In Defense of Those Speaking Out, My History With Dmbrandon

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The major events detailed in this twitlonger can be corroborated by several people, including former Juice member Moggi.

The original members of Juice were my closest friends, as I played Super Smash Bros Brawl competitively in my early teens. Dmbrandon scouted me out at an early age and became my static teammate and best friend.

We had great times together and he introduced me to so much as a teenager.
The fact that he was 7 years older than me hardly ever occurred to me.

It wasn't until Junior year of high school, when I started to date my girlfriend Jenn, that things got weird. Diem was very controlling, as I'm sure you'll hear from others. He feared Jenn's influence over me, because she was able to view him from an outside perspective. He would constantly tell me what a mistake I was making by being with her.

Ironically, he shamed me and Jenn both for getting into politics and social justice. He thought such ideas could only come from her, an outside influence in my life, and hated that I was branching out into other directions.

He took issue with any tweet I made about topics like sexism, ridiculing me for my stances and directly telling me to delete them because I was hurting my image and Juice's.

I started to develop mental illnesses as I grew up, namely panic disorder and clinical depression. He was entirely unsympathetic, and would just push me to work harder instead of empathizing. I became friends with Spiff and other "outsiders," who Diem despised. Much like with Jenn, he saw potential outside influences as a threat to the level of control that he had over me.

I started to recognize this pattern, but Diem was like my brother. I kept being his friend and putting up with his behavior, because I felt I owed him for everything he did for me, and our bond was too strong to break.a

I had plans to fly out to the 2015 Smite World Championship with Diem and the rest of Juice, because he was scheduled to commentate there, and the Juice Community arranged a meetup. Diem raised money on his stream to fly me and each member of Juice out to the event.

I was in such a heightened state of anxiety the night before that I had a nervous breakdown. There was an enormous amount of pressure on my shoulders, meeting fans that I interacted with online daily, who supported me financially. Due to a condition I have called trichotillomania, I ended up pulling out most of the hair from my eyebrows due to the stress. I even posted a picture on Twitter to show my viewers what I experienced.

I texted Diem a lengthy explanation of what was happening to me, telling him how distraught I was, and that I couldn't make it to my flight the next day because I was in such a terrible state. He texted back 6 words: "Give me back my flight money."

I started spiraling at this point. I was already in such a dark place, and now I felt incredibly guilty and ashamed.

I paid him back everything, and kept messaging with no response all weekend. When he and the other members of Juice returned from worlds, I suddenly found myself being left out of a lot of the group calls, and wasn't invited to play games with them. He and the group started ignoring me altogether.

I can't even express how badly this hurt. Not only was I recovering from a nervous breakdown, which Diem knew I had a history with, but he had influenced the rest of my friends to permanently ghost me.

This was so upsetting that I made a twitlonger detailing the experience and Diem's manipulation of me throughout our relationship.

As the twitlonger gained traction, I received a call from Diem, in which he screamed at me and eventually began crying. He told me to delete the twitlonger, or he was going to kill himself. He said that he could get fired for what I wrote, and that if I didn't remove it immediately, he would commit suicide.

As someone suffering from major depressive disorder and anxiety, this traumatized me.

I immediately removed the twitlonger. Moggi recently told me that Diem staged the situation to make it look like I took the twitlonger down because it contained lies, saying that my testimony wasn't credible because of my decision to delete it. Diem then told all of my friends that I was a traitor, that my girlfriend brainwashed me against him, and that I was crazy.

And the whole community had his back. In their eyes, I suddenly went back on all the statements I made in the twitlonger.

I've never told anyone about his threat because I feared for his life, and I never wanted to be responsible if something happened. I also still felt indebted to him for everything he did for me throughout my life.

Moggi now also tells me that after I left Juice, Diem kept tabs on me as my mental health declined. Diem would share videos with the rest of Juice, laughing at what was left of eyebrows, about how badly I was doing, how horribly depressed I was, and he continued to call me crazy.

Apparently his attacks on me were so personal that he even tried to blame my "craziness" on my sister for coming out as transgender, saying that it directly affected my mental health, when that couldn't be further from the truth.

I lost all the relationships that I had fostered over years in gaming. Everyone in Juice was told horrible things about me. No one was willing to go against Diem. I was dead to them.

It wasn't until Moggi reached out to me a couple of months ago that I started to see what really happened in the aftermath of the 2015 Worlds incident.

Now that allegations have been made against Diem by several community members, I was reminded of incidents in the past that I had overlooked while growing up with Diem.

As I said, I was in my teens when I first became friends with Diem, and some of his actions really confused and troubled me.

He had an obsession with the girlfriend of our friend and member of Juice. When we would hang out with her, he would pull me aside or whisper to tell me how hot she was, and how he could "probably get her to show [him] her boobs." He spoke in graphic detail about what he would do to her sexually. This was really alarming to me, because he was in a very serious relationship at the time.

On a different occasion, we were at someone's house playing mafia and there was a girl there that Diem began flirting with. Again, he kept saying how hot she was, and started telling me how, if we didn't get out of there soon, he was "going to do something." He kept repeating that he would have to do something with her if we didn't leave. He was still in the same committed relationship at this time as well.

That always stuck out to me, because I was so young, and the manner in which he spoke about this girl seemed predatory.

I don't want to speak over anyone else's accounts, because the victims should be the focus here, but I wanted to attest, as someone that spent many years as a best friend to Diem, that this is a pattern. Not just his aggression towards women, but the way he uses his power to harm vulnerable people.

Please believe those speaking out and do what you can to make their stories known, and make them feel safe within this community again.

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