Last month, YouTuber Tana Mongeau alleged in a live taping of her podcast that she and Cody Ko, another YouTuber, slept together when she was 17 and he was 25. In the aftermath of the news, Ko fans turned to r/CodyKo, a subreddit about the YouTuber, to discuss the allegations.
They found themselves stymied by moderators, including one a moderator claims was on Ko’s payroll, keeping the forum free from accusations.
Now, fans are utilizing r/CodyKoUnfiltered to post old content of Ko’s that they see as suspicious in the wake of the allegations against the YouTuber, who has not made any statement about it.
In early June, videos of Mongeau saying that she and Ko had sex when she was 17 were posted online following a live show for her podcast, Cancelled. Mongeau has almost 5.5 million subscribers on YouTube, Ko has over 2 million. Mongeau’s comments were reported at the time by Rolling Stone.
Ko is a former Vine star turned YouTube personality. Mongeau grew her following with a popular “Storytime” series.
“Cody Ko,” Mongeau said when answering the question about people she’s had sex with. “I can say that, I was literally seventeen.”
@self.detached Cancelled Podcast Tour Hot Seat Questions @Tana Mongeau @Brooke Schofield #cancelled #cancelledpodcast #liveshow #tanamongeau #codyko #brookeschofield ♬ original sound – 𝖈𝖗𝖞𝖇𝖆𝖇𝖞
In a later episode of her podcast, Mongeau said that Ko knew her age at the time they had sex and that she now sees that he took advantage of her.
What followed, according to Mongeau, was people accusing her of lying about having had sex with Ko when she was 17.
“The thing that was actually really heartbreaking to me and kind of crazy to me is after it going viral, seeing so many people not believing me,” Mongeau said on a June 20 episode of YouTuber Trisha Paytas’ podcast. “Like, ‘it’s Tana so who cares?’”
But people did start caring after Monday when D’Angelo Wallace, a YouTuber with more than 1.5 million subscribers, posted a video saying that he had found a video of Gabbie Hanna telling a similar story on a podcast. Hanna is also a YouTuber and has over 5 million subscribers.
“One time I told a guy, I saw him making out with a girl at a party who was underage. And I pulled him aside and was like ‘hey man, you probably don’t know, I know she like looks a little older. She’s underage. Watch it.’ And he’s like ‘oh my god, thank you for telling me,’” Hanna said in a video discovered by Wallace. “And then he fucked her that night!”
In his video, Wallace also condemned Ko for allegedly trying to “bury” claims about the alleged sexual encounter with Mongeau.
“You know that people are ignoring this because nobody is working harder to bury this story than you,” Wallace said in the video.
Some of that alleged burying took place on r/CodyKo, a subreddit dedicated to Ko. Social media users claimed that moderators of the subreddit were deleting posts about the allegations, which the Daily Dot confirmed in an interview with a former moderator of the forum.
The moderator, who asked to go only by his first name, Bryan, told the Daily Dot that in 2020, Ko reached out to him and asked him to become a moderator of r/CodyKo because he had started a Discord server dedicated to Ko. At the time, Bryan said Ko claimed to not know who was in charge of the subreddit and asked the moderator to “revamp” it.
“I was running the Discord, and he just asked me to run the Reddit,” Bryan said. “It wasn’t paid or anything.”
Posts about Mongeau’s allegation began popping up in the subreddit within the last year, and Bryan said that when he and the other moderators of the forum saw them, they deleted them “out of convenience” and because they didn’t want to have to respond to them.
After Mongeau made her public comments, Bryan said posts about the allegation became more frequent—and Ko fans started criticizing the moderators for deleting posts—so, he stopped.
But another one of the moderators, who Bryan said was an employee of Ko’s, was still deleting posts about Mongeau.
“I know him to actually work for Cody,” Bryan told the Daily Dot, saying he removed himself as a moderator at the end of June. He feels guilty for deleting the posts and wishes he hadn’t.
“I feel guilty. Because I don’t think I think that was necessarily the right thing to do,” Bryan told the Daily Dot. “I didn’t know anything about [the allegation]. I didn’t do any research into it… I’m not proud of that.”
Bryan shared his experience as a moderator in the r/CodyKo in a post last night and inspired others to do the same. U/ultowich, who is also no longer a moderator of r/CodyKo, said that they also deleted posts about Mongeau’s allegation but were later removed as a moderator “for not doing anything to quell the discussion of the issue.”
“I thought the posters talking about the Tana allegations were either trying to instigate drama or stirring the pot a bit, and possibly making up claims,” u/ultowich wrote in a comment. “Regrettably I did remove some of these posts.”
Because of the censorship that was common in r/CodyKo, other Ko fans created r/CodyKoUnfiltered, which they describe as “sub is a for Cody Ko fans without the censorship of the regular sub.” r/CodyKoUnfiltered has exploded recently as a haven for redditors to discuss the allegation.
“This aged like milk,” one redditor wrote alongside a clip of Mongeau and Ko that people thought showed them flirting.
And one redditor said moderators deleted a post from r/CodyKo that included a message to Ko about his behavior.
“As one of your female fans, fuck you,” the post read. “Your female audience base trusted you. You pushing things under the rug and staying silent makes you a coward… This is irredeemable.”
Ko did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Dot.
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