‘Horrified’
Harassment, Stalkers, Death Threats: A Day in the Life of Women on Twitch
Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru were threatened on a livestream — but they’re not the only women dealing with constant harassment
Rachel “Valkyrae” Hofstetter, Brittany “Cinna” Watts, and Emily “Emiru” Schunk are popular Twitch streamers with millions of social media followers. Over the years, they’ve each cultivated a massive community that tunes in to watch them play video games, participate in boot camps, compete in cook-offs, and sometimes, get together to walk around in the real world as a cameraperson follows closely behind.
On March 2, that last event, known colloquially as an “IRL stream,” went from innocuous to dangerous in the blink of an eye.
As part of a days-long streaming marathon called the “Sis-A-Thon,” Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru went to the Santa Monica Pier at night with two of their employees in tow, one of which was holding the camera for their livestream. The women walked around, took pictures with fans, and talked and joked amongst themselves.
At one point, a man in a button-down, short-sleeved shirt, squatting near a ride, called them over to ask if they would listen to him sing before abruptly pivoting to request Emiru’s number. When she declined, he stated he would “just keep following [them].”
The women nervously joked about stalkers as they walked away, heading towards the pier’s exit. Moments later, the man reappeared and tried to approach them yet again, but their cameraperson and another individual off-camera kept him away from the three women, who were visibly and audibly concerned. It was then that he appeared to lunge in their direction and yell, “I’ll kill you right now,” as they shouted for security and fled. All of this was captured on Twitch before the livestream cut to a holding screen featuring cartoon drawings of Valkyrae and Cinna with the message “BRB Traveling” emblazoned on it.
The Santa Monica Police Department confirmed their knowledge of the incident to Rolling Stone in an email: “Officers responded to a report of an individual making threatening statements toward a group of people at the Santa Monica Pier. Officers contacted those involved, assisted them with an escort to help ensure their safety, and conducted an area search for the individual. The suspect was not located at the time.”
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The next day, Cinna, and Valkyrae went live on Twitch to discuss the incident, revealing that they ran into a store to seek shelter from the man. “He’s still out there, but I am investing as much as I can to find this guy,” Valkyrae said as Cinna sobbed beside her. Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru did not respond to interview requests.
A Twitch rep tells Rolling Stone that the team is “horrified by any kind of harassment or abuse, even if it took place outside of Twitch, and our safety teams continue to investigate. We care deeply about our creators and their wellbeing and are working to ensure that they’re being supported.”
In the days leading up to the attack, Cinna and Valkyrae streamed themselves styling their hair together, playing video games, and otherwise hanging out in a sleepover-style marathon, which was targeted by reactionary content creators, including DramaAlert, an X account created by Daniel “Keemstar” Keem dedicated to posting content creator gossip. These posts denigrated the women, “calling them out” for “their behavior” and suggesting their content is inferior to popular male streamers.
There is no indication that the physical attack was inspired by the digital disparagement the women faced in the days leading up to March 2, but it is a symptom of a troubling pattern. According to several high-profile women streamers who spoke with Rolling Stone, two of whom have dealt with stalkers, this incident is just one of dozens of examples of female streamers facing both online and in-person harassment and stalking, a symptom of a deep-rooted misogyny that festers in digital spaces.
From follower to fanatic
Autumn Rhodes is a new mom. She’s also a popular content creator who has been involved in the gaming and streaming space for over a decade, boasting more than 82,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), 240,000 Twitch followers, and several stints in professional esports.
Her impressive career has been marred by the actions of a persistent stalker, who she says has sent her tens of thousands of sexually explicit and threatening emails and private messages across several social media platforms since she was 19 years old. Rhodes is now 28.
“On Twitch, it’s normal to have people that can donate to support their favorite streamer,” she explains over a video call. “I’ve been living on my own since I was 16, so it was a big deal saving up for college.” But Rhodes says one of her most generous donors quickly became entitled and irritable when she did not acknowledge him in Twitch chat.
“At the time, my ex-partner was becoming a doctor, so I kept my relationship very private,” Rhodes says. “[The man] found out I was in a relationship and all of a sudden I got these emails out of nowhere like ‘I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna fly to Canada and find you and your boyfriend.’”
Rhodes shared screenshots of emails, texts, and social media DMs allegedly sent by the man, whom Rolling Stone has chosen not to name. They range from a self-written contract that relinquishes his money to her to emails containing taunts like, “go tell cops, seal your fucking fate dumb bitch” and, “you can have me arrested you better pray they kill me cuz you fucked me over.” On TikTok, one DM read, “you will suffer…mark my words bitch your [sic] dead already.”
