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Twitch Streamer Gross Gore Banned After Years Of Sexual Assault Allegations

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Image: Ali “Gross Gore” Larsen

Today, Twitch banned and de-partnered Ali “Gross Gore” Larsen, a longtime streamer and subject of controversy, after sexual assault allegations old and new came to light last weekend.

Allegations emerged after the 28 year-old Larsen, who’s been suspended by Twitch numerous times over the years, made a post on the RoastMe subreddit on Friday. This led users to discuss previous allegations against him, culminating in lengthy lists of Larsen’s indiscretions, including videos of Larsen himself talking about times he asked a 15 year-old to show her breasts (he was 18 at the time) and slept with a 16 year-old when he was in his 20s, as well as a video in which another streamer, Jenna, accuses him of sexually assaulting her during TwitchCon. Threads also referenced a series of incidents at UK Runescape convention Runefest in 2018, which Kotaku reported on at the time, including a video in which Larsen appears to grab a woman’s face and try to kiss her, as well as multiple alleged inappropriate comments toward women that culminated in a physical altercation between Larsen and another streamer, Skiddler, that was dispersed by hotel staff and the police.

In the wake of these allegations resurfacing, a woman named Eve came forward on Saturday with her own story, saying that Larsen groomed her back in 2008, when she was 13 and he was 16. “Ali offered me video opportunities, clan chat rankings, and being featured on his personal YT channel,” she wrote in a Twitlonger. “In exchange, all I had to do was moan as he masturbated…Even at 13 I knew I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t understand until many years later how he used his power over me to help him masturbate.”

Over a Discord call, Jenna told Kotaku that Larsen was like a “big brother” to her for a long time, but during a party at TwitchCon 2019, he got drunk and refused to stop touching her arms, legs, and thigh while the two were on a couch. Eventually, he asked to grab her face. “It was super creepy,” Jenna told Kotaku, noting that she’d previously witnessed and talked to Larsen about other instances of sexual assault at events, during which she believes he was also drunk. “Then he started begging to grab me. And I was like ‘No dude, you’re my brother. Stop this.’” She says she ended up leaving the party not long after.

In response to the allegations, Larsen posted a YouTube video on Saturday in which he claimed some allegations, like the video of Jenna accusing him of sexual assault, were false or taken out of context, and that he had already apologized for others and turned over a new leaf. “There are some disgusting things from my past and I can promise you that’s not who I am today,” he said. “I look back, I cringe, I get embarrassed, and I regret so much.”

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Now, several days later, Twitch has banned him and taken away his partnership status, meaning he’s probably not coming back this time. In a statement to Kotaku, Twitch cited its rules against inappropriate behavior off-platform.

“The safety of our community is our top priority,” a Twitch spokesperson said in an email. “We take appropriate action when we have evidence that a streamer has acted in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, including in certain instances where the behavior may have taken place off Twitch. These apply to all streamers regardless of status or prominence in the community.”

The spokesperson specifically mentioned a rule that says, “We may take action against persons for hateful conduct or harassment that occurs off Twitch services and is directed at Twitch users.”

Kotaku also reached out to Larsen, who pointed to a video he posted to Twitter shortly after he’d been banned. In the video, Larsen showed viewers the email he received from Twitch, which cited “adult sexual exploitation” as the reason for his ban.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Larsen said in the video. “I don’t know what to say anymore. I’m so used to being thrown around in this community, and like being bullied and picked on. They’re bringing up stuff from 2016.”

He speculated that Twitch banned him for a “revenge porn” incident in which he allegedly sent nudes to a then-teenage streamer’s mother, but he said that he just showed her mother her Instagram account, and that she was 18 at the time. “This is a mistake from Twitch,” he concluded, adding that he’s going to start streaming on YouTube tomorrow.

Despite a laundry list of alleged infractions, Twitch took its time in banning Larsen. Back in 2018, he’d already been suspended numerous times, including in 2016 after he harassed a Riot employee. In a video Larsen released after Runefest 2018, he said Twitch would have perma-banned him had “someone at Twitch” not intervened on his behalf. Instead, the company suspended him for a month and prevented him from attending TwitchCon, suggesting it was well aware of the severity of his actions at Runefest. Since then, Larsen has managed to continue growing his Twitch audience all the way up to half a million followers. Larsen’s ban comes nearly a year after Twitch’s #MeToo reckoning, which resulted in the company banning several streamers accused of sexual assault and vowing to “continue to assess accusations against people affiliated with Twitch and explore ways Twitch can collaborate with other industry leaders on this important issue.” Months later, the company also ended up parting ways with an employee accused of sexual assault by a streamer.

