
ActuallySienna
27th Jan 2022 from
TwitLonger
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Why I No Longer Support imglower
I’ve started writing and deleted this three or four times by now. This may be one of the scariest and most vulnerable things that I’ve ever written, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified of the backlash I might receive for speaking out. It contains a lot of things that I would honestly rather have kept private and to myself. However, after somewhat recent events, I can’t stay silent any longer. It’s already taken me way to long to come out and admit the truth.
I don’t want to speak on behalf of others so the majority of my writing will be based around my personal experiences with Glower. Anything I say about my interactions with the other women who he harassed has been posted with their permission and after they’ve read it. Ultimately, it is their choice whether or not they want to release details of what happened to them. However, I know that including myself there are at least four women that Glower has harassed. I was not the first, and I was not the last. I want it to be known that if I had been the only one affected, I probably never would have ever said anything, as stupid as that is. I know there are people who think that I’m posting this for clout or to “cancel” someone. However, after finding out in November that Glower had once again harassed another one of my friends, I was filled with regret for not saying anything earlier. I feel that maybe if I had come out about my experiences publicly prior to this, she might not have gotten involved with him and she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. It’s for that reason that, even though it’s way too late, I am now speaking up. I don’t ever want anyone else to be manipulated and hurt the way that we have been. He has been given ample opportunities to change and failed to do so.
In the summer of 2019, I got back into watching speedruns after a couple of years of being pretty inactive in the community. I was drawn to the Paper Mario community after watching a glitchless tournament on twitch. I was reminded how much I loved that game, and immediately began following any runners that had recent runs on the leaderboards.
As Glower was one of the most active runners at the time, he was one of the first that I began watching regularly. Over time I got more comfortable in the stream and started being more of myself. A huge part of my humor is flirty humor and looking back I’m not really proud of the way that Glower and I started speaking privately, but ultimately, I made some jokes in his chat during a 5 golden pigs runs alluding to the fact that I found him attractive. This was true, but I also wasn’t expecting anything to come of it. I tease a lot of my friends that way, and I didn’t really know him, so I didn’t think twice about it. To my surprise, that same night he sent me screenshots of some of my messages- albeit a bit out of context- and stated that he was trying to figure out what I meant from my comments. I was really shocked by this. Honestly, I had never been DMed by a “bigger streamer” before, and I was really surprised by his name in my DM list. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re a fan of someone’s content and they all of a sudden reach out to you so personally, you feel sorta awestruck, a “He’s actually talking to me?!” kinda feeling. It’s a weird dynamic, and I really felt like I was meeting someone famous, as stupid as that is. He held all those world records, had hundreds of viewers, and I was a big fan. I was flattered that he bothered to talk to me at all. This obviously led to a pretty unhealthy friendship/relationship with him in the first place, but that was compounded by other factors.
Pretty quick into our conversation, he admitted to having a girlfriend and that seeing my flirty messages made her uncomfortable, and I immediately apologized. I told him I would be more cautious, and I wouldn’t make jokes like that anymore. After apologizing multiple times, he said not to worry, that him and his girlfriend had been having issues for a while. A few days later, he disclosed to me that they had broken up. If I were to be put in this situation today, I would have acted very differently out of respect for his previous relationship. However, younger, and much more naïve and inexperienced, I then viewed him as fair game, and I initiated most of the conversations that led to us getting romantically involved from then on out.
We added each other on snapchat and I started sending him pictures of me and my days. The majority of all of our conversations took place on snapchat, so I have little record of what was sent or when we talked, but I know it was often. From the context of a lot of his messages, I could tell he was interested in me, and I definitely had feelings for him. We would flirt back and forth and make jokes that had sexual connotations. But for a while, it was only jokes.
I don’t remember exactly when/how things escalated. I remember it was a transition period for me- I was moving back to school at the time. An important thing to note is that at this time I was attending a religious university; I was raised in a religious cult with extremely strict rules, especially around relationships and sex, meaning that no sexual activity was allowed whatsoever. At that point I knew that I was going to leave the church, but I had a year left of my degree and had invested too much into it to just drop out. I was dreading all of it and so unhappy with my circumstances, and Glower was my bright spot through all of those days.
As things with him progressed, we both acknowledged we had feelings and we decided we’d keep talking but that we weren’t getting in a committed relationship due to the distance. In addition to this, he insisted that our fling remain entirely secret. So overall, there was no commitment in our “relationship”.
