you're friends with my abuser, dmbrandon

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I thought I wouldn’t have to start at the beginning and to be able to make this short and sweet but after sitting on it, I have to. I know this will be long but please stay with me. This is not just another “oh that's just DM being DM” case. I don’t think it ever really has been. After leaving Juice I needed therapy twice a week for 2 years. I argued with her for the first 6 months that “well what if he's right and i’m wrong” my own therapist had to convince me I was gaslit and abused.


I joined Juice around the beginning of my smite career. I used to play on a team called Silver Snakes with Krett, Myflin, Purified, and a few others. I think Purified got me associated with Juice because I remember learning about who DiMreally was after Purified try’d out for our team. I knew of his name alongside Sev because they always got into my games as a duo. So the name was not unfamiliar, I just had no idea he was grinding smite as a career.

So I asked to join because I wanted to be around like-minded individuals trying to grow at the game. I recently just moved out of state and had no friends irl, or really online. I was aware of DM’s anger during games very soon after. I never really gave it a second thought because its frustrating to lose. I actually never saw the infamous clip of DM yelling at Krett about being in skype till way after. I discarded any weird feelings about that because whatever, friends get mad at each other sometimes.

It carries on like this for a while, everyone grinding out Smite. I got to know more juice kids, about Mimi, etc. I sort of got distant from my prior friends because I was so overwhelmed by the power? Coolness? I enjoyed being in Juice. Like holy shit we are this exclusive club and we get to do cool shit.

I was always close w/ Krett throughout this though. Until DM found out about this and told me Krett is madly in love with me and creepy and to stay away from him. Now at this point in my life and for a long time in juice, I was horrible at confrontation. I think it's something DM actively took advantage of. I never wanted to make people upset, ever. I parroted a lot of other people’s opinions instead of my own.

I manage to confront Krett that DM has an issue with him and Krett was just like “the fuck, you’re my friend. I care about you and I should be honest with you, i get really bad vibes about DM. Like r*pist vibes.” I was like holy shit man, thats alot. And not knowing what to do, I go back to DM with what was said and I remember him getting angry. That I was to cut all ties with Krett. And I listened because I didn’t want to lose my friendships within this new community.

Something I regret that I ended up doing was talking shit about Krett. Now after years of therapy I realize why I did this. It was to try and build a case against Krett because I never truly believed he was a bad dude. However I tried to convince myself of this by shit talking him in the group with the others.


I’m a suvivor of an insane amount of emotional and sexual abuse. I think that's why I held on to DM’s opinions so highly and heavily. He was someone I looked up to, and there really wasn’t anyone in my life that I did. DM knows I was sexually abused in the past by a family member. I felt safe to tell him, and it guts me to have to bring it out here, like this. There was a tweet years ago on my old twitter account where I just said #Metoo because I couldn’t find the strength to come forward about my abuse.

I always prided myself as a hard worker, if you watched my Bloodborne stream you know I’m insanely dedicated. And I dedicated alot of my beliefs and resources towards DM and juice. Its what my therapist said helped him get such control over me, and others around me. You just kind of, zone out all the bad because he does good things. He helps you out and you feel loved. Sure you get called an idiot and lazy weekly but eventually he says nice job. It was never easy for him to constantly tear me down, calling me lazy and stupid, but I trusted him that much. That he was seeing something I didn’t.

There wasn’t any talking to him about your feelings being hurt. It was dismissed and I took this as “Okay I need to get over this, it's my fault, I’m bothering him.” Something that always confused me is he always said “I’m not your dad I don’t want to fix your problems”, yet he always managed to be involved in them. I started making my own decisions because I felt so bad that he “had to keep fixing” them. But when I stopped going to him I got called out with “why the fuck are you doing this” “why didn’t you come to me first” It was a whirlwind and I started to never know what to do or feel.

This next portion may be jumping around alot, but instead of pointing out every single encounter I had, I thought I’d try to point out the ones I didn’t know were red flags.


When Mimi got exposed as a catfish, I saw a side of anger in him that I’ve never seen from anyone in my life. I got so worried he was going to end up killing Mimi or himself that I got so sick from it I ended up in the hospital. I still suffer from remembering that event and how scared I was.

Sometime after the next major event was Shadow. Shadow was a nervous guy, and I could tell he was struggling emotionally. With that type of emotional pain DM’s whole “get over it and go outside” mentality is probably the worst solution. The crazy thing is I actually preached that back to Shadow.

One Smite event Shadow had a panic attack and bailed. I remember him saying DM was demanding the money back. The next thing I really know Shadow is leaving juice. I was shocked and felt betrayed. Especially because I held resentment towards him when he had a panic attack and blew me off after i was trying to help. Now realistically I know better, I suffered from anxiety disorder my whole teenage years. But for some reason I just took this really personal and it helped me buy into this narrative around Shadow being a flake and emotionally unstable.


