16 minutes ago
Getty Images
The French government has launched an investigation into the death of online personality Raphaël Graven, known as "Jean Pormanove", who died in his sleep aged 46.
The streamer had been livestreaming on the platform Kick prior to his death according to French media reports.
France's digital affairs and artificial intelligence (AI) minister Clara Chappaz wrote in a post on X on Tuesday Pormanove had been "humiliated" and "mistreated" during streams on the platform for months, and said an inquiry into his death was underway.
A Kick spokesperson said the company was "urgently reviewing" circumstances around the streamer's death and working with stakeholders to investigate it.
"We are deeply saddened by the loss of Jean Pormanove and extend our condolences to his family, friends and community," they told the BBC.
The spokesperson said the platform's community guidelines were "designed to protect creators" and said Kick is "committed to upholding these standards across our platform".
Mr Graven had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across his various social media accounts.
Reports say he was found dead on Monday at his home in Contes, near Nice.
Posts on social media and local reports claim that prior to his death, Mr Graven was subjected to sleep deprivation and bouts of physical violence during lengthy streams on Kick.
Ms Chappaz called his death and experience of violence "an absolute horror".
In addition to a judicial investigation, Ms Chappaz said she had referred the issue to Arcom, the French media regulator, and Pharos, a French system used to report online content.
Owen Cenazandotti, a fellow French streamer who appeared alongside Mr Graven in his recent streaming marathon, has asked followers not to share videos of his "last breath" in a post on Instagram.
Source (Archive)
Aug 18
Thread [TW physical / psychological / humiliation torture], streamer Jean Pormanov is currently hospitalized in critical condition after 10 days of live being tortured, I see a lot of messages of support for his torturers, I am obliged to respond to them
For the moment we don't know if JP will survive at the time I post this but it seems essential to me to show what he has suffered for years in the silence of the entire media sphere, if not a local article or from Mediapart, unfortunately too few...
Since at least 2023, Jean Pormanov has been subjected to this kind of treatment almost daily by his "saviors." The beatings are constant, to the laughter of his torturers and the applause of the community that has grown up around this gruesome spectacle.
The videos I'm going to share throughout this thread are difficult to watch, but I think it's essential to do so to help you understand the level of violence accessible via platforms like TikTok or YouTube, watched mainly by children.
We can notably see clips like this one posted by their community where we can systematically see JP being hit by Safine and Owen, the two people he nevertheless considers friends.
Before we continue, you're probably wondering why JP continues to endure such constant treatment without having left for years? One word: control. Naruto (real name Owen) and his friend Safine became friends with JP a few years ago.
Jean Permanov was streaming alone at his mother's house at 40, living off welfare and the meager income from his stream. Owen spotted him because he was starting to become known for constantly ranting about the same game live. But he really broke through after he started appearing with TK78.
From then on JP began to be humiliated constantly but within a certain limit, since living with his parents he had no particular constraints and could leave whenever he wanted, the problems appeared when TK78 had his affair revealed.
From then on, Owen convinced JP to start streaming with him in real life with his friend Safine. That's when the physical abuse began, little by little, with new levels of violence every month.
What we can notice is that consent never existed in these live clips, we see JP being hit, strangled, shot with paintball, drowned. This clip is interesting because we see that JP tries as much as possible to never fight back.
When I said the boundaries were being pushed further and further, I was talking about trying to strangle him for as long as possible, holding him down to make sure he didn't run away. Despite the cries of distress, his "friends" continued.
And it continues, and continues, for years. Creating ever more unhealthy torture games for their young community who feed off this violence.
Who thrives on these constant humiliations. Owen, who has been in charge from the start, knows he must constantly overdo it to satisfy his young viewers who are always demanding more.
This will lead Jean Permanov to have several moments of complete breakdown where his nerves give way. But he is aware that he can do nothing because if he responds with violence, the blows will be harder, and he is not physically able to respond to them.
And for good reason, what makes him stay is this state of mental and physical fragility accumulated initially by a life of profound solitude, he reveals never having had a relationship or real friends before Owen and Safine. The latter does not hesitate to remind him of this.
This is the key point. Why does Jean Permanov stay behind and endure all this? Because Owen constantly tells him that it was his only true friends who lifted him out of loneliness, and incidentally out of poverty, with JP representing a huge gain for them.
Once they realized how profitable this gruesome spectacle could be, they convinced him that without them, without the salary from streaming, Jean Pormanov would never have a wife or children. All this was justified by a rhetoric of masculinist self-improvement.