Jenna hopes that some good comes of Larsen’s Twitch ban. “I feel bad, really, but he’s doing it to himself,” she said. “Obviously what he’s doing is awful and unforgivable. He really needs to get help, or he’s going to keep hurting people. That’s all there is to it. Maybe Twitch banning him will force him into going and getting that help.”

In response to Larsen’s Twitch ban and everything else that has happened, Eve told Kotaku that she’s “happy and ready to move forward,” but that Larsen’s response to his ban left her cold.

“He never reached out to me, and all I wanted was some acknowledgement and a private sincere apology,” Eve wrote in a DM. “He has been doing the same stuff for over 10 years. If he wanted to write off my story as him being a kid, then why didn’t this behavior end when he grew up? I honestly was hopeful after writing my story he would reach out, apologize, and I could move on and tell him I forgive him. But that video just showed me how not sorry he was, and deserved to be banned. I have no doubt in my mind if he weren’t banned, there would be more stories in the future of Ali sexually assaulting or harassing women. Without being held accountable, I don’t think he would see a reason to change.”

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Business

Jeep-Owner Stellantis Is Open to Dropping Cherokee Name, CEO Says

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The head of Jeep’s owner said he is open to dropping the Cherokee name from vehicles after recent criticism from the Native American tribe’s leader.

Carlos Tavares,

chief executive officer of the recently formed

Stellantis

STLA -2.71%

NV, said the company was engaged in dialogue with the Cherokee Nation over its use of the name. Jeep has two models, the Cherokee compact sport-utility vehicle and larger Grand Cherokee, that it sells in the U.S. and beyond.

Asked in an interview if he would be willing to change the Jeep Cherokee’s name if pushed to do so, Mr. Tavares said, “We are ready to go to any point, up to the point where we decide with the appropriate people and with no intermediaries.”

“At this stage, I don’t know if there is a real problem. But if there is one, well, of course we will solve it,” Mr. Tavares said, adding that he wasn’t personally involved in the talks.

Debate over the Cherokee name is among the issues facing Mr. Tavares, who took control of Stellantis when it was formed earlier this year from the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Peugeot-maker PSA. In the interview Wednesday, Mr. Tavares also discussed whether to cut down on the company’s 14 brands, making Fiat plants more competitive and his plan to stick with China.

Jeep has two models, the Cherokee compact SUV and larger Grand Cherokee, that it sells in the U.S. and beyond.



Photo:

FCA/TNS/Abaca Press/Reuters

The Cherokee Nation is the largest Native American tribe in the U.S., with some 370,000 members, and Jeep has sold millions of vehicles named after it. The auto brand extended its use of the Cherokee name to a compact SUV, a smaller version of the Grand Cherokee, in 2013.

The leader of the Cherokee Nation recently said he would like to see Jeep stop using his tribe’s name on its SUVs.

Chuck Hoskin Jr.,

principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said that he believed Jeep had good intentions but that “it does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car,” according to a statement first released to Car and Driver last week.

“The Cherokee Nation has an open dialogue with Stellantis leadership, and look forward to ongoing discussions,” a spokesman for the tribe said Wednesday. “We appreciate Stellantis’ reaching out and thoughtful approach on this.”

“
‘It does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car.’
”


— Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation

Mr. Tavares’s remarks come in the wake of a broad reckoning over racial and social injustice in the U.S. that was sparked by the police killing of

George Floyd,

an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis over Memorial Day weekend last year. In December, the Cleveland Indians decided to drop the baseball team’s longtime nickname after fans and Native American groups criticized it as racist. The Washington Football Team of the NFL has dropped a name that had been seen as a racial slur.

The Jeep Cherokee and Grand Cherokee SUVs are among the brand’s bestsellers in the U.S., accounting for 43% of Jeep’s sales in its largest market, according to company figures. Stellantis is rolling out a long-awaited redesign of the Grand Cherokee later this year.