After this, things started to quickly escalate into something sexual. At this point in time, I had never done anything remotely sexual with anyone, but I was wanting to explore. I initiated things by sending him a lewd picture that, while not showing too much, definitely expressed my intent, which he then reciprocated. At first, sexual interactions with him were something I really enjoyed and looked forward to. I was the one who was starting most of the lewd conversations. With that being said, I had disclosed to him very early on that I was a virgin and that I was inexperienced. This was something he latched onto, and something he used, I now believe, to manipulate me into doing things I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He became hyperfixated on certain things; asking me if I masturbated to him, pressuring me to do it after I told him I hadn’t ever done it and wasn’t comfortable with doing it, asking for videos of me doing it. I really wanted to please him, so I tried to give him whatever he asked for. I didn’t want him to stop messaging me, so I ignored a lot of my own personal discomforts to do what he wanted. However, I acknowledge that I did do these things willingly.
We talked and called in-between, too, having lots of conversations and getting to know each other. We became very close. I told Glower things that I had never told anyone else in my life. Some nights we would talk about our future- at that point I knew I wanted to go out east. He would say things like, I also need to move away from my parents, maybe I will also look at jobs where you’re going, maybe we can just make it through this and then meet each other. We talked about maybe going to AGDQ to meet up before all of this. At one point, we even looked up how much money it would take to visit each other. I became super invested in our “fling”. I thought we might have a future. I thought that maybe we both wanted that- he talked about it a lot, and it really seemed to me like he wanted it.
Then school hit full in force. We both became a lot busier. I still wanted to talk to him. I would message him, and he would ignore my messages for hours, then days, and then he eventually just stopped responding altogether, effectively ghosting me. I ended up messaging him and saying something along the lines of, “Hey, I know you’re busy but if you’re not going to put any effort into this, let’s just call it quits.” He finally responded to me and agreed, saying he was too busy and that he needed to focus on school. It hurt me a lot, but shit happens, and we ended things.
After this he would hit me up on occasion, and you could tell from the context of his messages that he would hit me up because he was horny. I knew what he wanted. Even though I didn’t really want to send him more pictures and even though he had hurt me, I always thought that maybe if I sent him what he asked for, he would change his mind and want me back. However, to nobody’s surprise, he would always just get off and then go back to not responding to me. I always felt so used, but since I always gave in, it became a cycle. After some time, I vented to some of my friends about what was going on and they helped me realize that I would be better off if I just cut him off, so I stopped responding to these types of requests.
Between October and December, I just focused on school. Then during Christmas break, Glower started hitting me up like crazy. At the beginning, I wasn’t as emotionally invested in him, but when he solicited me for nudes over Christmas break, I didn’t turn him down. I didn’t feel pressured at all. In fact, I found it really satisfying that he wanted to get off to me. However, after a couple weeks of this, a lot of my old feelings came back, while he just wanted to sext. This started to bother me. I ended up getting drunk and texted him, asking if he cared about me at all or if he just liked getting off to me. He responded saying, “I don’t know, I don’t even really know you.” At that point I knew he would never see me as anything more than someone to jerk off to. So that’s when I decided I was done with him.
In January, I started talking frequently to one of my close friends, and after a while ended up getting into a committed relationship with him. This person also lived far away from me, but after a couple of months, we bought a plane ticket for me to go out and see him. About two weeks before I flew out, Glower hit me up for the first time since my drunk text to him. Same thing as normal, you could tell he wanted nudes. I told him I was dating someone and at first, he seemed confused, but then he congratulated me. He seemed happy for me. I told him we could still be friends, but obviously that’s all we could be. He said he understood, and we left it at that.
Right after this, he started messaging me pretty frequently and it began to get uncomfortable quickly. Glower started asking really invasive questions about my relationship. He began to ask things about whether or not my boyfriend and I were physically involved, if I sent him pics, if we had sex, etc. When I declined to answer, he kept pushing me for details. When I told him I wasn’t comfortable with his questions, he apologized and backed off. I think he was still hyperfixated on my virginity and wanted to know if I’d lost it. Regardless, it was extremely inappropriate for him to be asking me those things.
After this, I went to visit my boyfriend for the first time and things went perfectly. We were happy. I began job hunting in that area and making plans to move to where he lived after I graduated. I knew I wanted to get the fuck out of Utah, and this seemed like a convenient escape. However, a month later, when I flew out there the second time, things were different. Things were going downhill in the relationship, and we were both unhappy. I was convinced that if I could just stick it out until I moved, it would work out. I lived every day stressed that we were going to break up before I made it out there.