Rhodes, who was based in Canada, tried to report this behavior to police in California, where he was based. “Nothing happened, because he kept harassing me. He didn’t get arrested until I was 22, so for three, four years I was getting harassed every single day,” she says, her voice shaky. “I thought I was gonna die, I was so depressed, so scared. I was in survival mode for years and nobody was doing anything about it. The police weren’t doing anything about it; Twitch wasn’t doing anything about it. It just kept escalating.”
Rhodes’ main source of income had now become a terrifying gauntlet of harassment, and during those years she missed out on several opportunities for fear of going to in-person events. “I remember contacting Twitch like, ‘Hey, I really wanna go to TwitchCon but I’m scared,’” she recalls. “And they responded like, ‘Yeah, don’t go to TwitchCon. It’s not safe.’ It was affecting my job, my livelihood.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Twitch said, “Over the past several years, we’ve built on and adjusted our approach to TwitchCon safety and security. We take security at our events extremely seriously, full stop.”
But Rhodes felt that she was left to fend for herself. “It enrages me that women have to go through this and we have to be screaming at the top of our lungs, ‘Help us,’ and nobody wants to help us,” she says.
The man terrorizing Rhodes was eventually arrested in December 2019. According to a news report, he had to be Tased by Bay Area police after “begging to be shot.” In February 2019, he pleaded no contest to one count of felony stalking and one count of misdemeanor stalking and was sentenced to 120 days in jail.
Rhodes fears he will try to find her in the U.S., where she now lives with her partner and toddler.
Though the details differ, the story remains the same for many women on Twitch: A man starts watching their streams, then eventually becomes obsessed with them, transitioning from fan to serial harasser or stalker.
Jonna Mae is a popular streamer known as “MissesMae” who’s been creating online content since 2012. Her partner, Mike “Diesel” Carr, is himself a well-known gaming personality. They often work together, but they did not expect they’d face a stalker together, as well.
According to Mae, a man, who Rolling Stone has also chosen not to name, began following her on Facebook, where she was one of several content creators who led the platform’s streaming charge.
“He initially came into one of my streams super nice and then out of nowhere he got inappropriate, rambling in chat, saying anything and everything to get attention,” Mae explains. “I told him. ‘Hey you need to chill out.’”
Mae says that the man then began behaving similarly in Carr’s Twitch stream chats.
“We think it was like, drug-induced or something, just from the stuff he was writing,” Carr says. “It was nonsensical, out-of-pocket stuff … then all of a sudden it was completely deranged, sexual stuff.”
Like Rhodes’ stalker, Carr and Mae says the perpetrator would make dozens of accounts on Twitch and elsewhere to continue harassing the couple. “You could always tell, it wasn’t even like he would try to hide who he was,” says Carr.
Late last year, Mae went into her email’s spam folder looking for a message and saw it was filled with harassing messages from the man. “Gmail deletes spam folders every 30 days, so I could only imagine what the past two years were like before that,” she says.
Carr also had a slew of messages from the same individual in his spam folder, some of which were requests to “buy” Mae from him. Though disturbed, the two continued creating content and making public appearances, even attending TwitchCon 2024 in San Diego, California. That’s when things escalated even further, though not at the actual Twitch event.
Twitch tells Rolling Stone that “people who have been indefinitely suspended [from the platform], including off-service violations, are not allowed to purchase TwitchCon tickets as they do not have active accounts.” This may have prevented Mae and Carr’s stalker from approaching them at the San Diego Convention Center, where TwitchCon 2024 was held. Instead, he found the couple at a San Diego Padres game that weekend.
“We’re big Padres fans, so we saw three of the games against the White Sox. The first two games, he emailed us and said he was going to try and go to them, so I didn’t post about the game on the third day,” Mae explains.
But at the end of that third game, as Carr and Mae rose to leave their seats, a man approached and asked to take a picture with them. “Initially I didn’t recognize him,” Mae says, but Carr almost immediately knew who it was and told her they had to “get out of [there].” Mae describes hiding in a bathroom for more than 20 minutes in the hopes that he would lose her in the throng of people exiting the stadium.
When the couple returned to their home in Chicago after TwitchCon weekend, they knew they had to do something. A lawyer friend helped them identify and locate the stalker and collate evidence in a massive binder, which Mae took to the local county clerk to get an emergency no contact order.
For them, the most damning evidence that warranted a restraining order was an email from the man that read, “i even sent you literally my sperm in a ziploc bag so that you could get yourself pregnant but it got returned because you don’t have that p.o box anymore…I mean no harm you know, I just really in love with you.”
