Ma'idah Lashani ⚖ · @BANparty
23rd Jun 2020 from TwitLonger
The post I never thought I'd write.
I literally cannot believe nobody else has said anything about Ryan Morrison yet.
I’ve tried very hard to move on with my life and cut his toxicity out of it, like excising a cancerous tumor from your brain, but I’m probably going to be in therapy for many years working through all the ways Ryan fucked me up in the head. However, I’m inspired by the courage of all the women who have been coming forward over the last week to call out their abusers in the streaming and games industry, and I feel it is my responsibility to share a few stories myself in hopes of warning other young women to stay away from this predator.
I helped Ryan start his first two businesses, and by the time I quit working there a few years later I was a shattered wreck of a person. Almost all the people who helped him found his companies had the same experience.
Here are a few things that happened to me when I worked for Ryan that I think people should know about:
- He encouraged me to be disingenuous with streamers and game developers about my interests in order to lure them into liking us enough to become clients.
- He barred me from speaking publicly about politics because I had not “earned that right” meanwhile he regularly drunkenly tweeted at celebrities and politicians, including fucking Barack Obama
- He maintained secret friendships with owners of prominent esports orgs while publicly making a big show of negotiating against them – he even allowed one of them to come to our annual company retreat.
At the same company retreat (possibly even the same year) he invited me to a work dinner where someone at the table remarked that Muslims are dirty people and don’t believe in soap. Rather than defending me after a long period of awkward silence he attempted to justify that person’s racism by saying “maybe it’s a cultural thing”.
- He made off color sexual remarks about a transgender staff member’s genitalia, both to her face in public at a games conference and behind her back.
- He booked a single room with 1 bed for the 2 of us to spend an entire week at Gamescom. He said his assistant mistakenly did it, but then he failed to book a new room the rest of the week.
I lost my luggage on this same trip. He offered to talk to the airport rep for me, and when he handed the phone back to me he laughingly informed me that whatever he’d said made the airport rep so angry the stranger literally wanted to fight me. I was scared enough to call airport security but they refused to help me. In the end I had to go alone to get my stuff from the guy Ryan had enraged. It was a really frightening experiencing so far away from home.
In addition to all the anecdotes above, he grossly underpays and relentlessly gaslights his staff. This constant gas lighting is the biggest reason I haven’t spoken out about my experiences before now. Truly manipulative people have a way of making you believe everything they’re doing is ok, and you’re the crazy one for even mentioning it. Sometimes when you get out of a really abusive situation you just want to put it in the rear view and never see it again. I know there are other young women working at his talent agency and law firm, though, and if any of those people want to speak out I hope they know that I believe them and they are supported.