Shocker: Turns Out MrBeast Is the Worst
Welp, you’re going to want to sit down for this. It turns out MrBeast, a 26-year-old man named Jimmy Donaldson who happens to be the world’s biggest YouTube star, might just be the actual worst. Shocking, I know! A YouTuber whose clickbait-y schtick is paying people to live alone in grocery stores for his entertainment being a bad person??? Impossible!
On Tuesday, Variety reported that MrBeast’s forthcoming reality show with Amazon is facing a class action lawsuit over allegations of sexual harassment and “chronic mistreatment.” The reality show itself sounds like a perfect recipe for exploitation, abuse, and serious trauma, with what Rolling Stone summarizes as “over-the-top challenges, such as staying in a nuclear bunker for 100 days or surviving prison, that test contestants’ mettle.” Beast Games, as it’s terrifyingly named, pits more than 1,000 participants against each other for a single $5 million cash prize; all had to sign NDAs. The first round of the show was filmed in Las Vegas in July, and the second, in Toronto last month.
Per Variety, the lawsuit filed by five unnamed contestants says Amazon and MrBeast’s production company “failed to pay minimum wages and overtime,” “failed to prevent sexual harassment,” “did not provide participants uninterrupted meal breaks or rest breaks,” and subjected contestants to “dangerous circumstances and conditions as a condition of their employment.” The contestants also allege that producers failed to provide “adequate medical staff on site” and even forced them not to sleep, and “to participate in games that unreasonably risked physical and mental injury.” The plaintiffs are demanding that Amazon and MrBeast pay alleged unpaid wages as well as unspecified punitive monetary damages.
Without going into extensive detail, attorneys representing the contestants said their suit aims to “establish a pattern of sexual harassment,” which is particularly foreboding. The lawsuit provides an example of this, pointing to Beast Games’ “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production” employee handbook, which states, “If talent wants to draw a dick on the white board in the video or do something stupid, let them… Really do everything you can to empower the boys when filming and help them make content. Help them be idiots.” (Please join me in a collective, exasperated, “Oh brother.”) One of the female plaintiffs recounted that “as one of the women, I can say it absolutely felt like a hostile environment for us. We honestly could not have been respected less—as people, much less employees—if they tried.”
Unfortunately, this lawsuit is about as shocking to me as a fork being found in a kitchen. MrBeast’s whole schtick as a YouTuber ranges from philanthropic stunts like claiming to give 20,000 South African children their first pair of shoes to waving money over people’s heads to make them do dehumanizing tricks for him, and it's always been abusive to an extent. His content is often some disturbing permutation of exploiting people's economic situations to torture them in some way or another, then film and further profit off of torturing them. So, I'm fairly inclined to believe any reality show run by him is bad.
As I wrote last year, MrBeast represents the most obnoxious and abrasive aspects of influencer capitalism:
Other people’s lives, struggles, and poverty appear to be a playground for him, a means to a profitable end, all while raising his profile as a supposed societal benefactor. Yes, he’s “helping” people—but at the crux of it all, he’s profiting off of systemic inequities, making a viral show out of others’ suffering for his followers’ consumption, and doing so for his own enrichment. … The entire “philanthropic stunt” YouTube genre can only exist in the context of an American wasteland of economic suffering; there’s no incentive for MrBeast to meaningfully engage with or address inequality when his business relies on it to operate.
All of this is to say, the lawsuit and varying allegations against MrBeast’s production company feel inevitable. “It’s a Fyre Fest kind of feeling,” one crew member recounted to Rolling Stone. “There’s a reason why this level of production hasn’t been attempted before, and it certainly should never have been attempted without people that know what they are doing.”