Ethan Klein Doesn’t Deserve My Apology

This week, I wrote about YouTuber and podcaster Ethan Klein suing three women for streaming his copyrighted content on Twitch. It was cheekily titled “Ethan Klein’s War on Women.” In it, I talked about Klein’s feuds, his lawsuits, and how the defendants have endured a barrage of misogynistic hate in response to them. 

On Thursday, the day before my birthday (thank you to everyone who upgraded their subscription as a present) and the day after his birthday, Klein posted a series of Instagram stories asking me to apologize for my coverage—with a twist. 

He wrote: “I’ve been thinking deeply about everything going on, specifically about the accusation that I’m a misogynist for suing three women. You are all correct, it’s not been fair. That’s why I’ve decided to add SeanDaBlack to the lawsuits, for gender equality. Sean, be sure to thank all of your snarker friends for their constructive advice!”

He continued: “I understand my announcement that I’m going to sue SeanDaBlack was upsetting to some. Therefore, in an act of super human grace, I will make you this offer: If the snark subreddit, Taylor Lorenz and Kat Tenbarge all apologize for calling me a misogynist, I will consider dropping the lawsuit against Sean. This offer expires Sunday at 11:59pm.”

When I saw this, my initial reaction was to point out the fact that I did not call Klein a misogynist at any point in my piece. In a statement, I offered to apologize for something I didn’t do if it really meant Klein wouldn’t sue Sean, a Black Twitch streamer who also reacted to Klein’s copyrighted content. 

Klein responded to me and my friend and fellow journalist Lorenz, who issued her own apology: “Sarcastic non-apologies will not be accepted […] Do this and I will tear up the complaint, I am 100% serious.” 

Before the deadline was even up, Klein said we were “unwilling to swallow [our] pride” and claimed he now needed Hasan Piker to donate $75,000 to the GoFundMes for the three women Klein is suing. Then, on Saturday—while I was at the beach with my friends—Klein backtracked and said the whole thing was an act of “trolling.”

“But if you ask me, I am the true feminist,” Klein wrote. “I hold people accountable, regardless of gender!”

So do I. Funnily enough, I started writing this response before Klein revealed it was all an exercise in “trolling.” I wrote that I wouldn’t be apologizing any further, because I didn’t do what Klein is accusing me of, and I didn’t trust him to keep his word. He didn’t. Plus, this isn’t really about me. It continues to be about Piker and punishing people in Piker’s orbit. Klein can’t even post about Zohran Mamdani’s win without making it about his personal gripes with Piker, who is a high-profile Mamdani supporter.

Now, as I previously reported, Klein is suing three women for making content reacting to his copyrighted work about Piker. He has not taken this seriously online, literally lighting money on fire in the video he made announcing the lawsuits. But this isn’t funny for the people with something at stake. 

Copyright infringement is not a violent crime. It is a civil one, giving plaintiffs the opportunity to recover financial damages. The three women he’s suing—Frogan, Denims, and Kaceytron—have significantly smaller audiences than Klein. They have each created GoFundMe fundraisers to afford legal fees.

Klein does not appear to be currently at risk of losing everything. Out of everyone involved, he appears to be the wealthiest by far. He is flaunting his ability to sue others who must rely on the generosity of strangers to afford to defend themselves. Klein can do all this on the luxury vacation he posted on Instagram from this week. 

Klein disputes that targeting these women is misogynistic in nature. But I never said that suing three women is misogynistic. It’s the way these women—and all the other women involved in this—are being treated that is misogynistic.

Sean, to his credit, posted “ethan klein using me to force accomplished women journalist [sic] to grovel to him is ironically exactly misogyny he claims is inaccurate in this very post” and “He presents a false choice: 1. grovel to him as he exerts the control he wants to feel over women. 2. Deny him whatever gratification he gets from that narcissistic behavior and subsequently be blamed (by him) for a small creator being sued […] I reject this choice, fuck you ethan.”

I didn’t call Klein a misogynist, but plenty of other people have. 

A video that has come up a lot on my social media feeds over the past few days is one from a little over ten years ago, where Klein zooms in on a photo of an 18-year-old victim of the Boston Marathon bombing at the scene of the crime with the words “You can scar me, but you can’t stop me” written on her stomach in paint. He then scrolls down to focus on her crotch and says the outline of her vulva is visible through her clothing—in some of the crudest language possible. He scrolls down to her visible scars from the attack and says “Nothing that a heavy night of fucking won’t incur.” He then issues a string of sexually-explicit phrasing and the N-word. 

At the time Klein recorded this video and disseminated it on the internet, he was about a year older than I am now. One of his fans defended the video in a recent post on the H3 subreddit with the “context” that Klein was using it to mock other people’s behavior. Here’s the thing: that doesn’t make its language any less misogynistic or racist. It doesn’t change the way I feel as a woman seeing it now. 

Klein and many of his online peers, especially men, have made content like this in the past. Many of them are still making it. They like to excuse it, call themselves reformed, or just delight in getting away with it. Since this is the internet, it doesn’t matter, right? Wrong. This behavior has consequences. It is harmful to the individual women targeted and to women at large. It is a thread in the fabric of systemic sexism. 