So JP had to continue to suffer, again and again, in the hope that with his salary (6,000 euros per month) he could achieve this life goal. Except that, having never had so much money before, he just spent the sum each month on all kinds of entertainment.
His situation had made him a prisoner. Either he continued to be tortured every day in front of the only friends he had, with a salary that allowed him to continue his new, expensive lifestyle. Or he returned to live with his mother, knowing he would no longer have an income.
Except that sometimes he cracked, and Owen's constant manipulation wasn't enough, so they had to change their method and be more restrictive to keep him captive.
The worst being when Owen wanted to amass more and more money with his marathon projects, making sure, as you could see in several clips, to tie JP up with a chain for hundreds of hours until he succeeded in a challenge.
A live broadcast like this, lasting over a week of systematic beatings, humiliation, and sleep deprivation, earned them over €50,000 in donations alone, in addition to the salary of the Kick platform, which has always endorsed this content. Driving JP to his limits.
And when it was the last straw and he was determined to leave for good, Owen threatened to put him out on the street, since he made sure he lived in a family member's apartment without rental papers, so as to keep that sword of Damocles over his head.
So no, we can't sum up the situation as "JP is consenting because he's staying", there is a whole mechanism of control that has developed around him, via years of humiliation to break him mentally and convince him that what he was going through was for his own good.
It is with immense rage that I have just learned of JP's death, after years of watching what he was going through in total helplessness. The result of conditioning a fragile man into a freak show, a punching bag, under the gaze of thousands of young people.
I remind you that the clips I shared are only about ten clips among hundreds still available on all platforms except Twitch, which banned them. But keep in mind that the worst clips were censored, he lived through worse than what you saw.
How could such content have been broadcast for years without any real reaction from the courts other than the seizure of the equipment, purchased in a single stream, and a police arrest? How could so many young people have been exposed to such trivialized harassment of a vulnerable person?
Beyond the tragedy suffered by JP, who only wanted to have friends to open up to the world after a life of solitude, how many young people who consumed this content daily were able to reproduce it on the most vulnerable people around them?
We must never let this happen again. I'm counting on you to talk about it and raise awareness around you. Raise awareness about the impact of harassment and violence, particularly on vulnerable people.
If you see this kind of content on platforms like TikTok or YouTube, report it constantly, hoping that there is real pressure put on these platforms. The worst being Kick, which financed this with a dedicated contract worth several hundred thousand euros.
The person responsible for all this, Owen, has just shared his death via his Instagram account. This is a huge tragedy and an admission of failure for all the organizations that control this type of content. A thought for his family, who have been harassed for years by this community.
Dozens of clips can still be found, some from this week, where JP's mother, whom Owen regularly called on stream to humiliate him, can be heard asking her son to leave, that he should not have to go through this for anything in the world.
I have a real conscience to continue sharing this, and not to delete the thread when I know it is dead, but I have been watching these clips for years without being able to do anything about it except talk about it around me. But that's enough.
If people need to see what he went through, what thousands of young people are watching laughing and surely reproducing, to be outraged and finally do something collectively to stop this, then I take responsibility.
In case some people don't have the information, JP died after 300 hours of live streaming of a marathon thought up by Owen which consisted of continuing to live a game until they had finished it with another person, recognized as disabled, who was going through the same thing.
It was after more than ten days of constant abuse, pushing him to the limit, even at night, especially at night, that his body gave out. Especially at night, since he couldn't even really rest because there was constant background noise.
When it wasn't sounds of donations from community subscribers, it was happenings of the team around Owen, which consisted of waking them up in the most shocking way possible, often hitting them in the process. 300 hours without real rest when he was a fragile person.
The tweet I reacted to, which the account quickly deleted. For the past 2 or 3 years, I've been seeing increasingly horrible clips scrolling through my TikTok feed, and I've been systematically seeing messages like this, probably from young people you know who need to be made aware.
Constant little reminders from Owen who explained to JP that he couldn't give up, even if it meant Owen ending up in prison to force him to stay (the only escape offered was to kiss with tongue for 3 minutes the other person in a fragile situation with them).
And of course they all knew how bad JP was both mentally and physically, since he had been taking medication for his strained heart for years, but also because of his more than worrying physical condition, but they continued...
For obvious reasons I'm not going to show you the clips where we see the death live, but he remained unconscious for 50 minutes after what appeared to be a cardiac arrest, all of this still live, before Owen slapped him with no reaction from JP. Chat reaction:
There are still dozens of clips I'm being sent, including some from a month ago, where Owen and Safine are clearly seen anticipating Jean Pormanov's death, aware of his fragile health, but pushing him to the limit anyway. They want to cover their own costs if he dies.