Mr. Tavares said the auto industry’s practice of naming cars after Native American tribes was a sign of respect.

“I don’t see anything that would be negative here. I think it’s just a matter of expressing our creative passion, our artistic capabilities,” Mr. Tavares said.

The Jeep brand sits alongside profit-drivers like Ram in the U.S. and Peugeot in Europe. But the company’s sprawling portfolio of 14 brands also includes some that will need to prove their worth, Mr. Tavares said.

Mr. Tavares said he has asked each of his brand chiefs to work on a 10-year plan to develop more long-term visibility on product planning.

“I’m saying, ‘Look guys, I’m going to give you a chance. You need to convince me—you, the brand CEO—that you have a vision,’” Mr. Tavares said.

After several turnaround efforts, Fiat Chrysler’s Alfa Romeo and Maserati brands have failed to mount meaningful comebacks in recent years. The Fiat brand struggles with aging models and weak sales, which has caused an overcapacity problem in the company’s Italian factories.

Even the storied Chrysler brand has waned in recent years, now selling only three models compared with the six it carried a decade ago. The brand’s U.S. sales have also slid to one-third their volume in 2015, according to company figures.

On the PSA side, the DS brand—which focuses on high-end sedans and SUVs—grew market share last year but continues to lag far behind some of its German competitors.

“After we give them a chance to fail, we need to be also fair,” Mr. Tavares said. “If the rest of the company is doing the right things and there is one part of the company that is pulling everybody down, we’ll have to take that into consideration.”

The Portuguese executive built his reputation in the automotive industry as a turnaround expert. Peugeot was bleeding money when it hired Mr. Tavares in 2013. Since then the French car maker has gone from losing 5 billion euros, equivalent to about $6 billion, in 2012 to becoming one of the most profitable mass-market car makers in the industry. Last year it reported a net profit of €2.17 billion, or roughly $2.62 billion, with an adjusted operating margin of 7.1% in its core automotive business.

This time, Mr. Tavares has a longer to-do list, including integrating the two companies’ European businesses and stemming losses in China.

In Europe, Mr. Tavares has been visiting Fiat Chrysler factories—including an Alfa Romeo facility 80 miles south of Rome—and encouraging them to benchmark their performance against PSA plants. Additionally, employees from Fiat Chrysler’s Fiat factory in Mirafiori, Italy, visited PSA’s Citroën’s plant in Madrid, and Mr. Tavares said they were surprised by the nonlabor cost savings they observed.

The auto executive said the new company could reach its cost-saving goals in Europe without closing factories.

Asked what lessons he had learned from the chip shortage that has idled car plants across the world, Mr. Tavares said large suppliers didn’t relay signals they were receiving about the looming crisis. “We were not protected,” he said. “That’s a clear lesson learned.”

Chinese regulators are taking a close look at Tesla operations after recent videos on social media appear to show a Model 3 battery fire and malfunctioning vehicles. WSJ explains how possible quality issues with Tesla cars could threaten the EV-maker’s meteoric rise. Photo Illustration: Michelle Inez Simon

Mr. Tavares said the industrywide shift toward electrification would continue to rely on government subsidies and other financial incentives for buyers until auto makers figure out how to lower production costs over the next few years.

“If we propose electric vehicles which are extremely efficient but nobody can buy because they are costly, what’s the point from an environmental perspective?” he said.

In China, the combined sales of Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler accounted for less than 1% of a market that sold 20 million vehicles last year, according to industry data. Fiat Chrysler has long struggled to turn a profit in the world’s largest automotive market, while the French car maker sold only 45,965 vehicles in China last year, continuing a rapid multiyear decline.

Mr. Tavares said Stellantis isn’t considering exiting China, removing an option that he said was still on the table when the company started trading in New York at the start of this year.

“We cannot be away from the biggest market in the world,” he said.

