What Happened to Sam Pepper?

Internet fame is not for everybody. Some people do not possess the personality and the characteristics required to conduct themselves in a responsible and admirable way online. Sam Pepper was an example of this. Beginning life on reality TV, he eventually turned to become a YouTuber, but his content and the way he conducted himself meant that it was only inevitable that he crashed and burned. But where is he now?

The Beginning of Sam’s Problems

For a former graffiti and street artist, Sam Pepper began life in the public eye in a very different way to YouTube. He was a contestant on the U.K.’s edition of Big Brother. He didn’t win by any means, but did become famous among the housemates for pranking people. So when he came out of the Big Brother house, and got back into the world, he decided to go into YouTube, and that’s when things started to go wrong.

Here’s the thing. What Sam thought was entertaining to himself and a select handful of others did not prove as popular online. His videos were prank videos. Now, normally this wouldn’t be an issue. However, it was the nature of his pranks which attracted a lot of criticism and controversy.

Down a Darker Path

The main problem that people took with videos created by Sam was that he frequently pushed and tested the boundaries of physical intimacy and contact. He would inappropriately touch people in public, for pranks, and at some point even attempted to see who he could kiss without any real prior connection to his “victims”.

It was in late 2014 when Sam released a video of himself inappropriately touching a woman’s rear end, and this generated such controversy and such a backlash among his followers and Internet at large that he was forced to come clean and admit that all of his videos was staged. Everyone that he interacted with and every person that was a “victim“ of his pranks were all paid actors. Obviously, this was quite damaging to his credibility.

However, when some very real sexual harassment lawsuit began to emerge against Sam by women who he had interacted with outside of his videos, this sparked the beginning of his downward spiral. His social media presence was pretty much destroyed in the fallout, and every time he did attempt to come back, he didn’t generate anywhere near as many views, and his channel was demonetized by YouTube itself. However, he will assert to this day that he doesn’t need the income, and is instead living his life peacefully.

In conclusion, Sam Pepper was an example of a YouTuber who lost his good standing in an attempt to generate views. Not only did his work frequently push boundaries of socially acceptable interactions, once it came out that he had faked everything, he had no credibility left. There was even a petition with 200,000 names to get his channel shutdown completely. It would seem that not everybody is suited to a life in the limelight. For Sam, it was probably a combination of age, immaturity and a lack of knowledge of consequences that ultimately led to the end of his career.