One of the rhetoric I see constantly, even after this tragedy, is to blame his death solely on JP's lifestyle, as if what he was going through on stream didn't have a huge impact on his mental and physical health.
They turned him into a circus animal, to be excited and mistreated in front of the crowd to provoke reactions, but then reassured and consoled in private to maintain control and ensure he doesn't rebel. All this while playing on the fact that he is his only friends.
For people who claimed to be his friends, the least they could do, since they knew how weakened he was, would have been to protect him, and not use his distress to enrich themselves until his last breath. Their responsibility is TOTAL.
Not to mention the responsibility of the justice system and successive governments that have never invested real resources in it. If that were the case, many tragedies could have been avoided. This is one of the many consequences of the austerity policy for public services.
It was not for lack of reports, since an investigation had been opened for violence against a person because of their disability, intentional violence in a group against vulnerable people resulting in ITT. Owen and Safine were taken into police custody.
Another huge responsibility I've already mentioned, but I'll try to go into more detail. That of the Kick streaming platform, which made this channel their flagship, by offering them the most lucrative contract in France: 2,000 euros per hour of streaming.
Kick is a platform created by Stake, a huge online casino site. When Twitch banned the broadcast of gambling-related content, Stake decided to create Kick to find a way to promote their casino and attract young people.
To develop Kick, they distinguished themselves by being much more flexible on moderation, unlike Twitch, to recover all the streamers banned from Twitch in particular. Kick also began to poach big Twitch streamers for huge sums.
It's important to understand that the platform is purely loss-making, much more significantly than Twitch, for example, since their sole purpose is to showcase their casino. It's this objective that led them to authorize this escalation of violent content.
Once streamers on their platform bring them viewers, they figure they can then convert them via contracts offered to the biggest streamers to play at their online casino via Stake. This is what was offered to Owen and Jean Pormanov.
We can see from this tweet that Kick was largely focusing its communication on this channel, they were notably following their marathons and directly participated in one of them by offering them a better contract depending on the results.
Source (Archive)
Thread (Archive)
Getty Images
The French government has launched an investigation into the death of online personality Raphaël Graven, known as "Jean Pormanove", who died in his sleep aged 46.
The streamer had been livestreaming on the platform Kick prior to his death according to French media reports.
France's digital affairs and artificial intelligence (AI) minister Clara Chappaz wrote in a post on X on Tuesday Pormanove had been "humiliated" and "mistreated" during streams on the platform for months, and said an inquiry into his death was underway.
A Kick spokesperson said the company was "urgently reviewing" circumstances around the streamer's death and working with stakeholders to investigate it.
"We are deeply saddened by the loss of Jean Pormanove and extend our condolences to his family, friends and community," they told the BBC.
The spokesperson said the platform's community guidelines were "designed to protect creators" and said Kick is "committed to upholding these standards across our platform".
Mr Graven had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across his various social media accounts.
Reports say he was found dead on Monday at his home in Contes, near Nice.
Posts on social media and local reports claim that prior to his death, Mr Graven was subjected to sleep deprivation and bouts of physical violence during lengthy streams on Kick.
Ms Chappaz called his death and experience of violence "an absolute horror".
In addition to a judicial investigation, Ms Chappaz said she had referred the issue to Arcom, the French media regulator, and Pharos, a French system used to report online content.
Owen Cenazandotti, a fellow French streamer who appeared alongside Mr Graven in his recent streaming marathon, has asked followers not to share videos of his "last breath" in a post on Instagram.
Source (Archive)
YeahGᴜᴇsʜ ☭
@GueshCtrlAug 18
Thread [TW physical / psychological / humiliation torture], streamer Jean Pormanov is currently hospitalized in critical condition after 10 days of live being tortured, I see a lot of messages of support for his torturers, I am obliged to respond to them
The tweet I reacted to, which the account quickly deleted. For the past 2 or 3 years, I've been seeing increasingly horrible clips scrolling through my TikTok feed, and I've been systematically seeing messages like this, probably from young people you know who need to be made aware.
For the moment we don't know if JP will survive at the time I post this but it seems essential to me to show what he has suffered for years in the silence of the entire media sphere, if not a local article or from Mediapart, unfortunately too few...
Since at least 2023, Jean Pormanov has been subjected to this kind of treatment almost daily by his "saviors." The beatings are constant, to the laughter of his torturers and the applause of the community that has grown up around this gruesome spectacle.
