friends, whereas my relationship with taiga had been with a fantasy idol. Ryan and I began talking a lot, chatting nearly all day and playing games together. Meanwhile, he had cut off Jamie for making threats and giving him an ultimatum (“You must pick either Adrian or me, you can’t have both in your life.”) I feel like I was a drop-in replacement for whatever role Jamie had filled in his life, and I started taking on tasks to support his stream beyond making donations. He once called me his “closest friend.”
Enter 19 October 2021
- The abuse from bungotaiga to me
- The hostility of the community
- The inaction of the moderators
My overarching goal in my friendship with Ryan was to help him succeed. There was nothing I’d say no to. I was convinced he is an undiscovered talent that the world needs (actually, I am still convinced). I’d do stuff like copy-write his professional correspondence, from emails to twitch, to negotiations with marketers. I also covered his equipment upgrades and pushed him to get a new computer and bill it to my MasterCard (which he also abused, but I digress).
I never fit into Ryan’s community, mainly because of Jamie’s abuse and hate. Two people in particular hated me most of all: Kiko and Trident. On the one hand, Kiko was just jealous because I was rich. He is not complicated, but very cleverly lies and walks the line between doing harm and being banned. Trident, on the other hand, hated me because I reminded him of himself — or something like that. He said publicly that he hated me for making racist tweets and being a troll, but his Twitter was absolutely flooded with racist, abusive tweets. He was also a white man who wore a Black avatar online.
I saw him in video chat in a public channel one day. He is unmistakably white. Like, white white. Like you could squeeze him from a toothpaste tube kinda white. In other words, he poses as another race, made horrendously racist tweets, got permabanned from Twitter for it, and says he is “Arab” when challenged. Just a real mess of a person. He and Kiko together tried to build a faction of hate against me.
Once Jamie was banned from the community, they took over the smear campaign to label me a racist neo-Nazi. I’m obviously not a Nazi. I’m just 10% ironic and 90% a troll.
He and Kiko slid into the community’s DMs and, unprovoked, started slandering me. They also did this in the voice channels. As soon as I found out, I opened a ticket to report them to the moderators.
The mods didn’t care. In fact, they called me crazy for reporting it.
Eventually Trident blows up in the public channel and tries to dox me. The posts are soon deleted, but later that day I get a phone call from Ryan asking me to delete my blog and social media posts. I told him that had he read them himself, he would see these accusations were lies. I wrote a LOT online, had hundreds of videos, Instagram posts, Tweets, etc. All the stuff I posted was mundane, maybe even boring, stuff from my personal life. Like photos from around my neighbourhood, of my car, of times I hung out with people, screenshots from WoW. Really just a typical blog made by a guy who spends too much time online.
Ryan wanted nothing of it; he said, “if you want to be my friend, you have to delete the blogs and all your socials” because “this is hurting my career.” He and I went through a few of those screenshots on the phone, and he just DID NOT GET IT. He asked me questions like, “Why did you say that all women should be working? how is that not anti-feminist, Adrian?” I told him that is a pro-feminist statement, and I am scratching my head as to how he could possibly think anything otherwise. I broke down all the screenshots that he brought up, but I eventually agreed to delete all my social media because, as I told him, “I guess that’s the life I chose when I chose to be friends with a streamer.” He told me it meant a lot to him and thanked me.
At the time, I knew how ridiculous this request was. I actually told Ryan that I had never deleted anything for anyone before. I had a mother who muzzled me, and even once broke up with a woman rather than comply with a similar request. At the time, I knew it was a very big deal for me to agree to something like this.
At the end of the call, he asked me point blank, “What can I do? Everyone hates you now; they think you’re a racist.”
I said that I would understand a ban given the circumstances. So he banned me for a week… WHILE LEAVING TRIDENT AND KIKO, the ones who were destabilising the community, UNBANNED. To this day, he is 100% confident that he made the right choice.
Ryan banned me to save face and ignored the actions two members of his community who were actively stirring up shit and who used my absence to build an even stronger faction against me, when I wasn’t able to defend myself as I had with Ryan.
Needless to say, I returned to an extremely hostile environment. And I just wanted to see Ryan succeed. At the same time, Ryan and I were becoming really close friends (or so I thought). We talked or DM’d every day. I told myself I only ever cared what he thought about me.
In general, I am proud about not giving a rat’s ass what anyone aside from my friends think about me. I don’t use the word “friend” lightly either. I am not easy to get to know, and at this point I had four friends IRL and Ryan.
That’s it.
