Youtube is a grand scale community of people to express new and interesting ranges of creativity and art. Whether it is music, painting, video games, or sketch comedy, there is definitely an audience for it on Youtube. But then there are the videos where nothing is achieved or gained. They either are there to pull views for the sake of views, or to trick people. These are pointless, but harmless. Then there are the videos like those made by Sam Pepper.
Sam Pepper is a semi-famous Youtuber with a following close to 2.5 mil- lion subscribers. On the surface, Peppers’ videos are just harmless pranks to an unknowing public, which is a favorite among the community. (Search Freaky the Scary Snowman, it’s really good.) Some of Peppers videos are actually as they seem, harmless and tame, but many others are far from being simple pranks.
Recently, on September 20, Sam Pepper released a video with a title I would care not to repeat where Pepper went around in public places, mostly sidewalks, and used a fake hand to trick girls so that he could pinch their bottoms. This shows straight sexual harassment, which is quite illegal, especially on Youtube. In the video, some women are seen smiling, but it’s more like a defensive reaction, because they all move the same, which is uncomfortably and taken aback.
This video has gained Sam Pepper a new kind of fame, as a scumbag. The thing is that Pepper has been making videos like this for years. In one video he made just about a year before, Pepper would walk up to random women, handcuff them to himself, say that they were now dating, and wouldn’t let them go till they kissed him. What made this recent video cause such an uproar is beyond me, but it’s good that it finally happened.
But it doesn’t end there.
Sam Pepper didn’t do the appropriate or smart thing to do in this situation, which is to apologize. No, Pepper decided to make a new video with a girl doing the same prank on guys instead of girls. The difference is that the title of this video had a “(2/3)” meaning part two of three. Not long afterwards part three came out, where Pepper talks about the videos. He states that both videos were staged and had actors. The point he’s trying to make is to bring more awareness to sexual harassment, and that it affects both men and women. He even tells a heartfelt story that really tries to pull on the heart strings, which a lot of people fell right into, at first.
What about his past videos? Do those have a message? What should we be aware of when you handcuff people to yourself? These are the kind of questions a lot of people started asking.
Then everything let loose.
Many of the things that he said in his third video were contradicted by the “actors” of the first original video. People were starting to see that he was just trying to cover his own ass, but what he did instead is open the door to the past that he probably never wanted to go public. Many women, under age at the time of these incidents, started coming out with information about how Sam Pepper tried soliciting nudes out of them, molesting them, and one woman even gave a story about how she was raped by Pepper. (The last one I do find fishy because the story seems way to well crafted, but that doesn’t excuse the other concrete evidence.)
In one misplaced yell, Sam Pepper started the avalanche that lead to his social burial. The real kicker? Many of his fans still support him. They think that he’s still innocent, or that he should be forgiven. The sway that Youtubers have on their fans is enormous. Good Youtubers, like Markilpier (Mark Fischbach), use this sway to do good things (Mark conducts monthly charity events.) Then there’s Sam Pepper, who teaches his fans that lying and sexual harassment are things that you can do without consequence.