The videos I'm going to share throughout this thread are difficult to watch, but I think it's essential to do so to help you understand the level of violence accessible via platforms like TikTok or YouTube, watched mainly by children.
We can notably see clips like this one posted by their community where we can systematically see JP being hit by Safine and Owen, the two people he nevertheless considers friends.
Before we continue, you're probably wondering why JP continues to endure such constant treatment without having left for years? One word: control. Naruto (real name Owen) and his friend Safine became friends with JP a few years ago.
Jean Permanov was streaming alone at his mother's house at 40, living off welfare and the meager income from his stream. Owen spotted him because he was starting to become known for constantly ranting about the same game live. But he really broke through after he started appearing with TK78.
From then on JP began to be humiliated constantly but within a certain limit, since living with his parents he had no particular constraints and could leave whenever he wanted, the problems appeared when TK78 had his affair revealed.
From then on, Owen convinced JP to start streaming with him in real life with his friend Safine. That's when the physical abuse began, little by little, with new levels of violence every month.
What we can notice is that consent never existed in these live clips, we see JP being hit, strangled, shot with paintball, drowned. This clip is interesting because we see that JP tries as much as possible to never fight back.
When I said the boundaries were being pushed further and further, I was talking about trying to strangle him for as long as possible, holding him down to make sure he didn't run away. Despite the cries of distress, his "friends" continued.
And it continues, and continues, for years. Creating ever more unhealthy torture games for their young community who feed off this violence.
Who thrives on these constant humiliations. Owen, who has been in charge from the start, knows he must constantly overdo it to satisfy his young viewers who are always demanding more.
This will lead Jean Permanov to have several moments of complete breakdown where his nerves give way. But he is aware that he can do nothing because if he responds with violence, the blows will be harder, and he is not physically able to respond to them.
And for good reason, what makes him stay is this state of mental and physical fragility accumulated initially by a life of profound solitude, he reveals never having had a relationship or real friends before Owen and Safine. The latter does not hesitate to remind him of this.
This is the key point. Why does Jean Permanov stay behind and endure all this? Because Owen constantly tells him that it was his only true friends who lifted him out of loneliness, and incidentally out of poverty, with JP representing a huge gain for them.
Once they realized how profitable this gruesome spectacle could be, they convinced him that without them, without the salary from streaming, Jean Pormanov would never have a wife or children. All this was justified by a rhetoric of masculinist self-improvement.
So JP had to continue to suffer, again and again, in the hope that with his salary (6,000 euros per month) he could achieve this life goal. Except that, having never had so much money before, he just spent the sum each month on all kinds of entertainment.
His situation had made him a prisoner. Either he continued to be tortured every day in front of the only friends he had, with a salary that allowed him to continue his new, expensive lifestyle. Or he returned to live with his mother, knowing he would no longer have an income.
Except that sometimes he cracked, and Owen's constant manipulation wasn't enough, so they had to change their method and be more restrictive to keep him captive.
The worst being when Owen wanted to amass more and more money with his marathon projects, making sure, as you could see in several clips, to tie JP up with a chain for hundreds of hours until he succeeded in a challenge.
A live broadcast like this, lasting over a week of systematic beatings, humiliation, and sleep deprivation, earned them over €50,000 in donations alone, in addition to the salary of the Kick platform, which has always endorsed this content. Driving JP to his limits.
And when it was the last straw and he was determined to leave for good, Owen threatened to put him out on the street, since he made sure he lived in a family member's apartment without rental papers, so as to keep that sword of Damocles over his head.
So no, we can't sum up the situation as "JP is consenting because he's staying", there is a whole mechanism of control that has developed around him, via years of humiliation to break him mentally and convince him that what he was going through was for his own good.
It is with immense rage that I have just learned of JP's death, after years of watching what he was going through in total helplessness. The result of conditioning a fragile man into a freak show, a punching bag, under the gaze of thousands of young people.
I remind you that the clips I shared are only about ten clips among hundreds still available on all platforms except Twitch, which banned them. But keep in mind that the worst clips were censored, he lived through worse than what you saw.
How could such content have been broadcast for years without any real reaction from the courts other than the seizure of the equipment, purchased in a single stream, and a police arrest? How could so many young people have been exposed to such trivialized harassment of a vulnerable person?
Beyond the tragedy suffered by JP, who only wanted to have friends to open up to the world after a life of solitude, how many young people who consumed this content daily were able to reproduce it on the most vulnerable people around them?
We must never let this happen again. I'm counting on you to talk about it and raise awareness around you. Raise awareness about the impact of harassment and violence, particularly on vulnerable people.