Write to Nick Kostov at Nick.Kostov@wsj.com and Nora Naughton at Nora.Naughton@wsj.com

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Entertainment

Rachel Lindsay deactivates Instagram amid Bachelor backlash

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Photo: Noel Vasquez (Getty Images)

Rachel Lindsay—who, as the first Black woman to ever serve as the titular Bachelorette, has found herself frequently placed in the position of critiquing, mediating, and bringing to light the franchise’s multiple problems regarding race—has now disabled her Instagram account, after “fans” of the show became toxic and abusive toward her. This, in the wake of the controversy currently surrounding the controversy-prone reality series, as long-time host Chris Harrison announced he was “stepping aside” from the show for a time in the wake of an interview with Lindsay in which he went far out on the defensive on behalf of a contestant who was photographed participating in a “Plantation Party” invoking the tropes and aesthetics of the slave-owning Antebellum South.

In her role as an Extra correspondent, Lindsay walked, with aplomb, an incredibly complex tightrope in that interview, one that Black woman are often demanded to perform—coming off simultaneously as a moral voice of well-earned outrage, a cool and objective assessor of the issues on display, and a warm and likable TV presence. (Harrison, meanwhile, rambled about the “woke police” and tried to insist that nobody knew not to dress up like a slave owner in 2018.) All of which apparently earned her, for her trouble, the dispiriting but not unexpected tide of online abuse that followed.

Per Variety, Lindsay’s departure from social media was announced by her podcast co-host Van Lathan, who noted on his own social media that his friend “Did it because that’s how much hate she’s getting from Bachelor fans, who are spamming her with all kinds of rude, hateful things to say.” (He also took some shots at Harrison, dubbing him “a 49-year-old man who can’t read the room in these present 2021 times.”)

Rachael Kirkconnell, the Bachelor contestant whose photographs began this latest iteration of The Bachelor: Still Has Trouble With Race, Huh?, has since joined numerous other voices from the franchise, asking fans not to attack Lindsay for her reasonable interrogation of both Kirkconnell’s own actions, and Harrison’s statements.

There’s no word yet on when, if ever, Harrison is expected to return to the franchise.

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Business

Google Suspended Federated Chat App Element for Allegedly Hosting Abusive Content

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Photo: Lionel Bonaventure (Getty Images)

Google temporarily yanked Element’s Android chat app from the Play Store this week for allegedly hosting abusive content. The decision’s particularly baffling given that Element is only a client for the federated chat protocol Matrix and not a service in and of itself. Meaning that Element can (and does) moderate its own servers, but has zero control over what happens on the network that users connect to.

“[J]ust as Google does not control the content on the Web, Element does not control the content on Matrix,” Element CEO Matthew Hodgson wrote in a blog post published Saturday.

Google booted Element from its app store on Friday without warning or prior notification and restored the app late Saturday evening, Element said. In a Saturday morning tweet, the company said they’d reached out to Google and confirmed that the suspension “is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix.” Element’s developers submitted a “detailed appeal” to Google to try to overturn the suspension, and it seems to have made a difference.

In a blog update, Hodgson said a Google executive reached out and apologized for the “bad communication” on Google’s part. The suspension was apparently related to “some extremely abusive content” on the default matrix.org home server, which Element runs on behalf of Matrix, that had already been identified and swiftly dealt with by Element’s moderators.

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“We’ve explained how Element and Matrix works, established a channel for communication over any future moderation concerns, and expect the app to be restored shortly,” Hodgson wrote at the time.

Hours later, he updated the blog to announce the app was back up and running again and thanked users for their patience.

“Thanks also to Google for being transparent and apologetic and the rapid resolution once we’d established contact,” he said.

But even though the app is now back in Google’s Play Store, its abrupt disappearance undoubtedly led to some headaches for the scores of businesses, universities, and governments, including the UK, America, France, and Germany, that use Element and the Matrix network. Google has previously suspended a third-party client for content beyond its control, as Android Police notes. In February 2020, Google banned the popular open-source Reddit client Slide for almost two weeks because a screenshot in the app’s store listing contained the text “ISIS” as shown in a news-related Reddit post.

Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment. The incident with Element comes after Google and Apple both cracked down on Parler’s app in the wake of the Capitol building attack on Jan. 6 for allegedly hosting violent content.

With this in mind, it makes sense that Google may have its hackles raised about content moderation and is going a bit ban-happy these days. And while this approach may be warranted in some cases, let us remember that not all apps are bad, and that some really are doing their best to fight off hateful and violent content.



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