While this was going on, Glower and I talked occasionally but just as friends and mostly in groups. We had a group of friends that VCed pretty much every night called “comfy chat”, where we would just chill or play games together.
At one point, Glower disclosed to me that he had been talking to one of our mutual friends. He said that things weren’t sexual between them, but that they’d been talking a lot. I asked if he was interested in her, he brought up some concerns about her age and about long distance, etc. He made a comment about wishing I was available. I was at a pretty low point in my relationship, however, I once again reminded him again that I was seeing someone. He asked how it was going, and I made a mistake in breaking down to him. I told him all the details of everything that had been going on with my boyfriend, all the ways it was hurting me, how I didn’t know what I should do, and how I wasn’t happy. He told me he was sorry, and he hoped I would be happy, that I deserved more. Then he made a few comments that made me uncomfortable, referring to some of the lewd pictures I had sent him in the past and how he couldn’t stop thinking about them. I just blew those comments off, and I thanked him for listening, apologized for venting to him, and asked him to please not mention anything to anyone. I felt so guilty for ranting about my current partner to someone I had been previously involved with. It was an absolute mistake and that choice just made things worse.
From then on, Glower would message me every single day. Oftentimes, he was extremely flirtatious. He would make comments about me needing to pick someone who was better suited for me. He would insinuate that I should dump my boyfriend. He constantly sent me messages that alluded to him thinking about me sexually and wishing I could send him more pictures. I probably told him to stop at least 5 or 6 times, which is something he downplayed in his account of things. His behavior put me in such an awkward situation. He was being so pushy, and I felt overwhelmed with everything that was going on. No matter how many times I told Glower that I was taken, he just would NOT listen when I told him to stop. I should have cut him off, but I was worried about the effects that it would have on our friend group. He didn’t want people to know we had been involved previously, I didn’t want to cause drama and chaos there, and I had never been placed in this situation before. I didn’t know how to navigate it.
One day, maybe like two days after the first conversation with Glower about my failing relationship, I got a text from the mutual friend Glower had been talking to, asking if she could get something off her chest. She then began to tell me all about how she and Glower had started a relationship of sorts- how he called her all the time, paid special attention to her, got her attached to him, and then ghosted her. She told me how hurt she was by him, how awful it felt. After listening to her, I just felt so guilty. I realized that by keeping quiet like Glower had wanted, I had failed to warn other people what he was like. So, I disclosed to her. I told her everything about our relationship, even that our fling had escalated to a sexual thing. We discovered that the night he ghosted her was the night that he was talking to me about her and about my relationship. Now that he was ignoring her, he was trying to hit me back up. We were both pissed about that.
Over the course of many months, we conversed often about the messages that he sent to us. It was how we supported each other through his poor behavior. I would vent to her when he’d try and flirt with me, she’d tell me jokes about the messages he sent her. Even though he told me their interactions weren’t sexual, she disclosed to me that he did send her sexual things and she ultimately told him she would never send him pictures. After that we discovered he was sending us the same sexual pictures/messages. Even with all of this, we both were under the deluded impression that Glower was a good guy who was just super emotionally immature and desperate. This is why, despite his shitty actions, we decided to keep supporting him and his stream.
Not too long after this, my boyfriend and I broke up. I was absolutely devastated. I felt so alone. Most of my friends didn’t know he even existed, because I couldn’t tell my school friends about him due to the university rules we had broken. Aside from my sisters, Glower was one of my only friends that knew my ex existed. I felt that I had no support, so when Glower asked how things were going with him, I told him what happened. I knew that telling him we had broken up was a bad idea because I knew Glower and his pattern of behavior, and I anticipated exactly what happened next- rather than being supportive, he immediately sent flirty/sexual messages soliciting nudes now that I was single. I told him no at first, that it was too soon. But a few days later, I gave in and gave him what he wanted. I knew it was stupid, but I was hurting, and it felt good to be desired.
I realize that this was shitty, which is why the next day I apologized to him, I told him I wasn’t ready to get involved emotionally with anyone else. He asked where we went from here, and we considered having a friends with benefits type of thing, but after a few days, I could just tell he wanted more. He kept asking me if he could come visit me when I moved. That made me super uncomfortable. When I thought about him visiting me, I felt so sick to my stomach. I knew how many times he had not honored my boundaries and was scared that if we met if real life, it would be the same thing. So, I cut things off. I told him I was done.