But as time went by and I got closer to Ryan, he began to take me for granted. He’d tell puppy lies and miss scheduled plans. More time passed, and our interactions evolved into insults, abuse.
((insert gallery of abuse))
I told him that I hated this. I didn’t want to argue with him. I was trying to be a good friend by keeping all my promises, telling the truth, keeping my calm. I started to doubt if we were really friends and gave him an opportunity to come clean about why he never played with me any more, nor invited me to call, etc. Instead of being honest that he felt our friendship had run its course, he gaslit me and started to make outrageous demands. For example, he would ask whom I was talking to in my personal life in paranoid fits that I was “talking badly about him.” He threatened suicide a lot when he didn’t get his way. At this point, the gaslighting has worked. I care about him enough to call him a friend, and he has me convinced that he desperately needs me too.
One day, he says that he “needs me to be accepted in the community.” This is when I opened a legendary 10 tickets to try and stop the flurry of abuse and accusations that, up until this point, I had been ignoring. Trident and Kiko were the subject of all but two of those tickets. On the one hand, and despite five very-well-substantiated reports with a mountain of evidence that he was going into VC and DMs to spread rumours about me, Kiko was told to “never talk about me again.” Trident, on the other hand, got a free pass for abusing me because “he was the Minecraft admin.” Ryan told me explicitly, “I can’t ban the admin of my Minecraft server.” I was flabbergasted. But you could temporarily ban me? The guy you chat with every day? Who donates $50k per month? Who complied with your request to delete all his social media? Without whose support and friendship you have repeatedly claimed you would be as good as dead? WHAT?!
That is what those ten tickets were about. It was me delivering the evidence against Trident and Kiko, which, at Ryan’s request, I had until now ignored, to an unmotivated moderation team who hates me but whom Ryan had just asked me to win over for the good of his stream.
I discovered just how passionately the mods hated me. FrostyMidir’s hatred was forthright and blunt. I respect his honesty. It seems they are all close friends with Jamie, so I can excuse them for their hate. I am only angry at Ryan for pushing me to ignite this powder keg. They gave me sanctioned hell.
I took this up with Ryan. He just gaslit me again. Come the 27th of November, I told him frankly that I couldn’t take this any more. I told him to exclude me from the business deals that I was helping with and to move on.
He spent the next 24 hours begging me to stay. So I did. I should not have. But I did. I regret it. I was committed to being this person’s friend, and it was making me a fool.
I stayed, and I continued working with the mods. I made peace with pretty much everyone in a few days INCLUDING TRIDENT. Literally everyone who hated me at least tolerated me and wanted to move forward for the good of the community. I was actually super happy with the way things were going.
enter 5 december 2021
- The blackmail by TridentFlayer
- Moderator abuse
- I was wrongfully banned
- How I felt and reacted to the ban
When I was making peace with Trident and we were both getting along, a newly-promoted mod who was taking his training wheels off decided it would be a good idea to stand between Trident and me. Bishopdread broke up a peaceful conversation, and RANDOMLY, and I mean it was random, banned us both from the server. I freaked the fuck out. I had been working so hard these past weeks to promote harmony! I went straight to Ryan (who had been consuming weed) and told him about what had happened. He entered a voice chat with Bishopdread, while texting me. So he was manipulated into believing we did something wrong. We were in total peace. Whereas I tried to break through his THC-induced stupor by threatening to leave him if he continued to show such poor leadership skills, Trident decided to be a little bit more creative.
In just a few short, and impressive, hours… Trident, that devil, got the brilliant idea to blackmail Ryan into banning me because he believed wrongly at the time that bishopdread’s ban, which was so patently uncalled for, was my doing! I can’t blame Trident for jumping to this conclusion. Our peace was new, and he had heard a lot of slander against me.
Trident blackmailed taiga by threatening to release a Google document about me (linked here lmao) if he did not permanently ban me.
Ryan decided that cooperating with a blackmailer was the best way forward. After a team meeting with his mods, he called me up and said, “I need to do this. I know it’s selfish, but I need to do what’s best for me.” He banned me permanently from the community.
At this point, I retaliated with all the pent-up frustration about not only this unfair ban, but also the now obvious manipulation and abuse. I turned on Ryan something wild. I amplified the voices of his past victims who spoke out against his abuse, highlighted how he treats others, and drip-fed it to the world via my Twitter feed. I have not revealed it all. Even in this document. Despite what it seems, I am actually doing my best to help Ryan. He knows what I could be saying, but am choosing not to. I still want him to succeed. I am hoping that sharing this story now will fill at least one of these two purposes:
- To warn the public and save at least one soul from such abuse in the future
- To splash a bucket of water on Ryan’s face to make him “wake up” to how he is manipulating peoples’ concern for his well-being for personal gains.
