‘Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation.”
When YouTuber D’Angelo Wallace posted his latest video, opening with those five words, he just wanted to start a dialogue about allegations circling around one of YouTube’s biggest stars. But in less than 24 hours, his 15-minute video reignited conversations about Cody Ko — a longtime YouTuber who has been accused of having sex with a 17-year-old when he was 25 — and what the YouTube community owes each other.
While there aren’t many solid details in the debate around Ko, here’s what we know: At a live podcast recording in May, content creator Tana Mongeau revealed during a “hot seat” segment that she and Ko slept together when she was a minor. “I was literally 17,” she said. (Representatives for Ko did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. Representatives for Mongeau declined to comment.)
While the statement was made in a comedic setting, it wasn’t the first time Mongeau, now 26, had been linked to Ko. Rumors of the two being romantically involved have swirled since Mongeau went from a YouTube fan to an outspoken, controversial force in the industry (her podcast is called Canceled). However Ko — who married YouTuber Kelsey Kreppel last year and recently became a father — has yet to make a public statement about Mongeau’s claims. Many on the internet, however, have taken to victim-blaming Mongeau or straight-out calling her a liar, saying she made it up for attention. So Wallace decided to take Ko — and his community — to task.
“The main point I wanted to make in my video is that regardless of the fact that we can’t prove or disprove someone’s allegation, there was still a lot of highly inappropriate misogyny rampant,” Wallace tells Rolling Stone. “Any space where this was being discussed was full of victim blaming and all manner of stuff that doesn’t have a place in the commentary community.”
Commentary YouTube, a popular subgenre of creators that cover drama, rumors, and allegations, has grown in popularity in the last four years, turning creators like Wallace into virtual pundits on digital culture news. But Wallace noted that Ko, who has over 6 million subscribers on YouTube, was rarely talked about, and Mongeau was often called “unreliable” or a “liar” by steadfast Ko fans. Wallace went through the few public details, and included a podcast clip from YouTuber Gabbie Hanna, which seemed to corroborate Mongeau’s claims that Ko knew she was 17 when they were involved. “One time, I told a guy — I saw him making out with a girl at a party who was underage — and I pulled him aside and I was like, ‘Hey man, you probably don’t know — I know she, like, looks a little older — she’s underage. Watch it.’” Hanna says in the clip, not naming Ko or Mongeau directly.
While Mongeau has made it clear that she does not consider her alleged sexual experience with Ko to have been traumatic, she’s said in later podcast appearances that the harassment she’s received for speaking about it has been difficult. “If I had a 17-year-old daughter or little sister [in the same situation] I would kill,” Mongeau said on Trisha Paytas’ podcast Just Trish. “The thing that was actually really heartbreaking to me, and kind of crazy to me, is after it started going viral, seeing so many people not believing me. Being like, ‘It’s Tana, so who cares.’ And then I started feeling bad for so many other girls who maybe look up to me and want to speak their truth and see the way that people just don’t believe people.”
In his video, Wallace is clear that he is not accusing Ko of a crime, but rather wants to call out him for not making a statement. “You have an obligation to, at the very least, call out the misogyny, the victim-blaming, and all manner of cognitive dissonance that’s coming from your audience in the name of defending you against allegations that you’re too cowardly to address,” Wallace says in his video. He also notes that while Instagram comments had largely become focused on the allegations, those on YouTube didn’t mention it — leading Wallace to believe that someone behind the account was taking them down. (Ko did not respond to a request for comment.) But following Wallace’s video, the comments have began to appear.
“It should have taken no additional input for Tana’s story to be taken seriously,” he says. “However, men don’t listen to women in these scenarios, they listen to other men. So even though that is wrong, I did see how I could use that to make this more immediate by directly calling out another man.”
Since Wallace’s video, Reddit moderators on the official r/codyko have allowed members to post comments and statements about Mongeau’s allegations against Ko. On X (formerly Twitter) Ko was a trending topic for more than two days. And less than 72 hours after he posted his video, it was viewed over 2 million times — with almost a dozen of the biggest names from Commentary YouTube posting videos echoing Wallace’s statements.
Wallace says he’s glad that more people are discussing the allegations against Ko, and beginning to publicly call out those shaming Mongeau. But he says the main reason he wanted to speak up was for victims who might be getting the wrong idea from the discourse
“Online, the main thing I was seeing was people being very open and honest about similar experiences they’ve had where they were dog piled and disbelieved and discredited, oftentimes because there was a massive social power imbalance between them and the person they were talking about,” Wallace says. “That is the source of a lot of frustration. And I [hope] that people who saw that also feel represented when they see these allegations being taken seriously and not discredited.”
