Hey everyone, I’m so sorry for how long this took. I’ve had an attorney retained since July 2020 and am planning to take legal action. I have a 30-page document detailing the full timeline with evidence, but due to legalities and because I’m saving it for court, I can’t post it publicly nor address everything here (such as naming names). However, I wanted to address the most important parts.
Zack’s allegations are all completely false. When it came out and I saw how everyone threw me aside so quickly, everything I’d been repressing broke me. If my friends weren’t willing to hear out my side, why would anyone else? In my panicked, emotional state, I just gave up, told a friend to write a vague apology, and posted it.
The truth is I was never in a relationship with Zack nor was I ever interested in him. Zack is touchy with his friends, leaning on them and lying on their laps, so I never thought deeply about it. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’m very oblivious and dense to these types of things, plus I’m straight and everyone knows this, including Zack. That’s why I never even imagined he would do something to me.
Saturday of CEO Dreamland (April 15th, 2017), Zack and his friend told me that they booked their hotel incorrectly and now needed a place to stay for the rest of the weekend. His friend had already found someone to stay with, but no one would take Zack and they told me he’d be stranded otherwise. With that reason, they told me I was his last option and so I reluctantly agreed to let Zack stay in my room. We slept in our own separate beds, but I woke up to Zack molesting me. I freaked out, terrified, but my body froze up and he forcefully performed oral sex on me. I yelled at him to stop, but he refused, and he only stopped once I managed to push him off me. I was so shaken up by everything — what he just did, his betrayal of my trust in letting him stay — that I just shut down.
On Sunday, Zack attempted to touch me again without warning and I rejected him, listing that this was illegal and that I felt disgusted about yesterday. He kept pressuring me despite my pleas and when I told Zack to leave, he threatened to expose me, saying he’d tweet out that we did sexual things. I couldn’t believe it and begged him to stop this, but Zack held that over my head. He blackmailed me into a second encounter of oral sex, which he gave up midway out of annoyance at how unwilling I was. He had me under his thumb after and I had no choice but to not get on his bad side because of his threats.
At Momocon 2017, Zack tried to blackmail me again and I finally snapped as I had enough of being used. Zack felt guilty at my outburst and apologized, saying he would never tell anyone and to privately resolve this. When I found out in May 2019 that rumors were brewing, Zack reassured me that he never told anyone, that he was the one who messed up, and offered to ‘take the bullet’ should it come to that.
However, I knew Zack had to be the source because I never told anyone the full story. All versions of the story out there are from Zack and Zack alone.
I was too ashamed to tell anyone and feared that nobody would believe me. I knew something terrible had happened to me at CEO Dreamland, but I didn’t know exactly what and Zack had put the fear in me that it was my fault. I started working out because I thought this happened to me because I was weak. I was in a state of constant severe anxiety and depression that I kept hidden from everyone else. I no longer slept properly due to frequent sleep paralysis and I internalized the guilt and shame for years as it ate away at me to the point that I often considered suicide. I suffered alone and in silence, believing it to be my only choice in a situation where I felt so helpless and powerless about my future.
On August 13th, 2019, after Zack’s sponsor dropped him, Zack asked me for money. I was resistant to the idea, but he asked again later via text. His insistence, combined with how I’d just seen proof that Zack had blackmailed Ally and how he blackmailed me two years prior, meant to me that the only option I had was to comply. There were only three payments, all at Zack’s request: $2000 on August 13th, 2019, $275 on January 13th, 2020, and $350 on February 24th, 2020. I never told him to ‘do his part by staying quiet’. Zack has confessed that the ‘hush money’ story was false in a follow-up Twitlonger by Tamim.
After the allegations came out, I was so crushed at how my silence had been worthless in the end and broke down, eventually opening up to my brother and closest friends about my story. That was when I learned that what happened to me did have a word.
I was raped.
The cold, hard truth was that Zack had raped me and blackmailed me with that this entire time because I didn’t understand what happened to me. I never imagined I could be a victim of rape and never even thought of what sexual assault looked like to a male victim. I was encouraged to seek therapy and currently, I have two therapists that I have been with for months. They, as professionals, taught me much about sexual assault and reaffirmed that what happened to me was rape. They told me that freezing up and feeling powerless is a common reaction among victims and that survivors of sexual assault can go months and even years without fully understanding what happened to them. Most importantly, they told me that my rape was not my fault.
It’s already hard enough unpacking everything I’ve repressed and learning the extent of the PTSD I’d suffered since April 2017, but I have struggled immensely the past three months with this revelation. The cruelty of how I was abandoned by nearly everyone I knew, that my rapist had manipulated the narrative to destroy my life, that the community I grew up with for over a decade had banned me without a second thought and cast me out as a pedophile and predator when I am none of these things — it all feels so unjust.
The Nairo everyone saw and talked with on stream or at tournaments was honestly the real me. I have never abused my position and power to hurt others. I loved nothing more than bringing a smile to people’s faces through my streams, no matter what they were going through, and giving back to the community. I honestly felt that making other people happy was my purpose in life.
I have lost all of that: my friends, my team, my ability to compete, my Twitch stream, my future. I lost my entire life to these horrible lies and thought of ending it all, but I’m now glad I didn’t continue to go down that path. To my closest friends who stuck by me and to the few people who reached out to me, you have no idea how grateful I am to you. You are the reason I am still here today.
I cannot offer any more details but should Zack or any other party continue to escalate this, my attorney will be dealing with this legally while I continue therapy. I have realized I need to heal and that must be away from the place I once called home.
Thank you for reading.
– Nairo