Ryan has panicked in reaction to all that I have done. After cycling through a series of lies about me, he has settled on slandering me as an “incel” who donated money to have a shot at sleeping with him. It’s so untrue it’s embarrassing. I do not want to engage in sexual acts with a man. I do not “buy a date”, nor would I overpay so greatly for an orgasm. I found some art that I found beautiful, compelling and deep. It inspired me. I did my best to support the artist that creates it. I thought we became friends. Instead of being honest that I had misjudged our relationship, he treated me like shit and tried to gaslight me into tolerating it.
He’ll likely stir up some other lie, again, instead of apologising and working to be a better person. So don’t believe any slander that comes out after this date (5 February at the time of writing).
I have taken some pride in how honest I’ve been throughout this whole thing. It’s been hard to admit that I have been played the fool. It’s been hard to admit that a lone wolf like me is as vulnerable to the manipulative behaviours used by toxic individuals as anyone else. The truth makes me look the fool, but what would lying accomplish?
6 December 2021
Events following my ban
Since this is where out friendship ended, I’ll keep this part brief and go over the highlights:
- I retweeted the documents published by Ryan’s past victims (now found here).
- Ryan retaliated with slander, most frequently on Twitter, but also in stream, in the Discord server, and well, everywhere.
- Ryan stopped streaming for most of the month.
- Initially, I just wanted an apology. I thought holding a torch up to the abuse he dealt would force him to acknowledge the shittiness of his actions (It didn’t).
- My DMs exploded, with messages from over a dozen other victims who wanted to share their stories. I was not alone.
- This re-wired my motivation. They are, for the most part, too scared to go public like I have for fear of this slander. I felt so, so guilty for financially supporting this man and his strategies for months and years to come. I had to do something. I know I can take the heat.
- I did not want to do any more harm than was necessary to “wake him up” to the nature of his actions. So I slowly, over time, tweeted out screenshots and proof of how he had treated me. I made it undeniable.
- His anger intensified, and he got harsher and harsher. This eventually led to me having to take legal action.
- I took civil action and threatened to sue him.
- I took criminal action and reported his harassment to the police.
- I threatened to sue Twitch for the suffering I endured through their platform.
- I did not report his Discord server. However, I know who did, why they did, and what post they reported in particular. And yes, it’d have never happened if I had never taken these actions, so I take responsibility for it. There was, however, no “mass-reporting,” nor shady business. One report to Discord was enough for them to see the sharing of child pornography, and they permanently banned him, his community, and every moderator in the community for complicity.
Here is a gallery of some of my tweets to illustrate:
29-31 December 2021
- After shaking the ground, I relent and delete everything.
- Ryan gets a fresh start, forgiveness, and a clear entry to the new year.
- We believed this was the end of it all.
Twitch’s legal team received my threat to sue and banned my account instantly. After a brief review of my evidence, they decided to refund over $25k, all the way back to October around when he started abusing me. As I understand it, this is their way of clearing themselves of liability for how Ryan mistreated me, while also ending my ‘professional relationship’ with Twitch. I never asked for a refund. They just did it.
Meanwhile, Ryan’s Discord server was banned.
IRL, I was randomly contacted by an old personal friend who “cut me off” a long time ago because of a vanity injury. It reminded me that people make mistakes, need to grow, and need time to grow. I think humans are mostly good, and given the chance, they will be. This interaction made me take a step back and think about what was happening between Ryan and I in a different light.
I had by this time really stomped the ground and made a thundershock in Ryan’s life and community. My message, I believed, was well received. It was done, and I wanted to give Ryan that time he needed, alone, to become a better person. He had all the money he needed to survive for years. This was a new year, so the timing felt right to send Ryan a message on 31 December, after weeks of silence between us, telling him that I was taking my website (bungotaiga.org) down. I said I was deleting every tweet, and I would stop talking about him. I said “have a good life,” and I was sincere.
He took a week break from streaming the first week of January to reflect and readjust. He was, I hoped, moving on and up.
March 2022 – Present
- Tipped off to abuse
- Bungotaiga hasn’t changed
- Website goes back up
- Shots fired, his friends attack
Sometime around February, despite the website being offline for weeks, I started to receive tips again about Ryan’s abusive behaviour and passing of child porn. I let them slide. I had hope he’d do the right things.
