My response to Craig.

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Hi guys,

I’m sorry that this has become a necessity to address and make sure things are made clear from my perspective to address things Craig has said of me. I’ll try to cover everything to ensure that all facts are made clear to you in order to allow you to see more clearly on what happened. I have no problems with stating everything because my conscience is clear so let’s run it back.

It started at the E3 Monstercat party at Exchange LA and while I was there I bumped into Craig. After the party, we all decided to go back to someone’s house. Craig offered so we ordered an Uber to go there. In the Uber, Tyler made a joke about Craig’s Ferrari and thinking it was all in good fun, I joined in on the same joke. I was sitting in the seat in front of Craig so I couldn’t tell if he was bothered by the jokes which were based off a quote in the BBC news report about the local rugby team in his hometown he sponsored. When we arrived at the house, people were rushing to the bathroom to use it. I made a joke as this was happening, saying “let’s pee in the pool!”. I ran out the back to the pool and pulled my pants down to my ankles to pretend to pee. The night continued as normal without me thinking there was a problem. Later on, Craig went upstairs to his girlfriend who was in her room alone. Craig returned downstairs and soon after he started to make it seem that my girlfriend (Lanai) and I were not welcome so we decided to leave. We ordered an Uber, said goodbye and went home just believing everything was fine but still unsure if we just misinterpreted the scenario.

Moving onto the next day... For context here, the previous day we had a group text to chat about having a group dinner the following day.
Craig took it upon himself to book the table for this dinner and included everyone in the booking while omitting my girlfriend and me on purpose without telling us... Our group of friends are not in the same location very often, so this is a very rare instance of when the group can spend time together in person, which is really important to me. My girlfriend and I didn’t attend the dinner because we weren’t invited to it and only found out about the dinner only 3 hours (3:00 PM) before the reservation at (6:00 PM). Marcel had found out that I had been excluded from the reservation and brought it to my attention, Marcel wanted to know why I wasn’t invited and then Craig replied saying "I’ll talk to you about this tonight if you're out". At the dinner, I was told Craig proceeded to discuss the night before and said I was making everything awkward for others with the Ferrari joke and pool joke specifically.
After my dinner with my girlfriend, we went to a party where all of our friend's group were going so we could meet up. At one point in the night, Craig approached me and opened up the conversation with a half-hearted awkward laugh and a "Hi". I stopped him immediately from speaking because I was so upset about the way he handled things up to this point and the way he laughed while saying “Hi” felt like this wasn’t a serious issue to him. I said "I'm going to talk to you like a man should and say things directly to your face and not behind your back in texts to everyone else but me. If you had a problem with things that I said last night, all you needed to do was talk to me directly about it and I would've happily apologized. I meant no malicious intent in any of the jokes that I made and I joined in on jokes so accusing me of starting the joke is not fair. I thought it was a group of friends having fun together." Craig then interjected me saying "I have so much going on in my mind right now". I replied with "we all have things going on in our life". Once I finished that Craig replied with "but Brian, my dog just died", to which I replied "Craig, my dad just died but that doesn't give me the right to take my frustrations out on everyone else because of my own personal grievances and use that as a reasonable excuse for my actions. I can't tell what’s going on in your brain, no one can. Unless you tell me about your personal issues, how can I tell that you're sensitive to jokes we are making that we think are all in good fun but unaware to me, it’s upsetting you? You can’t hold that against me as if I am attacking you and being a dick on purpose because I don’t know what’s going on inside your brain.” Per your tweets, I feel this is the part that you have either poorly misinterpreted or else recalled incorrectly since you accused me of “making fun of your mental state”. Having you say something like that really hurts me because I wouldn't say something like that to you or anyone and I would really appreciate if you retracted that tweet.
I continued to say to Craig, "The main reason of this trip which I booked last second was to finally be in an event where all of our friends were in one location together. This was the one night everyone from our group of friends was in Los Angeles together before some people had to go home and you took that away from me because you weren’t willing to talk about it properly with me this morning, face to face. If I had known I had upset you or insulted you accidentally I would’ve apologized completely, I never meant to offend or upset you but texting everyone about the night before behind my back and planning a dinner just to exclude me was selfish and really hurt because it was the one thing I was truly excited for, to have some time where we were all together as a group." I ended it with “that's everything I want to say to you, have a good night and just leave me alone." Craig said "ok" and walked away.
You stated in your tweet that I made fun of your mental state and “that’s the whole reason I stopped the conversation”. You didn’t end any conversation. You didn’t really say much and I never said:
“it’s so sad you’re too fucked up in the head to take a joke anymore”.
That never left my lips and I 100% refute that accusation entirely.

Fast forward to 2019... In April, Craig did a meme stream. In this stream, he commented about the group and why he doesn't play with us anymore. Here is a link to him speaking publicly about it during the last week of April before I had made any public statement on the group about Craig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9fPVJqn724
This video was brought to my attention by viewers and was shown to the group but I didn’t say anything publicly. It was kept private but made known to the group because it was about our group. The content of the video bothered me because we grew as a group together and I thought we had mutual respect contrary to anything personal between him and I. As time went by people noticed we hadn’t worked together and started asking questions regarding our friendship. Out of respect for Craig, I ignored a lot of the questions from in-stream donations, etc. Mainly because I didn’t want to say anything regarding it and because Craig wasn’t there to defend himself and I felt it should remain private. Then someone asked me a question about him not being in the group and I answered their question because Craig had spoken about the subject in his video. It wasn’t directed at mine and Craig’s personal relationship.
Here is the link which includes what Craig said before in-stream and what I said. Please note, Craig’s two clips included were made in his same stream before I had said the following in this video, the editing of the clips are not in chronological order and may confuse some people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bawGo4cSxik
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bawGo4cSxik&t=1s

