In Gaming | My Journal

We All Got Played: ProJared Reveals The Truth Behind His Controversy.

Bethany Edelgard27 August 2019

Lied to and played like a f@#king fiddle from the beginning.

Three months after the drama, ProJared finally comes forward with information and hard evidence about everything that transpired, in his video “YOU’VE BEEN LIED TO“. And damn, I am so livid right now.

What you will find out is that what happened with Jared was nothing more than a meticulous plan by three deceitful people to utterly destroy his career with falsified evidence and using the internet’s “Guilty Until Proven Innocent” philosophy to its most destructive intent.

A Quick Rewind.

Jared Knabenbauer (ProJared) was caught up in a big controversy where two fans of his alleged that he solicited nudes from them, saying he knew that they were underage. Along with these allegations, Jared’s ex-wife, Heidi O’Ferrall, spoke about her allegedly abusive relationship with Jared and how he cheated on her with Holly Conrad.

Personally, I never cared for the fact that Jared sent nudes to fans or posted them online, after all, it shouldn’t matter how an adult consentingly expresses their sexuality. But what really concerned the majority was that he allegedly and purposefully sent nudes to minors.

Everything quickly turned into a shitstorm as Jared practically saw his career destroyed in a matter of hours after Heidi kickstarted her crusade to turn Jared into a monster. Jared lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers on his YouTube channel and I even bore witness to people making an event out of it by live-streaming his declining sub count.

Heidi practically formed a cult of supporters for her own nefarious means and Holly Conrad’s mental health got dragged through hell the entire time from being part of the drama.

What made it worse was Jared’s silence on the situation that only helped to solidified the chance that he could indeed be guilty. He did make some statements, but it didn’t address much and it was hard to know what to believe as Jared didn’t talk about the allegations of soliciting nudes from minors, just primarily his marriage and divorce with Heidi. Holly also did the same, not mentioning the alleged solicitation of minors due to legal reasons.

pic.twitter.com/0dl6VKRx3n

— Jared Knabenbauer (@ProJared) May 18, 2019

Holly did try her best to calm the storm that Heidi conjured with tweets discussing what happened from her side, but it left some unconvinced and others like myself finally realizing that there was definitely more to this story than Heidi and the rest were letting on.

The Orchestration of ProJared’s Downfall.

“And as the internet has shown me, people are more likely to believe whoever fires first on Twitter.” ~ProJared

Jared wastes no time by stating that the allegations about him are indeed 100% false. He also gives us the reason behind why he stayed silent for so long, saying that “serious matters need to be taken seriously”. He talked to as many legal persons as possible before it was safe to actually come forward with the whole truth.

In his video, Jared goes into impressive detail and exposes the blatant lies of Chai and Charlie, the minors who came forward with the allegations. Not only do we learn that Chai and Charlie lied this entire time, but that they’re best friends who conspired to take Jared’s career down for attention and to profit from the drama like freaking con-artists.

Take note that Chai and Charlie have “conveniently” deleted their tweets that started the allegations in the first place.

Something that I didn’t even notice before was that Chai had no evidence about his allegations regarding Jared, as Jared says he never talked to Chai.

Jared highlights an essay on Medium where Chai writes about an accident that caused him brain damage, which has led him to suffer from a mental disability (Psychosis). This has caused Chai to not remember things as they appeared.

“How does this tie into the ProJared controversy?”, you’re probably asking.

The time that Chai made up what happened between him and Jared fits the timeline of his accident that caused his brain damage. Chai even talked about how he would have homicidal thoughts, further complimenting the fact that he is indeed not mentally well.

As for Charlie, he misled everyone with what happened between him and Projared, proving him to be the most manipulative of the bunch.

Charlie warped the events between him and Jared as badly as possible to frame Jared for things that did not transpire. You can even see Charlie getting very inconsistent with whether or not Jared asked him for his age in tweets he made and in an interview he took part in.

Interestingly enough, Charlie and Chai never contacted law enforcement about the allegations, only the Game Grumps channel. This correlates with their agenda.

The allegations even got so bad that Jared even thought he actually did the things they were saying he did, so Jared apologised to Charlie and Chai…but that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to paint Jared as the villain as much as possible to gain sympathy. They manipulated him and didn’t care. As I mentioned before, Chai and Charlie used the drama to help fill their pockets as they pinned their Paypal accounts and businesses to their profiles so people could support them.

This has to honestly be one of the cruellest and the largest scale of psychological manipulation I’ve ever seen on the internet, especially when you add Heidi’s grotesque actions into this.

The fact that one of the duo is a trans guy (Chai) only makes this worse as someone who advocates for the trans community. Dude, you make all of us look like sh*t. Just…fuck you. Fuck both of you.