Around this time, Ryan’s boyfriend, whom he suddenly dumped (thanks to jealous Jamie’s lies… surprised?), and who happened to be a mutual acquaintance, came to me with a heart-breaking warning:
Ryan Wasson was still abusing others both online and in his intimate relationships.
The specific details should remain private. This is someone else’s life, and I want to keep this “tell-all” about Ryan and me. I share this information to explain why I chose to rebuild the website. This time, it’s staying up.
I’m so heartbroken, disappointed, and still a little angry.
After writing this “tell-all,” and just as I expected, Ryan’s best friend has been slandering me on Twitter again. Like before, Jamie is cycling through a series of lies trying to figure out which ones “stick.” Just look at the timestamps of this stuff and how bizarre and tangential the accusations are. I’m writing this paragraph on 9 March 2022.
What a strange lie to tell! I was in Canada the whole time this went down. At the bottom of this page, you can see a video recording of nearly all my posts in the community at that time, where I clearly stated that I was in Canada. I posted several recordings of me rollerblading in front of Canadian monuments, etc. What is to be gained from claiming that I “moved from France to Canada”? Just use your own judgment and notice both how rarely they back up their lies and how, when they do, the screenshots are STOLEN FROM THIS WEBSITE (I posted it maybe halfway up this page) with TAIGA’S RESPONSE CROPPED OUT. You can also be 100% sure that screenshot is stolen from me here because it includes the French date style ‘day/month/year’ instead of the American ‘month/day/year’, and the picture otherwise is a perfect match.
What Ryan and Jamie don’t know is that the world is mainly good. I know that most people out there will not easily be led by the nose with these pathetic lies. I am unworried, and I appreciate you all for taking the time to investigate.
What I learned
- Livestreaming is the future
- Learn when to quit early, leave toxic relationships
- Control vices, donate over time to offer stability to streamer
There were many valuable truths (some of which are even clichés) that I discovered from this mistake. The biggest, certainly, is that livestreaming is an incredible and innovative media for social relationships. When done right, it can add significant benefit and happiness to your life. It also provides a way for the great talents among us to share their gifts with far, far more people than previously possible. In real life, you are so limited by having a one-on-one conversation with one person at a time. Therapists, for example, reserve less than a single hour for their patients. Streaming enables people to impact others and can deliver motivation beyond these limits. We, as humans, are eager and ready to suffer and endure harsh struggles to accomplish our dreams.
The more happiness you have, the more you’re ready to suffer.
And the more you’re ready to suffer, the more you can accomplish.
Done right, streaming can accelerate your life.
I’ve also learned how emotions make no distinction between real or fake relationships. I’ve learned that not everything needs to be “real” in order to have meaning. Have you ever just laid back in bed, awake, and let your mind wander? Have you ever made up a fantasy, or made up a story, and played it out in your mind? Looking back, it made you happy, didn’t it? The happiness was “real”, the reason for it was purely “unreal”. So as long as my survival isn’t at threat, I think it’s perfectly fine to engage in fantasies to fulfil my human emotional needs.
I’ve also learned better when to quit. If I could do it all over again, I would have walked away after Jamie started to slander me in response to my $5k donation. There were a lot of “red flag” moments, and I ignored them. It’s easy to look back now and see how this advice also applies to the few relationships I had that were very unhealthy. I need to know when to quit and learn to quit early instead of holding out for another person to change because I believe in them (it never happens!).
In this story with Ryan, I should have made my donations incrementally instead of in large bursts. I was feeding drama rather than providing a streamer with the comfort of a stable income to continue producing their streams. I admit that I donated in bursts partly due to vanity. I liked the appreciation and recognition. But it also reflects how I get paid IRL. I don’t get a paycheque every two weeks like most people, and it’s more fun to yell BONANZA with a group than by yourself in your kitchen! This was not wise and destabilised the community I was trying to support.
I’m writing this blog in part to warn you how to not do this, but not to dissuade you from livestreaming altogether. Please guard your optimism and look forward to the future. Livestreaming is awesome, and I am going to stay here all the same!
Thanks for reading my story!
Miscellaneous
Here are some out-of-context screenshots, while having nothing to do with my “tell all”, they are something I’d like to share with the world. Random order.
Here’s the last 1000+ of my messages in Bungotaiga’s discord server, this was recorded just mere minutes (less than 10 minutes) before his server was banned. You can pause throughout to read any of them comfortably.
If you have any feedback, questions, or feel like something’s missing from my story, tell me at @adrians_reality on twitter.