On July 23, Ava Kris Tyson stepped down from her role working with MrBeast, the mega-popular YouTube creator who has hundreds of millions of followers and billions of views. This came after X messages leaked showing LavaGS, a former moderator on Tyson’s Discord channel, interacting with Tyson when Tyson was 20 and Lava was 13. The inappropriate nature of the conversations, though mostly juvenile, shocked the MrBeast community, especially in the wake of larger conversations around how creators and their young stars should interact, and many on social media claimed this was evidence of “grooming.” Lava quickly came out to defend Tyson, saying they were just “edgy jokes,” maintaining that nothing untoward ever happened between the two.  

However, Lava’s story was just the beginning, and the day after Tyson announced she was stepping away, another former Discord moderator who worked on Tyson’s server when they were a teenager came forward. In a video on X, Nathan Weyman, who started working on Tyson’s Discord when he was 15, said that Tyson “used me, manipulated me, and did very inappropriate things with me.” 

Weyman, with the help of former moderators, leaked over half a million messages from Tyson’s Discord spanning 2017 to 2021. A few days after posting the messages to GitHub, they were removed, spawning conspiracy theories that someone was trying to silence them. (In a statement to Rolling Stone, a GitHub spokesperson said they were removed because it “violated our terms for additional products and features.”) According to those logs, Tyson shared links to a website with drawn pornography, talked about her genitals, and asked to “purge” controversial chats. “It’s been a long time coming, and I saw other people finally speaking out,” Weyman tells Rolling Stone. After the new logs leaked, Lava seemed to rethink some of their interactions, too. “The conversations were weird, but nothing inappropriate ever happened to me,” Lava said. 

The following day, on July 27, a woman named Jess, who was Tyson’s executive assistant from 2023 to 2024, posted an over 60-part thread on X sharing her detailed experience with Tyson, whom she claims used the position within MrBeast to entice her with employment, leading to her being  “sexually assaulted” while working. 

With over 55 billion views on the MrBeast channel, the brand has become a global empire with its line of chocolate, fast food, and action figures — in most of his videos he has a recurring cast of friends including Tyson. Tyson is a trans woman who announced their transition in July 2023 years after she started appearing in MrBeast videos, making her one of the most visible trans people online. This made her a target for anti-trans rhetoric and initially, Donaldson defended her, writing on X in April 2023 that Ava “isn’t my ‘nightmare’ he’s my fucken friend.” But after the conversations with the first teenage Discord moderator came to light last month, Donaldson tweeted that he took “immediate action to remove Ava from the company, my channel, and any association with MrBeast.” 

“The conversations were weird, but nothing inappropriate ever happened to me,” one former moderator says.