Former Twitch employee says Dr Disrespect knew he was sending sexually explicit messages to minors

More information has been reported about the 2020 Twitch ban of Guy Beahm, also known as popular streamer Dr Disrespect. A report from Rolling Stone on Thursday provides new details from a former Twitch employee.

As Beahm said in his lengthy statement earlier this week, in 2017 he exchanged messages with a minor using Twitch’s now-defunct Whispers feature that “sometimes veered too far toward inappropriateness.” Now, the former Twitch employee says the minor informed Beahm that she was a minor, and Beahm continued to send her “sexually explicit” messages anyway, according to Rolling Stone.

“There was no confusion,” the former Twitch employee said. “Messages sent after this was confirmed were no less explicit and sexual than before, and I think more so than the categorization ‘leaning too far toward inappropriate’ suggests.”

The former employee also detailed Twitch’s internal response to the Whispers messages after the first report about them was filed in 2020. They said the decision to permanently ban Beahm from the platform was made “relatively quickly due to the severity of the behavior.”

In addition, the employee revealed that Twitch had set up an incident response team codenamed “Gold Sparrow” to address allegations of sexual misconduct against streamers after several such allegations surfaced in June 2020.

Twitch and Beahm did not respond to IGN’s request for comment on the Rolling Stone report. Twitch has not publicly commented on any of the revelations that have come to light in recent days about the 2020 ban.

YouTube, where Beahm currently streams, has also not commented on the situation. Former global head of gaming partnerships at Google, Ryan Wyatt, told Rolling Stone that Beahm was not offered a contract with YouTube due to rumors of the ban. YouTube employees, he said, were made aware that the ban concerned inappropriate messaging involving minors.

The situation flared up again last Friday after former Twitch employee Cody Conners wrote on X/Twitter that Beahm was banned almost exactly four years ago for “sexting” with a minor and attempting to meet her at TwitchCon (Disclosure: Conners briefly worked at IGN in 2011. Although Conners did not mention Beahm by name in his post, various reports have confirmed that he was referring to the popular streamer as more details have come to light over the past week.

Rolling Stone’s source added that it was Conners’ post that “definitely got the ball rolling” regarding comments made by other former Twitch employees in previous reports on The Verge and Bloomberg.

Beahm responded to Conners’ post and subsequent reports with a series of statements, the most extensive of which arrived on X/Twitter on Tuesday. While he admitted in that statement that his conversations with the minor “should never have happened,” he added, “Nothing illegal happened, no images were shared, no crimes were committed, I never even met the person.” He also referenced his 2021 lawsuit against Twitch over the ban, which was “resolved” in 2022.

Following the revelations, a number of brands and partners have severed ties with Beahm, including Turtle Beach, 2K and the San Francisco 49ers. Midnight Society, the game studio co-founded by Beahm, also ended its collaboration with him after conducting its own investigation into the allegations.

Photo credit: David Becker/Getty Images

Alex Stedman is IGN’s senior news editor covering entertainment. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.