From then on, he continually tried to solicit things from me. I told him no. I stuck to my guns for a while. But he kept mentioning how he was disappointed, how it was lame I wouldn’t send anything, how he was masturbating to me and couldn’t stop thinking about me. I felt so pressured. One night when I was feeling really low, and when I was intoxicated, I sent him more photos. This pattern continued for a bit. I would say no, I would be firm about it, and he would just push and push and push. Then when I couldn’t take it anymore, I would concede. I always followed it up with, “We are done, this is the last time, I don’t want this.” However, because I had given in in the past, I think he thought that if he just kept pushing me, eventually I would give in. And I guess he was right.
After a while of this cycle of him pressuring me, I told him that I really didn’t want to engage with him and that I felt coerced into sending things. I refused to send him more pictures. He seemed surprised at my reaction and apologized. He said he was being a dick and he didn’t realize it. He swore he wouldn’t send anything sexual from then on. For a few days he honored that promise, but then it started up again. He would continually harass me, sending me sexual DMs about everything I posted. I remember one day I put a video of me and my puppy on my snapchat story, and he DMed me about certain parts of my body that were in that video that he liked. I would post a selfie on twitter and immediately my phone would start buzzing, always his name. No matter how many times I told him to stop, he would laugh it off like it was a funny joke, say sorry, and then repeat the behavior. I started feeling anxious posting anything on any of my social media platforms, because he followed them all, and I was worried what he would send me after he saw them. He admitted to masturbating to more than one of the pictures that I posted. I felt like I was trapped, that I couldn’t get away from him. But I didn’t feel like I could block him. His community was where most of my friends were. I remember telling one of my friends that I felt like if I blocked him, he would just do it to someone else, and that I would rather be the person who had to handle it. Ultimately, I didn’t know what to do.
Then, the google doc with all the accounts of people being sexually harassed/assaulted by speedrunners dropped. This was sometime in the summer of 2020. One of the people who was accused of assault/harassment was an active member of Glower’s community and chat. In the moderator channel, we got in this huge debate about whether or not we should ban this individual. I remember sitting there and reading the chat, being dumbfounded by the comments that I read, people sympathizing with the abuser and accusing the victim of lying. I tried voicing my opinion and the need to support victims of harassment, to which I received significant pushback from other moderators and Glower himself. I ended up leaving his discord and unfollowing him after this incident. I was slapped in the face with the realization that Glower defended these people so readily because he knew he himself had done questionable things and didn’t want to get cancelled himself. I realized that by continuing to support him, I was showing him that his behavior towards me was acceptable. He had just sent me sexual messages the day prior, so it’s not like the harassment wasn’t continuing. That day, I finally blocked him on all social media platforms and left his community, as well as the channel where our friends hung out.
There were a few people who knew the reasons why I left that began calling him out publicly in our friend group discord without my consent. Honestly, I had just wanted to run away without saying anything, but these people tried to stand up against him. Ultimately, it came to nothing except for a huge mess of drama and those people who tried to defend me leaving the server.
Shortly after this, I posted my previous twitlonger about what it’s like to be a victim, detailing all of my history with sexual harassment and assault. In this piece, I wrote about him. After writing it, I felt extremely conflicted about posting the information about him, and ultimately decided to edit it out. I was scared of how people would react, and I was scared his community would come after me. However, I sent him the unedited version with the section about his behavior in it. After this he absolutely panicked. Since he was blocked on my social media, he couldn’t see that I posted an edited version, even though I had literally told him I didn’t release the section about him to the public. He began to freak out and then posted “his side” of what happened in a document that he sent to specific mutual friends of ours. Ultimately, since I remained silent and he shared his side only, he suffered almost no consequences. Our friends brushed it aside, said it was fucked up but continued hanging out with him.
I stayed away for a while, but after a lot of drama and, later, apologies, I finally rejoined the server with my friends. I rejoined glower’s server sometime in 2021 and began following his stream again because he had apologized over and over to me about his behavior. He swore he didn’t know what he was doing was harassment, that he was just stupid and that he wasn’t trying to hurt me, and I decided I would give him another chance. I really believed that he had changed. With that being said, I warned him that if he ever harassed another person the way he harassed me and my friend, I would not hesitate to release details of his interactions with me publicly.