I first became aware of Klein in 2020, when he and the YouTuber Keemstar engaged in a viral back-and-forth feud. Klein positioned himself as taking the moral high ground in his arguments against Keemstar’s behavior. A few months later, he started a podcast called Frenemies with YouTuber Trisha Paytas. It propelled both of them, Paytas in particular, to mainstream fame. On this show, Klein cemented the idea that he was no longer the type of person who made content like the video about the Boston bombing victim. 

The most-viewed livestream on the H3 Podcast channel actually features Klein and Paytas bringing attention to reporting about a woman who came forward with a rape allegation against a prominent YouTuber. It was my reporting. I was in my first full-time job as a journalist at Business Insider. I became aware of these allegations and sought to bring them to light and inform as many people as possible. Paytas was with the alleged victim the same night the allegations took place. She corroborated this for my story. She and Klein debuted it on Frenemies to an audience of millions. They actually started speaking about it minutes before the article was published. With the help of their platform, it became a viral phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Klein and Paytas defended the anonymous woman who came forward. They also defended me from other YouTubers’ attacks. I was grateful. I believed Ethan Klein cared about gender-based violence.

Fast forward four years, and I watched Kaceytron break down in tears on a livestream while recounting how her disabled father answered the door and was served Klein’s lawsuit against her. She uses her income from Twitch to support her family. 

“It’s really fucking traumatic to see your dad cry like that,” Kacey said. “And I know people are going to be making fucking fun of me for this.”

They did. Notoriously misogynistic male content creators made fun of her and said she deserved it. She has received an enormous wave of online abuse that reminds her of what she experienced in the era directly after Gamergate, she told me.

The same thing has happened to the other women Klein sued, who are Arab women. One of them, Denims, told me that on any given social media post she has made since Klein sued her, “at least 20% of the comments are straight-up misogyny (at its simplest, ‘whore’).”

“There’s been a noticeable trend of radicalization of online content creators towards right-wing ideology, particularly in the past year,” she continued. “Unfortunately, the influx of people often mostly consists of right-wing sexist trolls, that only see that creator as a vector for their attacks on women or minorities that they already dislike.” 

Kacey’s sister posted her own statement about their family’s history and what Klein is doing now. It’s worth a read.

“People like Ethan Klein have no idea what it means to live in poverty and true economic despair. They don’t understand the violence it breeds. Not just physically, but the emotional violence of being constantly dehumanized and ignored,” she wrote. “I will never understand why the wealthy seem to despise the poor and want to see us suffer. This feels like one of the most blatant examples of class warfare I’ve ever witnessed.”

Since my last post on this went live, I’ve watched Klein’s fans react to it in their subreddit and elsewhere. He frequently reposts their commentary. They call me unprofessional. Undermine me. This is how the Kleins and their fans have treated me for years, despite how much my journalistic work has impressed and enriched the Kleins in the past.

And now I am supposed to apologize for saying that Ethan Klein has given misogynists another reason to abuse women online, even as his fans are abusing me. I received a threatening email shortly after my article was posted in the H3 subreddit. I have read their demeaning comments about my appearance (“The middle part with cheap two stand bleach highlights is giving ‘Its the year 2004 and I just lost my audition for American Idol’”), my voice (“The fucking vocal fry though.... It's always the mean girls”), and my writing (“What is happening? Did the schools close? Never mind the content, what is this sentence structure?”). I have seen them spread conspiracies about me and my loved ones. I have seen them accuse me of being attracted to Piker, like Klein has repeatedly done to women who criticize him. Piker is nice-looking, but I am a lesbian. 

These people and Klein claim that I am a snarker posting snark. “Snark” is internet gossip. Snark subreddits run the gamut from content seeking to hold public figures accountable to vicious harassment against specific influencers, everyone around them, and anyone who defends them. It tends to most egregiously target women. It also targets a lot of men. It has certainly targeted the Kleins, but also almost everyone they hate. The people in the H3 subreddit and Ethan consider themselves anti-snark, but they are snarkers, too.

The audience for my journalism, including my opinion journalism, is much broader than the H3 audience. I did not know if my average reader would care about any of this. A lot of my Bluesky followers are hearing about Ethan Klein for the first time. But contrary to what the H3 fans are saying about my journalism, I’ve gotten a positive reception from older people, people in traditional media, and people outside this bubble. And maybe that shouldn’t surprise me. 

I was recently honored with a national recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists. My fellow honorees included the former executive editor of The New York Times. As someone who just got laid off this year, I felt small in comparison to the journalistic titans who share the title. But when I was interviewed by an older female journalist for an upcoming feature about the award, she remarked that anyone who can understand Trisha Paytas is deserving. And since H3 fans are convinced I’m just a vengeful fan of Paytas, I’ll have them know she has had me blocked on social media since I covered her critically in 2021.

This has been a big week for Spitfire News, thanks to the attention my piece garnered, and not all of it positive. It’s scary to have someone as litigious and powerful as Ethan Klein pressure you to apologize for what you said about him. As an independent journalist, I’m scared of these kinds of things a lot. But as cliché as it sounds, I’m also free. Once upon a time, the scariest part of all this would be the fear of getting in trouble for it at work. Now I’m my own boss. And I don’t have to apologize to anyone.