The Reality of The Imperfect Victim
In June 2024, on a live tour of her podcast “Cancelled” with co-host Brooke Schofield, YouTuber Tana Mongeau answered a question from an audience member about her past sexual partners, confirming rumors that she’d hooked up with fellow YouTuber Cody Ko when he was 25 and she was “literally 17,” unaware of the reach these allegations would have.
As a teenage girl filming storytimes in her bedroom in the clickbait era, Mongeau amassed a large following and a lifetime of internet notoriety from videos with titles like “I GOT ARRESTED AND BANNED FROM LONDON: STORYTIME” and “JAKE CAUGHT ME CHEATING ON HIM (our biggest fight ever)”, and went from simply being a fan of YouTubers like Ko to becoming a key figure in internet history. Known for her embellishments and exaggerations, the public perception of Tana has remained largely negative, informed by the disaster of TanaCon, her past relationships and fake marriage to Jake Paul, her use of the N-Word (which she has since apologized for), and her seemingly constant involvement in internet beef.
On the contrary, Cody Ko, whose career as a content creator from Vine and then YouTube has been relatively quiet, has come to have the reputation of a “good guy,” known for his friendship with business partner and podcast co-host Noel Miller, his role in the commentary YouTube community, and marriage to Kelsey Kreppel, whom he shares a child with. Because of his image of a family man and an “ally”––the opposite of Tana––many ignored what she said and downplayed the seriousness of Tana’s allegations, which, as YouTuber D’Angelo Wallace has pointed out, constitute statutory rape in California, where the age of consent is 18.
In comment sections on TikTok where clips from the “Cancelled” live show circulated, users used Tana’s well-documented past against her, saying things like “Yes the age is gross. But let’s not act like Tana is completely innocent. She used to be so gross.” and “It’s Tana. This is a lie.” One comment summarized the dismissal of Tana’s experience writing that “this was typical for [Tana] … Cody should not be the only one to blame … she encouraged it and now is talking about him on every podcast. it’s not really fair.”
According to the internet, because Tana’s image wasn’t pristine or faultless, because her past held publicized relationships and video titles full of hyperbole, she couldn’t possibly be the victim in this situation. While on a podcast, Tana commented on the overwhelming dismissal of her account: “After it started going viral, seeing so many people not believing me, being like, ‘It’s Tana, so who cares’ … 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 her Substack titled essay titled “Who’s Afraid of Amber Heard?” writer Rayne Fisher-Quann calls the bluff on the perceived level of progress presented by the #MeToo movement and “the idea that the dominant culture has moved forward enough for the systemic distrust of women to be anything other than a default setting … in reality, everyone still thinks women are lying all the time, and they never stopped for a second.”
Even with corroborated accounts from YouTubers like Gabbie Hanna, timelines that add up, DMs between Cody Ko and Tana when she was an underage fan, for many on the internet there is still doubt about Tana’s credibility. As more creators begin to address the allegations, as Cody Ko steps down from “day-to-day operations” at his company TMG Studios, with podcasts under his production like Emergency Intercom going independent, Cody stays silent and people still don’t want to believe.
If we were to imagine a world where Tana was “the perfect victim,” where she had never offended anyone with derogatory language or been caught in the whirlpool of life on the internet where your past lives forever in easily accessible .mov files, maybe the response would’ve been different. Maybe Cody Ko’s subreddit moderators wouldn’t have deleted any mention of Tana, and faceless users wouldn’t have taken up arms to defend his honor.
But the perfect victim will never exist. As Rayne Fisher-Quann says, “once you start pushing the idea that a woman has to be perfect in order to be believed, you head down a road that ends with the systemic exorcism of any woman too human to be a good victim.” Tana’s misdeeds will always circulate around the internet, as they are now; her highly publicized wrongdoings, like TanaCon or the iDubbz video where she says the n-word, aren’t forgotten and they shouldn’t be. But recognizing her faults doesn’t disqualify her from being a victim, and doesn’t invalidate the girl she was when she was only 17.
— Intern Koreb