I thought he had changed, but he proved me wrong just a couple of months ago. In the summer, he got involved with a girl he’d met through twitch/discord. After they broke up, he began messaging me about how heartbroken he was and how he couldn’t believe it was over. I tried to console him. From what he told me, nothing sketchy had gone down, they just had mutually decided to end things. I spent a lot of time giving him advice, talking him through it, playing games with him to help distract him.
While I was helping him through this, he would make comments to me that made me a little uncomfy, saying things like, “Man, I really fucked it up with you,” or “You’re really the full package, aren’t you?”. One moment he’d be claiming to be heartbroken, the next he was telling me he liked my twitter profile picture, which made me nervous because of our history. I didn’t want to know what he thought of my pictures. Additionally, he began asking me about my love life. He asked me about some of my close friends, asking whether or not I was involved with them romantically. He asked me about previous relationships I’d had and was basically asked if I was having sex with anyone. Once again, I don’t have any screenshots of this in particular because it was on snapchat. I felt conflicted because I wanted to help him, but I was bothered by his behavior. Ultimately, I just made excuses for his creepy behavior, and I told him there was no chance of me getting involved romantically with him ever again. After that our interactions were centered on getting him through his breakup.
A few weeks into this, I found out from a mutual friend that he had actually sexually harassed his ex. I was sent a screenshot where he admitted to it. The screenshot was dated several days past when him and I had been talking, when I had been consoling him. I was livid, my heart just absolutely sank. He didn’t have the decency to tell me personally, likely because he knew exactly how I would respond. He must have known that I knew, because he didn’t message me for a while after that.
One night, while I was working, he reached out to me, asking if I could talk. I told him I was busy but that he could send me messages and I’d read them when I had time. In this message he sent a thousand excuses for why he did what he did to her, saying that it was different from the way he harassed me. He said that he wasn’t treating her like he did to me, he just was overcome by his emotions and couldn’t help himself. Through all his messages, it was clear that he didn’t understand that what he did was truly wrong. He continued to justify it, and it was clear he hadn’t learned a thing over the year that I thought he had changed.
The reality is that Glower has had a thousand chances to change and act differently, but he has shown me time and time again that he will continue to harass and prey on his female viewers. He will overstep boundaries. He will ask invasive questions. He will continue with this disgusting behavior, at least until he suffers some consequences. I don’t want there to be more women like me, like these other amazing girls that I know, who have been tricked and then hurt by him. Because of this, you will never catch me supporting him ever again. I have removed myself from any space that he is present, I have unmodded myself from his stream, and I have unfollowed him on all platforms. I have taken some steps away from the Paper Mario speedrunning community, which is hard because it’s a game I love and a community filled with people who mean a lot to me. It’s just hard to be active in streams and in a community when people are constantly praising and acknowledging someone who’s done such disgusting things, when I know what he’s really like.
I know that this is just my side of the story, but I promise you that there are people and resources that will back me up. At this time, I am declining to share many screenshots, aside from the document where he admitted to harassing me. But if needed, I will release more because there are so many. Honestly, it’s overwhelming to go through them and decide what is worth posting. However, I have lots of screenshots of him admitting to his own toxic and predatory behaviors. I have messages between me and the other women he’s harassed. I have enough to bury him. But revenge is not my purpose in sharing these things.
What I am hoping for is a community that is safe. What I want is to protect more people from being hurt by him. What I know I probably won’t get is some accountability on his part. At the absolute minimum, I want people to know who he really is and what he is capable of. I have let him walk all over me for the better part of two years and I am done accepting and enabling that behavior.
Thank you to all of my friends who have reached out to me and spoken out against him. It’s through people like you that we are able to make our communities a safe space, and that’s something I will never take for granted again. To the women who have been hurt as a result of my silence, I’m sorry. I will never be able to take away what happened to you, but no matter what, I am here to support you. Women in the speedrunning community deserve so much better than people like imglower, but unfortunately it is something we experience all the time. He is not the first person to harass me on twitch or even in life, and he probably won’t be the last. However, I hope that as time continues to pass, we can get better at standing up for ourselves and for the victims around us. I know that I am committed to doing so from now on.
Link to his admission of harassment. In it, he quotes portions of my writing, the unedited version of “It’s Hard to Be A Victim” that I sent to him. The last picture is a photo of what was actually released to the public, which did not include any of those details.
https://imgur.com/a/qVgIubu