Deadrop developers Midnight Society have “terminated” their relationship with studio co-founder and celebrity streamer Herschel “Guy” Beahm, aka “Dr Disrespect”, over fresh allegations about the reasons for his infamous Twitch ban in 2020.
At the time of the ban, which came just a few months after Beahm and Twitch announced a two-year exclusivity contract, Twitch commented only that Beahm had been jettisoned for acting “in violation of our Community Guidelines”. Beahm himself described the move as “a total shock” in a later conversation with the Washington Post. In August 2021, he took Twitch to court over the ban, but the dispute was eventually settled with neither party admitting any wrongdoing.
Last week, however, former Twitch strategic partnerships account director Cody Conners alleged in a Xitter post that an unnamed person “got banned because [he] got caught sexting a minor in the then existing Twitch Whispers product. He was trying to meet up with her at TwitchCon. The powers that be could read in plain text. Case closed, gang.” (Twitch Whispers is a now-retired private 1-to-1 messaging service.) According to two anonymous former Twitch employees cited by the Verge in a subsequent investigation – one of whom worked on Twitch’s trust and safety team at the time of the ban – the unnamed person in question was Beahm.
As to why it’s taken Conners this long to make the allegations, he posted a rather elliptical comment just yesterday suggesting that “the information had been so normalized, declawed in the circles that I ran in that could be reduced to allusion and entendre.
“For everyone who has since said “that’s fucked” — I agreed with you on Friday night before you wrote it,” Conners went on. “I should have agreed with you sooner.”
Beahm hasn’t yet addressed these latest claims about his behaviour, beyond tweeting last week that “Listen, I’m obviously tied to legal obligations from the settlement with Twitch but I just need to say what I can say since this is the fucking internet. I didn’t do anything wrong, all this has been probed and settled, nothing illegal, no wrongdoing was found, and I was paid.”
Beahm’s and Conners’ statements have, as you’d expect, been the subject of much discussion on social media. Responding to this, Beahm told viewers of a Twitch stream yesterday that he needed to take a “step back” from his work at Midnight Society. “I mean I’m gonna have to relay this to the Midnight Society, but, you know, maybe I step away from there too,” he said. “Just completely remove myself from the scene. It’s what I need to do.”
Shortly after that stream, The Midnight Society ran a statement of their own acknowledging the allegation, and declaring that they would part ways with Beahm “in order to maintain our principles and standards as a studio and individuals” following an internal inquiry. Here it is in full:
On Friday evening we became aware of an allegation against one of our co-founder’s Guy Beahm aka Dr Disrespect.
We assumed his innocence and began speaking with parties involved. And in order to maintain our principles and standards as a studio and individuals, we needed to act.
For this reason, we are terminating our relationship with Guy Beahm immediately.
While these facts are difficult to hear and even more difficult to accept, it is our duty to act with dignity on behalf of all individuals involved, especially the fifty-five developers and families we have employed along with our community of players.
I’ve mailed a representative of Beahm to ask for comment about Midnight Society’s statement.
Back in 2020 around the time of Beahm’s ban, there was a wave of revelations about abuse, manipulation and predatory behaviour on the part of streamers and influencers across Twitch and Youtube, alongside a few developers or journalists. In September 2022, Twitch was the subject of a Bloomberg report into cases of child grooming, following which the platform holder announced plans to improve safety measures, including better moderation and “expanding the signals” for catching and blocking users who are younger than 13.