Coupled with emails in which the man discussed attending the Padres game and complimenting Mae for the pants she had on there, the evidence was enough to grant Mae an emergency no-contact order. In January of this year, she successfully filed a two-year no-contact order against him in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois.
“After two years of that, it was a huge wave of relief,” Mae says. “But it doesn’t stay. We’re still nervous … that kind of stuff lingers.”
Online misogyny transcends the internet
Mae and Rhodes aren’t the only streamers who have successfully protected themselves from stalkers through the court of law or other means. But litigation is an expensive and confusing process that not every streamer can endure, and law enforcement is still woefully unprepared when it comes to online harassment and stalking. Couple that with the internet’s pervasive misogyny which all too often derides victims’ experiences or flat-out denies that they even happened, and you have obstacles that feel insurmountable for most.
In the aftermath of the in-person harassment and threats against Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru, a spate of posts on X and elsewhere (some from the same accounts mocking them in the days leading up to the event) suggested they had staged it, or were exaggerating the severity of the situation.
“No means no, you’re not entitled to anybody,” Valkyrae said in a March 2 statement on X. “The fact that this man threatened our lives after being rejected while we were in a group, in public and live on stream just shows the harsh reality women live in. This happens off camera to women all the time.”
Caroline Kwan, a variety streamer who often discusses the intersection of politics and pop culture, tells Rolling Stone that women in this space who face stalkers don’t often speak publicly about their experiences.
“After the incident happened with Emiru, Cinna, and Valkyrae, I felt this rage from not just myself, but so many women streamers who tweeted in a way that they don’t normally speak about these things,” Kwan explains. “There was just an outpouring of rage that you could tell was pent up. So many female streamers have had really horrific, terrifying things happen and it’s a double-edged sword — on the one hand, if you share your experiences, it shines a light on the issue, but on the other hand, it could potentially make you more of a target. It could be a trophy for these guys who are behind all this harassment.”
And it’s not just the biggest women streamers who face obsessive fans. “This is happening at all levels, this is happening to female streamers who have 20 viewers, this is happening to female streamers who have 500 viewers … I’m thinking about all of the streams who do not have these types of resources [that creators like Pokimane have]. There’s this idea that any streamer you’ve heard of is a millionaire,” Kwan explains. And the few who are millionaires (in 2023, Pokimane confirmed she was worth well over $2 million) spend “thousands of dollars a month on security,” Kwan says.
For Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), online misogyny has remained a constant for the last 15 years. “We’ve been tracking the increasing online misogyny, which is documented to have increased regularly since 2011,” she says.
“This exposure and escalation [of misogyny] is happening at every level — elementary, middle school, college … the escalation of physical violence and threats is part of the same online trend that we’re seeing. You have this political climate where young men suddenly feel empowered to assert control, even physical control or ownership, over women and their bodies,” Miller-Idriss explains.
The men stalking Mae and Rhodes both expressed a feeling of ownership over them, and resorted to violent rhetoric and obsessive behavior when that ownership was questioned. The individual who threatened Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru did so immediately after being turned down romantically, an all-too-common phenomenon amongst men.
According to a 2018 study published in an American Psychological Association journal, “Men with high scores on sexual dominance motivation and positive attitudes about casual sex had a greater probability of responding aggressively when they formed extremely hostile perceptions of the woman who rejected them.”
Online misogyny doesn’t just exist in digital spaces. It can (and does) bleed into the real-world. “With Twitter or X becoming more of a cesspool, and Meta removing so many of the content moderation guidelines that would have set a norm about what constitutes hate, that’s really affecting hate against women,” Miller-Idriss says. “You can say that women are property now, you can say that LGBTQ people are mentally ill, kind of legitimizing and normalizing some of that stuff. And, of course, the anti DEI climate in general … it’s hard to imagine that this climate doesn’t exacerbate it.”
For Miller-Idriss, misogyny often manifests in a preoccupation with women’s visibility, and there are few women more visible in modern society than Twitch streamers.
“I use the definition of misogyny that Kate Mann uses, which is that it’s not hatred of women, it’s a law enforcement mechanism of the patriarchy,” Miller-Idriss explains. “You’re trying to police the gender norms and expectations that the patriarchy wants to have in place, which includes women being subservient, demure, not public, not in leadership roles…. When women violate those norms, they get met with misogyny.”