I can forgive Chai if it was just an honest mistake considering his mental health, but considering that he and Charlie were in cahoots with each other, I have no sympathy for cancerous garbage that can do something like that to another human being without any remorse.

Jared also talks about a person called “Pamela” who alledges that he looked up her nudes at an event and showed it to strangers. These also turned out to be lies, although why she did something like that remains unclear. Jared said the event she talked about never happened and even asks for help to find the event she’s talking about. Jared doesn’t know Pamela personally and thinks she could just be mistaking the situation for something else or for something that it wasn’t, as she doesn’t really have a reason to lie.

So…what about the cheating on Heidi with Holly?

No cheating was involved, as it would seem both Jared and Holly were telling the truth in their tweets.

I don’t know what it was, but while I did believe most of it, I honestly was never 100% sure if to take Heidi’s words at face value about the alleged cheating and abuse she suffered from Jared. And that’s before I realised how deceitful Heidi was about hiding the fact that she was in an “open relationship” type marriage with Jared.

As for Holly, I sympathised with her the beginning because of two reasons (assuming there wasn’t malicious intent):

1. I was in a similar situation myself with regards to her and Jared’s “supposed” relationship, so I related to the situation.
2. It always seemed like she got caught in the crossfire of something she was not to blame for.

Jared goes onto clear Holly’s name attesting that she never cheated on Ross, as he knew everything about what we going. Ross is a great friend of Jared as he supported him through his tumultuous times, and if anything, Ross’ actions are a little suspect and there’s more to that story we don’t know.

But whether or not Jared cheated on his wife or not, he is definitely right when he says what happened between him and Heidi is really none of our business, as breakups happen all of the time.

It’s their personal life and it’s up to them if they choose to disclose the specifics about their marriage for whatever reason.

End of the Saga: Cancel Culture Needs To Be Cancelled.

“What was amazing was seeing the sheer amount of coverage from drama YouTube channels, all weighing in from a supposed “neutral” stance; Not one of them tried reaching out to me. Not one of them tried to ask “Hey, is any of this true? What’s your side of the story?”. They aren’t interested in truth or fair, they’re interested in clicks.”

~ProJared

When Jared said that, it was honestly really disheartening. Most of you probably don’t know what it’s like to have the whole world against you, believing lies concocted by others to do you harm.

I’m not going to sit here on a soapbox and pretend like I knew Jared was “innocent all along”, even if I never unsubscribed from him with everything that happened. You can see that I was frustrated with him in my initial article about the drama. Hell, I even engaged with the memes about the controversy on Facebook. I’m in no way innocent.

With everything that happened to him, this hits me harder because I now know since then what it’s like to have a hate mob sent your way. A hate mob sent by people out to do you harm with only one half of the story to condemn you as if you were some villain.

The “evidence” was there against Jared and me and the internet took the bait like suckers. The evidence seemed damning and it really did look like Jared was indeed guilty. But this is what happens when you run with a “Guilty Until Proven Innocent” mentality.

I’ve also seen things like this happen to my own friends as well. Even to the most innocent of my friends, I’ve seen people weaponised social media against them because of something those people don’t like about them.

I personally used to do “call out” posts on Facebook where I posted screenshots of things people said that I didn’t like, but I’ve stopped from doing that because I don’t want any part of this disgusting cult-like behaviour on the internet where people use “evidence” to ruin the lives of others. I wouldn’t want to unintentionally send hatred someone’s way, not knowing there is more to their side of their story.

To Jared: I’m sorry. Not just for what you went through, but for also losing practically all of my faith in you and believing what was said about you.

We should all learn from this by giving people the benefit of the doubt.

“I know a lot of people reacted very emotionally to all of this, and they may have said or done things they now regret, and if this someone is you, I want you to know that I forgive you. And I hope that you can forgive me for anything too.” ~ProJared

I’m at least glad that this controversy helped me to discover Holly Conrad. She’s really pretty and seems to be a really nice person as well (and yes, also because I can relate to her lol).

I’m really happy to see that Jared is starting to regain his subs after his video. I’m also glad he didn’t just leave this mystery unsolved and will still continue to make videos.

I look forward to seeing where you go from here, Jared. I can’t watch you on Twitch because they have my account hostage. Maybe you should join Mixer with Ninja, as I have *nudge nudge* hehe.

This is the part where I usually put my information to support me, but considering the subject of what happened, it doesn’t feel right. Especially as someone who knows what it’s like to have a hate mob sent your way. Attempting to profit off of drama this serious would leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I don’t have mouthwash (lulz). Also I apologise for swearing.