I truly believe DM’s whole mentality about just getting over it because depression is in your head, convinced me that Shadow was “being an idiot.” Looking back on it I’m disgusted I joined in on jokes about him pulling his hair out, and I’m ashamed I just felt like “well fuck shadow”. I never reached out to him and tried to understand that he was just in pain.

I said some shitty things about him and that's on me. It was the same way I started saying shitty things about Krett. I really didn’t want to believe Shadow was this unstable mess. I saw myself in his pain and anxiety and just dismissed it out of fear of being the outlier once again.


I eventually reached out to Shadow after I left Juice because I carried what I did with me. I told him I was terribly sorry, and it happened to me too. He eventually told me about why he took down that Reddit post. DM threatened to kill himself if Shadow didn’t. I was beyond shocked, I wanted to vomit, and I still do. My mind jumped to Mimi and I had to question my judgements on that after hearing this. From my side I just heard how Shadow was crying and kept saying Diem was like a brother. I felt he didn’t want to hurt his brother even through all this, and just took it down. Like his story had too many holes in it and it was a bad look for DM. I never knew Shadow was threatened the way he was. I had a different side of the story.



This behavior continues for the next few years, where I’m constantly questioning what I should say and do. I tried to balance not upsetting DM and doing the right thing, while also figuring out what the hell I want and somehow still managing to piss him off. Smite was pretty big for all of us and it got us involved with a lot of people. It what was awesome about Smite.

But for some reason he just didn’t like people I talked to. I’ll never forget scrolling through my twitter feed and he saw Mez or Mezmoreyez, on my timeline. He took my phone and unfollowed Mez and asked why the hell i was following him. I felt so fucking bad, me and Mez never had an issue and now he was going to see I unfollowed him. I asked what was so bad about Mez and DM told me Mez is a racist. So well shit, yeah I will unfollow that.

Spiff? DM said he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what he's talking about, don’t associate with him. Fdot? He’s lazy and not a hard worker, don't bother. Frost? A leech of barracuda and leeching streams. Streamers I hung out with were “scummy people'' so don’t talk to them. I have so many stories of who apparently is a scummy person and I don’t believe most of them are even real now.


I never realized how much it shut people out from me. And unfortunately isolation is a key factor of gaslighting. I just didn’t know. It's why I felt I had to share all of this. It can be stupidly easy to keep writing stuff off because you question yourself and convince yourself that you’re the one who is wrong.

Through all of this though I still thought DM knew what was best. He has been successful and he's a great speaker. So I stayed in my lane and kept trying to do the right thing. He also started working for Hi-Rez and that was so awesome. But it 100% exposed more of his behavior and again for some reason we all just dismissed it as “angry dude playing video game.”

This was the time I started to get unsure of my career path. I know Kelly left streaming to do her stuff. DM took a bigger step into being a caster and being hired by Hirez. I felt pressured to make moves with my career. “You need to build a resume outside of streaming.” So I went down to GA because I was offered to trial being a cameraman for SPL. It was a limited offer so I had to move first and I was positive I was going to take it because building my resume.

I ended up moving to GA and declining the job because I would have been doing 8-12 hour days and I would have become a part time streamer. I gave that up to continue being full time. So now I awkwardly live in GA after declining a job offer. But I lived next to DM and thought it was nice to have a so-called friend literally next door.

He didn’t approve that I declined but it honestly seemed okay on the surface. We were able to hang out more and talk about shit. Unfortunately GA put a big strain on me mentally and financially. My relationship with my ex declined rapidly. We basically felt like roommates instead of partners. This is all stuff I confide to DM.

I felt his mental health wasn’t great either, especially after getting fired from Hi-rez. I remember talking during car trips about our relationships. He wasn’t sure if Kelsey ever cheated on him, he expected it because of a trip she took. He wasn’t sure if she loved him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Salem, if he loved her or not. I didn’t know what that really meant to be honest. They were physically affectionate towards each other. Other people started asking me about it and I didn’t know what to say or think. This resonated pretty loudly with me since I was questioning my own shit. I remember feeling like damn that has to be painful but you get it.


I don’t know if this was when he realized he could make moves. That I was vulnerable and scared too. Everything looking back seems to have happened so fast. We slept in the same space platonically before. There was this one incident in the hotel where he cuddled behind me and bit my ear. I wrote this off. I was scared to confront it feeling wrong and convinced myself otherwise. I learned that I was not the only person he did this to in hotel beds. That is their stories, and their decision if they decide to share.