And for Kwan, who regularly discusses these issues on her Twitch streams, it’s crucial that society recognizes the forces behind what happened to Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru. “This is not happening in a vacuum, this is not an individual, one-off thing,” she states, before turning to the online reactions in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
“This issue with female streamers is the result of misogyny that accounts like Keemstar and all these drama bait accounts play a part in cultivating this seething resentment of women and anger over them,” she points out. “[DramaAlert] had tweeted two days earlier, ‘Pokimane and her clones [Valkyrae and Cinna, who streamed with her during the marathon] finally called out for their behavior.’ And it’s like, what is their behavior? What are you talking about?”
[Keem, who runs DramaAlert, declined to comment.]
She continues, pointing to the current political landscape as a perpetuation of misogyny: “This is representative of a mentality at large. So many people who voted for Donald Trump, so many young men have this belief that they have been victimized by a woke society, by progress that has benefitted women and trans people and all of these other groups.”
The frustrating fight for justice
Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru have not yet brought their attacker to justice. Mae, Rhodes, Carr, and others have expressed their frustration at how difficult it is to be taken seriously by the police, the courts, and the general public — all a side effect of a culture steeped in misogyny.
Rhodes claims she had to threaten to go public with the details of her stalker and how it was affecting her life before the police would take it seriously. “What about all the women who don’t have followers or they can’t do this?,” she wonders angrily.
“You just need to be persistent,” Carr says, echoing Rhodes’ sentiment. “It’s sad … but if you’re just persistent you can definitely get it done.”
But how do we stop harassment and stalking from happening in the first place? Some people believe that social media platforms like X, Meta, and YouTube have a moral obligation to remove inflammatory content that could be contributing to the constant online misogyny. For Twitch streamers, the ability to moderate their chat so only verified accounts can participate is helpful, but not a catch-all (some users may not want to verify their account by giving Twitch their phone number, and bad actors have historically made multiple accounts to circumvent bans).
Twitch tells Rolling Stone that it has several safety tools to better support creators on its platform, including “dedicated staff content moderators” and a “range of tools to protect our community and guard against harm.” There is also “Shield Mode” which “allows streamers to activate all their safety settings at the touch of a button” and “AutoMod” which “blocks potentially harmful messages in chat.” More than 80 percent of streamers have enabled this tool, according to Twitch.
“It’s also worth noting that we developed our off-service policy with these use cases in mind — the policy allows us to take enforcement action against Twitch accounts, even if they broke our policies outside of Twitch,” the rep says.
As far as stalkers creating multiple accounts, Twitch “continues to enforce our ban evasion policy” and has “built tools like suspicious user detection, which notifies a channel if a viewer may have been banned from their channel previously.”
But platforms like Twitch can’t stop the transition of harassment from online, typed-out threats to real-world danger. That problem is systemic, rooted so deep into modern society that it seems impossible to pluck it out.
“Content moderation helps,” Miller-Idriss offers when asked about solutions. “We also need more preventative interventions… we find the most effective thing to do with teenage boys is point out the manipulation of online influencers who are selling them content that is driven by outrage, scapegoating and the kind of manipulation about their very real grievances and problems, whether that’s loneliness or something else.”
Though this kind of behavior points to a mental health crisis amongst young men, Kwan hopes people will ask different questions in the wake of what happened to Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru. “We should not be asking, ‘Well, why didn’t they have security?’ or ‘Why didn’t they do this?’” she says. “The questions we should be asking are, ‘Why did that guy feel so bold in stalking these women?’ We should be looking at, ‘What is it in this culture that directs a man like that to do what he did to those women?’”
As Kwan said, what happened to Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru did not happen in a vacuum, and stalkers do not solely target Twitch streamers, though they are certainly more visible than most.
In February 2022, young TikTok star Ava Majury’s father shot and killed an armed teenager who broke into their home, who Majury claimed stalked her for months both on the platform and off of it. In March 2023, podcaster Zohreh Sadeghi and her husband Mohammad Naseri were killed by a man whom she had an order of protection against when he began constantly messaging her and her friends after they met on Clubhouse, a podcast chat app. And there are countless stories of women who were not in the public eye but were killed by their male stalkers — former coworkers, lovers, etc. — even after going to their local authorities for help.
Luckily Mae, Rhodes, Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru were not physically harmed by the men stalking them. But they all detailed their frustrations when trying to bring them to justice or sharing their experiences on social media platforms — how they were met with disdain and disbelief; how they had to remain persistent with authorities to be just to be heard; how concerned they were that other women facing this may not have the tools or support they did.
At the end of our conversation, Rhodes emphasizes how important mental health support is in potentially preventing this kind of behavior, and how dedicated she is to securing a future for her daughter, where harassment like this doesn’t happen.
“I want a better world for her,” Rhodes says with tears in her eyes. “I don’t want her to feel unsafe.”