DaddyOTerror
Sometimes, victims of crimes don’t receive justice because there is insufficient evidence.
But what if someone recorded and uploaded that crime to the internet?
You’d think people would flock to the authorities as soon as they saw it. Right?
Especially if the victim were a child?
Right?
Sometimes,
You find yourself on a part of YouTube whose purpose you don’t really understand. Whether it be MS paint fan-animations, top ten-lists, ASMR, terrible sketches, you may find yourself on a subsect of the site and you think:
Who the hell is watching this?
For me, that part of YouTube is family channels. And while I can watch an aesthetic mommy vlogger and appreciate the perfect life she portrays, there is a sour taste in my mouth when I think of these people. Something about it just… isn’t right.
I can’t blame myself, my first introduction to the genre wasn’t pleasant.
Alongside
The 2017 ElsaGate scandal, a huge spotlight was put on the platform when Phillip DeFranco covered the family channel DaddyOFive. 2017 was seriously not their year over at YouTube.
The DaddyOFive channel was a mixed family led by the father, Mike, and his wife, Heather. Heather had three sons, Jake, Alex, and Ryan in her previous marriage and Mike also had two children from a previous relationship. His two children, Cody and Emma, were the black sheep of the family.
The punching bags,
the jokes,
.
The targets.
And while I am all for making a visually pleasing blog post, I do not feel good about plastering the faces of these distressed children on yet another page on the internet. They’ve had enough.
Their story is important, though, and we can’t forget what they went through. While we can’t undo it, we can take from it and make sure this cannot happen to children again.
One could say Cody and Emma were not welcomed openly in their new home. A whiteboard score board marked every time they did something bad. The more marks, the more privileges they lost. Heather’s boys never were judged under this system. As DeFranco points out, Cody is the main target, without fail. The video he highlights is a ‘prank’ where the parents pour invisible ink on his carpet and blame him. They begin hurling punishments his way and Cody, who is clearly traumatized by these people, immediately professes that it is not him. He cries and panics as his parents tell him how awful they think he is.
After releasing the video, audiences were not happy, and the family released a statement ensuring that it was just a prank.
Honestly, truly, they are a happy family you guys. Mike says they have all the X Box games they want. Good thing Cody can play with it between sessions of verbal abuse.
In another video they torment Emma so badly that she voices suicidal ideation. Rather than stop the camera, delete the footage, and care for his daughter, our sweet, sweet Michael just clips out the audio and yells at Emma for her depression.
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Mike yells at Cody for self-harming at school because he should be paying attention.
Instead of show concern for Cody’s learning disabilities, Mike yells that Cody will be a failure.
Cody and Alex wrestle on the floor. Mike pushes Alex’s head into the wall with a thud to break it up.
1.25 million views.
Jake throws Cody into the corner of a bookshelf and he hits his head. Mike steps back to fix the focus.
Cody will clearly state his needs:
Please leave me alone.
Get out of my room.
I can’t work in class when people are talking.
But his family viciously violates these requests and then wonders why he cannot manage his emotions. It is worth mentioning that Cody has been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, an issue some children face where they are defiant of authority figures. However, I would heavily argue that Cody is the voice of reason in every single situation, and I believe that could be a potential misdiagnosis of his trauma responses.
The family clearly draws entertainment value out of gaslighting Cody, no matter how badly they would like to hide it. Jake smirks to Mike behind the camera after pushing Cody and receives punishment for none of it. Mike rants about how badly he wishes Cody could join them on their DisneyLand vacation, but unfortunately, he is ‘too bad’ :( He makes up a lie, claiming that Cody…
SREAD FECES ON THE WALL.
And after retracting that statement, claimed that the real reason was that he had clogged the toilet. Not only did this man:
- Lie to hundreds of thousands of people about a very embarrassing thing his son did not do.
but he also
2. Punished his son for clogging the toilet by leaving him out of the family vacation that his torment probably paid for.
Because, you see, Mike knew very well which videos did well and which did not. For the audience he was targeting, freak-out videos, pranks, fights, and tantrums were key. And poor Cody, who was already vulnerable, was put in the center of it. Cody-centric tantrum videos did the best by far, and fans didn’t just approve of the torment, but joined along in mean comments and hate compilations.
And in the world of YouTube, views = money.
So we can sit here and ask ourselves: why? Why would anyone do this to their son? But people are vile and greedy.
Luckily, soon after DeFranco’s expose, the channel was banned and Emma and Cody were rightfully placed in the custody of their biological mother (oh yeah, Mike forged documents to illegally get custody of them, just to abuse them for profit. Cool.) They are currently on probation due to child abuse charges.
Mike has attempted to return many times, holding a grudge against, as he says “that DeFranco guy” for ruining his family. However, YouTube banned him again eventually for the same thing.
And while it is great they eventually stepped in after DeFranco’s video, DaddyOFive was not an obscure channel. They consistently pulled in hundreds of thousands to over a million views and had a similar number in subscribers at their peak.
It brings us back to the same question:
Why doesn’t YouTube ever step in until it is absolutely necessary?