But I came over to talk to him, and we hung out and watched some stuff. I didn’t really question how close we sat next to each other on the couch. DM ends up cuddling behind me which didn’t catch me entirely off guard due to prior events. And honestly I’ve cuddled up next to friends countless times. At the moment it kind of just felt like two people stressed and sad. My heart actually hurt for him that he felt lost in his relationship. I was right there in those feelings.

I really don’t know how we started making out but I remember thinking “oh god, this is bad.” Somewhere in my head I’m thinking this needs to stop. He ends up sticking his hand down my pants and touching me and the rest feels like an autopilot blur. What snaps me back is I know I ended up at my own house that night. I remember texting him “ty btw” because of coming over to talk about my relationship.I think by texting that I just could pretend nothing happened, somehow completely gloss over it. And then the sheer panic and fright I felt because once I sent it I immediately thought “Oh jesus fuck hes going to think I mean thank you for what just happened.”

I’ve held on to those events for so long and afterwards tried to maintain a normal life. I wasn’t okay for a long time after that and my body and mind just tried to autopilot for the next few years. Anything to get back to normal because we never brought up what happened. And I can’t comfortably sit on this anymore. I tried to blame myself in every way possible but I’m done.



I’ve been made aware of things he has said. And other people have told me they share a similar experience. It brought all of this back to the surface again and I’ve been trying not to vomit writing all of this. Because writing this is me reliving all of this. What I used to think was a mistake I now think was just some fucked up power play. How you get emotionally and physically discarded. I think what took so long for me is that I was Juice, harder to get rid of probably.



How I really ended up leaving Juice was not just some peaceful walkaway. I played it off like that because I wanted to keep the peace. DM and me argued about Paperbat (PaperbatVG) and I truly feel this was the final straw. Pbat’s shitty actions got a lot of heat on Juice because he was associated, and people wanted answers rightfully so. DM’s own mods came to me by their own accord and asked me why he was staying silent. I didn’t want to speak for him so I informed him and I was met with backlash about stop talking to people and causing drama.

Again I tried to tell him his own mods did not feel safe to talk to him about this. It wasn’t my doing to go message them. I’ll never forget DM didn’t see anything wrong with what happened. I tried to ignore that initially too. “Its online, it's just ghosting. Ghosting isn’t abuse” I really wanted to puke. You know how badly I’ve been hurt by people and how you can 100% emotionally abuse someone. THAT IS REAL. I cursed him off and we were hostile towards each other.

Come that same night he just randomly shows up at my house because Salem came up to my room and said “DM wants to talk to you about your stream”. I immediately said no, he didn’t ask to come over, and we just fought why would I want to talk about my fucking stream. This is literally our last interaction ever besides one final attempt to talk to him which I’ll get to.

I try one last attempt to just keep the peace, move on from what happened that night. Just like I tried to move on from what happened before. I still had issues with confrontation but I was much better at this stage. However Juice and this whole situation was basically my life so that's why I tried to just keep the peace.


I was no longer invited to anything, game wise or IRL events. I watched Juice members and my mutual friends fly down and hang out next door. I even asked to join in games, nah nothing. We unintentionally flew the same flight to Bacon’s wedding, I had no idea because he wouldn’t talk to me. But I remember how awkward it was that Kelsey and Salem were like hey guys! And he never even looked up from his phone.

The wedding was uncomfortably similar. I had Arock ask me what's up, couldn’t really answer. I honestly couldn’t take this shit anymore and got the balls to confront him via text. I said “Hey can we talk face to face, its important” I use to HATE face to face conversations at the time, text felt safe. But DM never talks in texts, throughout all my years it was always “Get in voice”.

His first response was “You didn’t say happy birthday to Kelsey.” Me confused, said “I didn’t but I don’t see how that relates to us.” I felt bad about not saying happy birthday but I felt she clearly saw me and her husband no longer talking or hanging out. I didn’t want to add to her stress, especially because of what I knew and kept secret.

DM responded back to my initial question with just “I’m done here.” So, I left juice shortly after since he was not willing to talk to me, apparently ever again.

I tried to deal with all this pain, privately, and amongst a small circle of people who have known the whole truth. I didn’t want to speak up and just let everything go. My pain didn’t matter anymore.

After I left he tried to further isolate me. He privately shittalked me to people in discord. I know this because they told me. If they wish to speak up on that as well that's their choice. I don’t know what he said about me, but it was another final attempt to further isolate me from people I cared about. It was very vile and a true representation of his character I struggled to see for so long. It's why I choose to share a lot of my story with you today. In hopes that you can see it's not just random when people start disappearing around DM.

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