I responded only to what had been made public by Craig in his stream… His reasoning for leaving the group was because “all they did was play Fortnite and Gmod and then shit about other YouTubers” which isn’t true of our group and not the true reason as to why he left the group.
He left the group in 2015 and was not kicked, he left on his own accord. He left the group chat on Skype and then stated his reason was that he didn't like feeling as if he was under Vanoss’ shadow. If you search his tweets with the word “group” or “Vanoss” you will see many tweets showing his disdain in 2014 and beyond, well before Fortnite was a big hit, and before Gmod was played by us for quite a few years. Also, his language and tone changed in his tweets about the group... He went from using "our group" in 2014 to eventually saying "I'm not in a group lol" in early 2016... Finally, he said in his eyes, "there was never a group to begin with" in late 2016.
As for the “shit talkers” that he presented the group as, we have talked about other Youtubers, as people do. People speak about other people, Youtubers speak about other Youtubers. Was it all good? No. Was it all bad? No. But that’s because people have different opinions about lots of things. Many times we would discuss things happening in the YouTube scene and some would have opinions others might not have, but to paint us purely as gossipers isn’t right. We spoke about other Youtubers with no ill will towards them but more as water cooler talk. To be honest the vast majority of our talk was about ourselves within the group chat and talking shit to each other. We would plan recording sessions and speak about upload times so we don’t upload videos at the same time as one another.

Also, here is the original stream of mine which occurred on June 27th:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9cTScBEG8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9cTScBEG8&t=1342s

Just so people can clearly see that I did not speak first publicly about Craig and the group but rather merely addressed what he said on his stream.
Yesterday Craig publicly tweeted out about a "rumor" he heard of “how he hates everyone in the group” which makes no sense to me. If it is just a rumor then it is one that didn’t need the attention he gave it but he wanted to anyway. He mentioned how I was the one making it out to look that way. I never accused him of hating everyone or anyone in the group when he clearly still hangs out with people within the group. It would be illogical of me to accuse him of hating them with that fact in mind... After his opening line, he brought up the E3 incident at the party and misquoted me entirely by accusing me of making fun of his mental state. I did not make fun of his mental state at all. Why would I get some sick enjoyment that you’re going through stuff after I had just dealt with my own personal issues? When your dog died, I hugged you when you arrived at our booth at Insomnia and talked to you for over an hour trying to help give you some advice from my own experiences after my father’s passing. Remember that?
We sat in the stock room of the booth for an hour, eating a Subway sandwich and I listened and talked. Why would I then go and make fun of your mental state after that? You were my friend. A period of time proceeding E3, Craig told Marcel to tell me "If Brian wants to fix things all he has to do is come to me and apologize". I was aware of how he was upset by my jokes, but from Craig’s message, I felt he wasn’t aware of how his actions and words had impacted me. There felt like no sincerity in the way he tried to reach out to me at all...
He has my phone number, he could have contacted me personally, we could have tried to reach an understanding…instead he communicated to me via a mutual friend and not in a way that seemed like he genuinely wanted two-way forgiveness.
I never said he ditched the group, I spoke about how he doesn’t play with the group anymore by saying "he left the group to do his own thing", "we were cool with that and we respected that", "but I don’t get why you would leave a group and then talk shit about the group", "we didn’t kick you out man". I don’t understand why he would say that I said, he ditched the group. Craig said his side of the story isn’t on YouTube, but Craig was the one who spoke first publicly on the matter in a disrespectful way on his stream that gets over 30-50k concurrent viewers and in two video links which I have provided.

As for me not replying to your DM, there are two DMs. One made in May, that I felt had the same issue as the message you gave to Marcel. The message hadn’t shown any self-awareness towards my feelings. Had Craig approached me without a demeanor that wasn’t as if it was an inconvenience to him but rather a reconciling approach I would've been more open.
He sent me this DM while staying at Tyler’s, which again begs the question why would I accuse you of hating the people in the group when you’re visiting Tyler in this case. I felt he was encouraged, and rightfully so by his friends to quash things and move on. He took the advice but his way of messaging me didn’t seem like it was out of a heartfelt intention to be friends once again and I decided that I wanted to leave this behind me so I left it.
Yesterday, however, after Craig saw a YouTube video that had gathered a lot of views and which had been uploaded a few days prior to his statement, that had both of our opinions on this matter within it, Craig felt compelled to then bring personal instances to discuss his split from the group and make this whole issue centered around our private issue. Slandering my name and twisting my words and the situation to his favor in order to justify himself by bringing up private instances by quoting me in a false manner.
I replied to your statement refuting it and you backtracked by saying it was a "near quote" and if I really wanted to sort this that I had to DM you… which you then sent a DM to me after you had made it all public and refused to delete the tweets in order to go private because of the reason you gave
“I don’t have my side of the story anywhere”.
Well here is the whole story. No sides. Take from it what you will. I have nothing to hide and I have a clear conscience on the situation and it's unfortunate it has taken this route, as it is unfair to our large audience who clearly support us both equally. You failed to think of the very negative perception I would then have to deal with regarding the mental health "quote" which was just plain wrong...
Like I’ve always said on streams, I wish you the best.
In your tour and other endeavors, but our friendship won’t be the same. With that being said, as time passes, if we have the chance to speak to each other, face to face and not over the internet, I’d be open in trying to have things at least become friendly between us.
I appreciate everyone who has been loyal to us, on both sides. Even the people telling me to go fuck myself, I appreciate you all. I mean it. Thank you for watching our videos and enjoying our content. We are all human and make mistakes but I hope we can all learn from this. Move forward and hope for the best. May there be more good times and hopefully less drama along the way.
xxx
Brian Michael Hanby

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