The Illuminaughtii “Drama”: an MLM Critic’s History of Abuse and Censorship

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I regret to inform you that another creator I thought I liked has revealed themselves to be an enormous, embarrassing hypocrite. Why does this keep happening lately? I feel like I went a good 10 years not being seriously disappointed in anyone and then late last year everyone decided to reveal themselves to be giant assholes, as if there was a Good Person Cosplay subscription service that suddenly went under. Or maybe I’ve just been paying attention more. OR MAYBE there was a magical personality-shifting amulet that was chucked into a volcano, leaving a handful of people exposed as absolute fuckheads.

ALLEGEDLY! Allegedly! Please don’t sue me, Blair Zon, aka Iilluminautii!

Alright, I’m pretty sure we share a similar audience but just in case you don’t know who Illuminaughtii is, she has an absolutely enormous channel where she posts hundreds of video essays, most of which critically examine pyramid schemes and other companies that engage in immoral or otherwise shady practices. I was one of her 1.7 million subscribers, though she put out SO MUCH CONTENT there’s no way I’ve seen even 1% of her output. I guess she has an entire team of writers and editors working for her which is the exact opposite of me but I was always honestly inspired by how much work she got done. And it all seemed pretty well-researched, so from my perspective she was just a really successful person exposing scams, which is awesome.

But a few months ago, I noticed a really weird Tweet from Blair: she accused another YouTuber known as LegalEagle of plagiarizing her channel’s video editing style. LegalEagle has even more subs than Blair, and the editing style she called out has been used by a million other editors over many years. It was SO weird that I clicked through to see what I was missing, and clearly I wasn’t the only one baffled. Fellow YouTuber HBomberGuy asked for clarification before pointing out that Blair herself pulled directly from Brian Deer’s documentary exposing an anti-vaxxer.

Yikes! As for LegalEagle, they very nicely explained to her that that “style” had been used by them for several years before her channel and that it’s not a big deal. She subsequently deleted her accusation without an explanation or apology. I found the whole thing so cringey and embarrassing that I unsubscribed from her because honestly, an apparent plagiarist falsely accusing someone of plagiarism and not even apologizing is just not a person I care to support or listen to.

End of story, right? That’s all that happened, and then for some reason two months later I decided to make a whole video about it, right???? If only. Now, a lot of what I’m about to say is going to sound like “drama,” like this is just some losers fighting each other and why should we care? But I assure you, it’s something you should care about if you have ever supported Illuminaughtii or if you care about powerful abusers or freedom of speech.

Three days later, former collaborators of Blair’s began opening up about their own experience with her, and holy shit were the accusations bad. “Sad Milk” was a channel started by a group of creators including Illluminaughti, One Topic, The Click, Oz Media, and Wonderstruck. Those latter four all posted separate Twitter threads that backed up one another’s accounts, alleging that Blair was “Lashing out at friends and fans, (showing) paranoia and generally poor anger management,” “spreading lies” and vague subtweets or shady Reddit posts, deleting criticism, blocking former collaborators, and “starting fights, but…almost never publicly apologiz(ing) if proven wrong.” Oz went on to say “She will instead hide behind a private apology probably, and from my perspective, act as though this makes everything better. Afterall, she would express to me that admitting error would only make her look stupid and weak.”

Which is funny, because four days later Blair revealed that she had, in fact, sent LegalEagle a private apology presumably thinking that made it all better, which it totally would if she had made a private accusation, but whatever. As for her response to the accusations from her former collaborators, Blair decided to make an entire video about it, and it popped up on my YouTube feed and I decided to watch it because surely she would either apologize or show that she was being unfairly maligned, right? Right???

Friends, I will link to the video out of fairness, but I actually will urge you to not watch it, because it’s honestly disgusting. Like, I hate that I had to give her several additional views to make sure I had my facts straight in order to make this video.

The video wasn’t all toooo bad: she addressed the allegations of her plagiarizing Brian Deer by explaining that she was actually quoting Deer in the video, but she apologized for failing to make that obvious but basically said she’s gotten better at that over the years. Which, okay! Fine. She then moves on to the allegations from her former collaborators. She blames her poor behavior on being stressed out because she was the one doing all of the hard work on their channel, which would have been bad enough but she goes on to accuse them all of being terrible in various ways, like how The Click allowed child groomers on his Discord? (The Click responded showing that he was made aware of a pedo on his discord who had been banned by his moderators while he was asleep because it was literally the middle of the night. He also showed convincing evidence that Blair created sock puppet accounts called “Doobieschmirtz” to doxx and insult the former Sad Milk members on Reddit and elsewhere).

