Over the past few months, Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast) has faced serious allegations regarding some practices within the Mr Beast brand and its branch companies.
The Mr Beast controversies reached a critical point on Monday 16 September, after several participants in the recent production of the highly anticipated Mr Beast Games filed a lawsuit against Mr Beast and Amazon. This lawsuit marks the first official legal action taken against Mr Beast after months of allegations of poor practices and working conditions revealed by ex-Mr Beast employees.
The Golden Boy of YouTube: Mr Beast
Currently Mr Beast is YouTube’s #1 most subscribed channel with an audience surpassing 316 million people worldwide. Donaldson, the face behind Mr Beast, had established himself as a content creator known for his bizarre challenge videos, which feature prizes amounting to one million dollars to contestants for completing insane challenges.
Donaldson is also known for his expansion into other business ventures, such as a launch of his own merchandise lines, his own chocolate brand, Feastables, and fast food establishment Mr Beast Burger. This is coupled with his many charities, including Team Trees and Team Seas that have goals of replating trees and cleaning the ocean and beaches.
Donaldson has created a multimillion-dollar empire and on the face of it, he appeared to be a kind and giving person, whose whole success was propelled by the incentive of helping other people and the planet. However, people started to speculate that there was something lurking in the shadows, and it took one small allegation to start the massive scrutiny of the Mr Beast empire and image, and test whether it was truly the force of positivity and good it posed to be.
How the allegations started
On 16 July this year, Adrox, a commentary YouTuber, posted a video regarding Ava Kris Tyson’s behaviour online. Ava is one of Donaldson’s closest friends and was his roommate in college. The video shows allegations of her friendship with a controversial artist going by the name of Shadman.
Shadman is infamous for doing inappropriate artwork depicting underage characters in a NSFW (not safe for work) environment.
The video outlines Twitter snippets showcasing Ava’s endorsement of Shadman’s work and even a clip featured in a Mr Beast video showing a Shadman poster that Ava owned. Adrox claims that this friendship is concerning, especially since Ava works in a channel whose main target audience is children.
Following this video Ava Tyson fell under severe scrutiny and slowly more allegations tainting her character came to light.
On 25 July the Twitter user Nathan W came forward bringing allegations of his own interactions with Ava. He claimed he was a moderator of Ava’s private discord server and provided screenshots of the server with Ava engaging with minors in inappropriate ways, making inappropriate sexual jokes and even having a channel within the server to share pornography with the minors. Ava denied these allegations.
The allegations mounted against Ava kept getting bigger and more serious which led to Donaldson announcing publicly on X that he was firing Ava from the company and that he had launched a private investigation for the case.
Allegations of Mr Beast
Ava’s situation put Mr Beast and his company under a spotlight. It led to multiple people investigating whether Donaldson himself was also hiding a dark side from the public’s eyes. It did not take long until the first allegations surfaced.
Dogpack404
On 24 July, a channel on YouTube by the name of Dogpack404 uploaded a video named “I worked for Mr Beast, he’s a fraud”. Also known as Dawson, he is an ex-Mr Beast employee and, in his video, he made various allegations toward Mr Beast, such as staging videos, rigging competitions, deceiving his audience, exploiting kids for money, illegal business practices, doing illegal lotteries and brainwashing kids into buying his unhealthy chocolate bars: Feastables.
The video itself explores each of these claims and seeks to justify them with evidence which he says back them up. Dawson even provides some of Mr Beast’s own video footage to seek to validate his claims. The video also reveals that Dawson has even more serious allegations to raise against Mr Beast and is going to release them periodically in different videos.
The video was very well received upon release and exploded in views. It led to multiple other allegations against Mr Beast.
Feastables is no longer Rainforest Alliance certified
A video released by YouTube channel Ahnestly explains how Mr Beast initially received Rainforest Alliance certification, an indication of the company engaging in healthy business practices. Yet the chocolate bars themselves never adopted the iconic Rainforest Alliance logo on them, despite the obvious incentive to include it as it changes customer perception of the product.
Ahnestly speculates that the reason for this is the company’s intention to drift away from these good business practices and working conditions after the product’s release. The suggestion is that it was considered advisable not to include the logo in the first place, so as not to arouse suspicion. In his video, Ahnestly also showed the Feastables website explicitly showcasing that the product was Rainforest Alliance certified, and that the manufacturing process did not use child or slave labour.
However, the website no longer includes that information. There is no mention of the certification or a claim of child and slave labour free product.
Allegations of toxic working environment and misogynistic culture
Dogpack404 then released a second video, where he interviewed an ex-Mr Beast employee and challenge contestant Jake Weddle. During the interview Weddle talks about his experience as part of the Mr Beast crew and the work culture in the company. He mentions being underpaid and treated unfairly: “I made dogshit pay, making gazillionaires more money.”
In conjunction with the video multiple ex Mr Beast employees and contestants came forward with their own stories and experiences, corroborating Weddle’s experience and exploring more issues within the company. This includes a misogynistic treatment of workers.
In a third video released by Dogpack404, he explores this misogynistic work environment. He highlights multiple witness testimonies of a working environment where women would be forced under uncomfortable situations, with possible instances of people getting laid off due to sexual harassment.
A copy of a supposed Mr Beast employee handbook has been leaked to the public and shared by ex-Mr Beast contestant and celebrity Rosanna Pansino. The document outlines some outrageous business practices including comments such as a ‘No does not mean no’ policy and classifying employees into desirable and undesirable, as well as highlighting the favouritism and boy’s club culture in the company: the main acting talent in all the videos are Donaldson’s closest friends.
Trey Yates, ex-editor, in an interview with The Asher Show, claims that despite him never receiving a handbook like that during his time at the company, says that the contents of the handbook align exactly with the working environment present at the company at the time of his working there.
The Beast Games lawsuit
The collaboration between Amazon Prime and Mr Beast to create the largest game show in the world has attracted considerable attention. The Beast Games, featuring over 2,000 contestants competing for the prize of five million dollars, is the most ambitious project Mr Beast has ever attempted.
As production for the series continues, multiple videos and statements have been released by participants and coworkers denouncing alleging within the production. Videos on X went viral of contestants in the game show station in Las Vegas wearing black trash bags while waiting at Allegiant stadium.
During productions, several constants claim to have been hospitalised and seriously injured, due to lack of safety concerns for the participants. Contestants also claim to have been kept in less-than-desirable sleeping conditions, suffered instances of sexual harassment, been refused access to medicine, and experienced poor hygiene and poor meals.
Workers on set have also apparently had their fair issue of problems as well, claiming to be overworked, underpaid, exploited and underfed. Ultimately these issues culminated in the lawsuit issued to Mr Beast and Amazon this Monday.
The lawsuit was filed by five anonymous contestants and includes a total of 13 different allegations. The more serious include failure to prevent sexual harassment, unfair business practices, and false advertising.
North East Bylines has contacted Mr Beast for comment.
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