The sudden emergence of sexual assault claims leveled against Daniel Greene, a prominent BookTuber in the fantasy sphere, has sent shockwaves across social media over the last week. This new controversy, happening almost in conjunction with the recent damning allegations against Neil Gaiman, is making everybody wonder if the MeToo movement is now coming for literary figures, but the Daniel Greene/Naomi King drama may have been resolved sooner than anyone could’ve anticipated.
It would be a gross understatement to suggest that Daniel Green is a cornerstone of the fantasy community on YouTube. Starting his career as a very young reader, Greene may have spent most of those early days in obscurity reviewing his favorite books, recommending series he’d read, and very, very slowly expanding his little community, but now he is everybody’s go-to fantasy book reviewer, having roped in a whopping 500k subscribers to his main channel. The man has even published three of his own books over the last few years, so he’s also an established author in his own right.
All of this is to say, it is entirely understandable why the community, and even social media at large, absolutely exploded last week when a former friend and colleague of Daniel’s, Naomi King, came forward and accused the BookTuber of having non-consensual sexual encounters with them during a trip the pair took to Las Vegas.
Per King’s first video, which they published on Feb. 10th, Greene engaged in sexual acts with them while they were half-asleep and under the influence of drugs. At first, King had opted to discuss this experience in ambiguous terms, releasing a video on YouTube that brushed on the encounter without naming anyone in specific. Greene, who of course knew it was about him, asked his lawyer to send a cease and desist letter, which then compelled King to make their Feb. 10 video, explicitly accusing the BookTuber of having non-consensual sex with them.
Greene, in turn, released a video denying all of the allegations and threatening King with a lawsuit. He then published a second video, wherein he explains why King’s narrative doesn’t make sense, and that they have purposefully edited the evidence (consisting of an apology letter and a few chat screenshots) to make this case against him.
Now, for whatever reason, whether it was the realization that their narrative was already unraveling or the legal woes of taking this to court, King deleted their two videos and published a third one, apologizing to both Daniel and his fiancé Kayla, and all the people whom she may have misled.
And that’s the crux of it. But of course, where the internet is involved, things are always bound to get more complicated than they should. Like the fact that because of his dominant status, many fellow BookTubers released videos of their own condemning Greene for his behavior, and then immediately backtracked on it when the full picture emerged. Daniel’s Discord mods went on a campaign disowning the content creator in every sense, and folks on social media, taking Greene’s preemptive legal action as an admission of guilt, piled on with accusations and speculation.
What essentially took a matter of days to be resolved (well, at least partially) spiraled into a web of unjustified outrage and emotional manipulation. Of shifting stances and unnecessary apologies.
I wonder what this says about us as a community, where such rhetoric as “innocent until proven guilty” are, in practice, just ideals we toss around, never to be actually employed when it comes to our own personal, often parasocial relationships with celebrities, influencers, content creators, and the like.
That’s not to say people were gullible to believe King, or vice versa. One usually deals with evidence as it’s presented to them, and if one narrative is convincing enough, you can’t help but lean towards it until a clearer picture emerges. We now have this clearer picture, but even then, we couldn’t possibly say for sure how it all went down in reality.
The distinction is in recognizing that no narrative, no matter how compelling, should be taken at face value in this digital age. Just as the tide has now shifted in favor of Greene, King could swoop in with her own evidence and take us back to square one. I wonder how the other content creators would react then. Would they delete their apology video to Greene and upload another one in support of King? And round and round we’d go, over an issue that feels less about the truth and more about who controls the current narrative.
It’s also important to note that while the severity of issues like sexual assault is treated with due respect by most audiences, the lives that could directly or indirectly be affected by these controversies is something often overlooked. If King’s allegations are false or misrepresented, then that ends up casting a long shadow over the uphill battle other survivors of SA have to fight in society. It won’t matter then if this was King’s intention or not, because the damage is done.
The same could also extend to Greene’s fiancé, Kayla, who now has to relive the trauma of being cheated on (at least that part is something both parties acknowledge) and deal with the public scrutiny of an issue that should’ve remained private.
We can only hope that people will now give the couple and everybody else involved enough space to work through this and find their way toward healing.