But the worst was her response to Wonderstruck, which is why I urge you to not watch her video. She claimed she helped give him a job, a home, and a car but that he failed to meet a deadline and was let go. (In Wonderstruck’s response, he shows receipts that indicate he was fired before his deadline, and also reveals that Blair was going to be his landlord to him and the other Sad Milk collaborators like some kind of weird Company Town AND that she chose a brand new luxury car for him that she would own the title to for two years, meaning she controlled every aspect of his life.)

But then for some reason, Blair reveals that Wonder had mental health problems, and shows a message he sent her revealing that her abuse of him treating him as an “emotional punching bag” led to him trying to commit suicide. I honestly would not even talk about this here with his name involved had her video not already racked up more than a million views and had Wonder not made his honestly heartbreaking video about this entire thing.

Look, I’ve (unfortunately) dealt with a number of loved ones who have made similar threats. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to deal with it, though my personal practice is to treat every threat as a real one and to inform authorities immediately, as Blair apparently did even though it didn’t appear (to me) to be a threat, but a description of an attempt that had already passed as Wonder says his therapist called him and he didn’t go through with it. But one way to not deal with a person’s description of struggling with suicide is to randomly show it to a million people on YouTube as a response to that person confirming someone else’s accusations of abusive behavior. To make matters worse, she suggests that Wonder brought up the idea of him accessing a gun as a threat towards HER, and THAT is why she called in the wellness check.

I’m leaving out a lot of details because there is A LOT. If you want to get into the nitty gritty, please check out the linked videos from both Click and Wonder. At least, while they’re still available because all of this brings me to the final cherry on top: in response to Wonder’s thorough debunking, Blair apparently issued him a cease and desist.

And that’s the point where I finally decided I wanted to make this video, because you know my stance on this: a powerful person with millions of subscribers has absolutely no need to use legal threats to silence someone with 100,000 subscribers, unless that smaller channel is just out there broadcasting obvious libelous bullshit with zero evidence. And the only way that’s happening is if Wonder, along with Click and Oz and One Topic, are photoshopping fake Discord screenshots, fake bank statements, fake airline tickets, fake texts, and fake photos in a complicated conspiracy to bring down Illuminaughtii. If that’s the case then I will happily make another very public video apologizing, but until then Occam’s razor suggests that Illuminaughtii, instead of offering evidence to rebut her critics, is using legal threats to censor a person who honestly believes that she was manipulative and abusive towards them. And so far it does seem to be a single person she’s targeting: Wonderstruck, the person who has been most open about their mental health issues stemming in part from his relationship with Illuminaughtii. Why? I don’t know, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that Wonderstruck signed a non-disclosure agreement to work with Blair. You can’t win a libel case against someone who says something true but mean, but maybe you CAN win a lawsuit against someone who signed a document saying you can sue them if they say something true but mean about you.

The fact that she has built her entire career on “exposing” people who are secretly abusive scammers just makes this entire thing too hypocritical to ignore.

And okay, holy crap, friends, but right before I recorded this video, YouTube recommended I watch this video from a creator called “SWOOP.” It’s VERY long but I am so glad I listened to it on 2x speed while I got ready this morning because she reveals new (to me) information about Illuminaughtii at around the 1 hour 10 minute and 40 minute marks, which I’ll try to sum up here: Blaire’s ex-boyfriend has ALSO made a video reporting that he witnessed Blaire doing all the same behaviors over the course of their relationship to him and others: anger issues, lawsuit threats, petty fights, bullying. Only he didn’t post that video after seeing all these other reports – he posted it four years ago. The other development I had missed is that Blair was once part of an anti-SJW “humor” channel, but at some point she started a big fight that led to her deleting all of the videos she made in that channel so that hardly any footage of it exists today (via FPS Diesel).

Honestly, after watching that video I actually disliked Blair even more. She sounds like an absolute monster.

If you agree, I urge you to unsubscribe from Illuminaughtii and go check out Wonder’s GoFundMe. Legal battles are incredibly expensive, and Wonder has stated that any excess money raised will be donated to the Trevor Project, an excellent charity that seeks to prevent suicide and self-harm amongst LGBTQIA youth.

Also, check out all those Sad Milk guys’ channels! One good result of all of this is that I found some really wholesome creators to follow. All the links are, as always, in the transcript on my Patreon linked below.