If you see this kind of content on platforms like TikTok or YouTube, report it constantly, hoping that there is real pressure put on these platforms. The worst being Kick, which financed this with a dedicated contract worth several hundred thousand euros.
The person responsible for all this, Owen, has just shared his death via his Instagram account. This is a huge tragedy and an admission of failure for all the organizations that control this type of content. A thought for his family, who have been harassed for years by this community.
Dozens of clips can still be found, some from this week, where JP's mother, whom Owen regularly called on stream to humiliate him, can be heard asking her son to leave, that he should not have to go through this for anything in the world.
I have a real conscience to continue sharing this, and not to delete the thread when I know it is dead, but I have been watching these clips for years without being able to do anything about it except talk about it around me. But that's enough.
If people need to see what he went through, what thousands of young people are watching laughing and surely reproducing, to be outraged and finally do something collectively to stop this, then I take responsibility.
In case some people don't have the information, JP died after 300 hours of live streaming of a marathon thought up by Owen which consisted of continuing to live a game until they had finished it with another person, recognized as disabled, who was going through the same thing.
It was after more than ten days of constant abuse, pushing him to the limit, even at night, especially at night, that his body gave out. Especially at night, since he couldn't even really rest because there was constant background noise.
When it wasn't sounds of donations from community subscribers, it was happenings of the team around Owen, which consisted of waking them up in the most shocking way possible, often hitting them in the process. 300 hours without real rest when he was a fragile person.
The tweet I reacted to, which the account quickly deleted. For the past 2 or 3 years, I've been seeing increasingly horrible clips scrolling through my TikTok feed, and I've been systematically seeing messages like this, probably from young people you know who need to be made aware.
Constant little reminders from Owen who explained to JP that he couldn't give up, even if it meant Owen ending up in prison to force him to stay (the only escape offered was to kiss with tongue for 3 minutes the other person in a fragile situation with them).
And of course they all knew how bad JP was both mentally and physically, since he had been taking medication for his strained heart for years, but also because of his more than worrying physical condition, but they continued...
For obvious reasons I'm not going to show you the clips where we see the death live, but he remained unconscious for 50 minutes after what appeared to be a cardiac arrest, all of this still live, before Owen slapped him with no reaction from JP. Chat reaction:
There are still dozens of clips I'm being sent, including some from a month ago, where Owen and Safine are clearly seen anticipating Jean Pormanov's death, aware of his fragile health, but pushing him to the limit anyway. They want to cover their own costs if he dies.
One of the rhetoric I see constantly, even after this tragedy, is to blame his death solely on JP's lifestyle, as if what he was going through on stream didn't have a huge impact on his mental and physical health.
They turned him into a circus animal, to be excited and mistreated in front of the crowd to provoke reactions, but then reassured and consoled in private to maintain control and ensure he doesn't rebel. All this while playing on the fact that he is his only friends.
For people who claimed to be his friends, the least they could do, since they knew how weakened he was, would have been to protect him, and not use his distress to enrich themselves until his last breath. Their responsibility is TOTAL.
Not to mention the responsibility of the justice system and successive governments that have never invested real resources in it. If that were the case, many tragedies could have been avoided. This is one of the many consequences of the austerity policy for public services.
It was not for lack of reports, since an investigation had been opened for violence against a person because of their disability, intentional violence in a group against vulnerable people resulting in ITT. Owen and Safine were taken into police custody.
Another huge responsibility I've already mentioned, but I'll try to go into more detail. That of the Kick streaming platform, which made this channel their flagship, by offering them the most lucrative contract in France: 2,000 euros per hour of streaming.
Kick is a platform created by Stake, a huge online casino site. When Twitch banned the broadcast of gambling-related content, Stake decided to create Kick to find a way to promote their casino and attract young people.
To develop Kick, they distinguished themselves by being much more flexible on moderation, unlike Twitch, to recover all the streamers banned from Twitch in particular. Kick also began to poach big Twitch streamers for huge sums.
It's important to understand that the platform is purely loss-making, much more significantly than Twitch, for example, since their sole purpose is to showcase their casino. It's this objective that led them to authorize this escalation of violent content.
Once streamers on their platform bring them viewers, they figure they can then convert them via contracts offered to the biggest streamers to play at their online casino via Stake. This is what was offered to Owen and Jean Pormanov.
We can see from this tweet that Kick was largely focusing its communication on this channel, they were notably following their marathons and directly participated in one of them by offering them a better contract depending on the results.
Source (Archive)
Thread (Archive)
Last edited:
