#maybe it is all a misunderstanding and i've accidentally thought this guy was a creep for years

[teenagefeeling]

okay. i have debated making a post like this on and off for about the past decade. and i was always like "well, it didn't directly involve me, and i have 0 evidence, my memory of the details is a little shaky, and i don't think it needs to be a huge deal." but it has been weighing on me more and more recently, and i feel like i should at least tell my mutuals this story because i think about it a lot. and i think it's perhaps a conversation that should be had.

but i wanna preface this first with: this is not an accusation or an assertion that anyone necessarily did anything. not only is this information alleged, it's also something i heard secondhand and not directly from the person (and about 10 years ago) so it would be really hard for me to verify its veracity. wanna make that extremely clear before i imply that someone might have committed a crime. it's a very big MIGHT.

but here's the story: i was on twitter a lot as a teenager and jack and dean used to be pretty friendly with their fans. it was fun, they'd reply to people's tweets, they even commissioned a friend of mine for graphic design work which i thought was really cool. jack, to my knowledge, never dmed any fans in a purely social context. like, he dmed my friend to comission work from her, but they weren't like, chatting bc he didn't do that. dean, however, was a chatter. i never personally talked to dean, but i had a friend who had a friend (that's 2 degrees of separation between me and this story for those keeping count) that used to talk to him i think regularly. one day my friend came into the group chat saying her friend had been messaging dean (we are all about 15/16 here and he would've been like mid-20s) and he was asking her what kind of porn she was into. at the time, i think we as teenage girls were so used to predatory men that all we really did was make fun of him behind his back for a few minutes (iirc he had just gone through a breakup so we were all like "wow, very pathetic that this is what you do when you're depressed"), but i don't think it even occurred to any of us to tell anyone about it. it's like one of those things that happens to you as a kid and ur like fine but you look back on it as an adult and you're like "holy shit how did that adult man think that was okay?"

i thought about it a lot when the cody ko allegations blew up bc imo it's a fairly similar situation, like the victim wasn't even really bothered by it, but it's still obviously wrong. but it just makes me think like, for every cody ko who gets publicly called out, there are probably 10 dean dobbs who just get away with it because the victim never had any intention of speaking up. youtubers just aren't who they say they are. a lot happens when that camera isn't rolling.