On July 23, Ava Kris Tyson stepped down from her role working with MrBeast, the mega-popular YouTube creator who has hundreds of millions of followers and billions of views. This came after X messages leaked showing LavaGS, a former moderator on Tyson’s Discord channel, interacting with Tyson when Tyson was 20 and Lava was 13. The inappropriate nature of the conversations, though mostly juvenile, shocked the MrBeast community, especially in the wake of larger conversations around how creators and their young stars should interact, and many on social media claimed this was evidence of “grooming.” Lava quickly came out to defend Tyson, saying they were just “edgy jokes,” maintaining that nothing untoward ever happened between the two.
However, Lava’s story was just the beginning, and the day after Tyson announced she was stepping away, another former Discord moderator who worked on Tyson’s server when they were a teenager came forward. In a video on X, Nathan Weyman, who started working on Tyson’s Discord when he was 15, said that Tyson “used me, manipulated me, and did very inappropriate things with me.”
Weyman, with the help of former moderators, leaked over half a million messages from Tyson’s Discord spanning 2017 to 2021. A few days after posting the messages to GitHub, they were removed, spawning conspiracy theories that someone was trying to silence them. (In a statement to Rolling Stone, a GitHub spokesperson said they were removed because it “violated our terms for additional products and features.”) According to those logs, Tyson shared links to a website with drawn pornography, talked about her genitals, and asked to “purge” controversial chats. “It’s been a long time coming, and I saw other people finally speaking out,” Weyman tells Rolling Stone. After the new logs leaked, Lava seemed to rethink some of their interactions, too. “The conversations were weird, but nothing inappropriate ever happened to me,” Lava said.
The following day, on July 27, a woman named Jess, who was Tyson’s executive assistant from 2023 to 2024, posted an over 60-part thread on X sharing her detailed experience with Tyson, whom she claims used the position within MrBeast to entice her with employment, leading to her being “sexually assaulted” while working.
With over 55 billion views on the MrBeast channel, the brand has become a global empire with its line of chocolate, fast food, and action figures — in most of his videos he has a recurring cast of friends including Tyson. Tyson is a trans woman who announced their transition in July 2023 years after she started appearing in MrBeast videos, making her one of the most visible trans people online. This made her a target for anti-trans rhetoric and initially, Donaldson defended her, writing on X in April 2023 that Ava “isn’t my ‘nightmare’ he’s my fucken friend.” But after the conversations with the first teenage Discord moderator came to light last month, Donaldson tweeted that he took “immediate action to remove Ava from the company, my channel, and any association with MrBeast.”
“The conversations were weird, but nothing inappropriate ever happened to me,” one former moderator says.
Rolling Stone spoke with Weyman and Jess, as well as a half dozen individuals to corroborate their stories, which seem to show Tyson using her position of power at MrBeast for free labor, friendship, and sexual encounters. “I do believe part of the reason Ava was so able to easily manipulate me was due to the overall branding of the Beast channel appearing extremely charitable,” Jess says. “I thought if I was loyal to Ava and MrBeast, then I would be greatly rewarded.”
Rolling Stone contacted Tyson over Instagram, X, email, and phone. Tyson and the reporter spoke for about two minutes over the phone before she said she would call him back later. The reporter’s number was blocked, and she did not reply to an email with a detailed list of questions and allegations.
IN 2015, WHEN WEYMAN WAS 13, he first started watching the MrBeast channel. Two years later, Tyson put out a call on X (then Twitter) asking for help setting up a server for the video game Garry’s Mod, to celebrate MrBeast hitting 10 million subscribers. Weyman enthusiastically reached out to Tyson, then 21, who moved their conversation over to her private Discord server. Weyman says he was paid $100 to build the game’s server.
Called “Dank Memes,” the private Discord server at that point only had “about 20 people,” Weyman recalls, including Donaldson. “I’m not sure why [Tyson] decided to invite me, but part of me feels like [she] was kind of trying to shock me with all the MrBeast members here and no one else is,” Weyman says. “Looking back, [she] was kind of trying to woo me with like, ‘Look, this is everyone you look up to.’”
In the leaked Discord messages from when the server was still private in 2017, Tyson wrote that she was the “dictator” of the server and “I can do what I want.” At that point, the server was full of those who knew the Beast crew in the real world as well as fans surprised at the intimacy the space offered them. At one point, Donaldson comes into chat to post “No /i know his penis size/ and it’s huge,” referring to Tyson.
A spokesperson for Donaldson confirmed the legitimacy of Donaldson’s message. “When Jimmy was a teenager he acted like many kids and used inappropriate language while trying to be funny,” they wrote in a statement. “Over the years he has repeatedly apologized and has learned that increasing influence comes with increased responsibility to be more aware and more sensitive to the power of language. After making some bad jokes and other mistakes when he was younger, as an adult he has focused on engaging with the MrBeast community to work together on making a positive impact around the world.”
Nathan, Lava, and other members of the Discord would also sometimes refer to Tyson as “dad” or “daddy” in the chat logs. Tyson would also compare her wife to Belle Delphine, who at the time was posting softcore pornography online, asking members of the Discord if they “had managed to get [her] bath water” since she had missed out. “You’d see edgy jokes and porn jokes all the time,” Atlas, another former teenage moderator, tells Rolling Stone. “And at the time, it didn’t bother me. Of course, I thought it was funny. When you’re 16 and 17, everybody thinks porn jokes are funny.”
Weyman and Lava claim that things didn’t seem too unusual for online spaces they hung out in, but some interactions pushed that boundary over the line. They would often have hourslong Discord calls with Tyson, playing video games together, or just chatting with their cameras on. Both tell Rolling Stone that Tyson would often “smoke weed” on camera, talk about her marital issues, or complain about working on MrBeast videos. Weyman recalls conversations about “hentai,” or drawn pornography, while Lava thinks it is “possible” but doesn’t remember any specifics, though the conversations were over voice chat, so the messages can’t be seen in the logs.
“At the time, I was so starstruck,” Weyman says. “It felt so unreal to me that I was even in that Discord, let alone having these conversations, I would brag to all my friends about it.”
“Looking back right now, I’m about the age [she] was then, and I can’t imagine myself spending hours on Discord talking to a 15-year-old, let alone multiple, about my problems,” Weyman says.
The server would go public in 2018, turning into Tyson’s main Discord for her to interact with fans. In the leaked logs, moderators, including Lava and Weyman, discussed why it would be best to leave an already existing NSFW section age-gated since the server’s lowest age was 13. Tyson shrugged off their concerns with “tbf the internet is full of porn” and “what am I a parent.” (Tyson did become a parent in 2020.) There did end up being an NSFW channel in Discord that Weyman says “went back and forth between being locked to specific roles [like moderators] and then being open,” and anytime it was open to moderators, “there were minors who had those roles.”
“You’d see porn jokes all the time,” says another former teenage moderator. “Of course, I thought it was funny. When you’re 16 and 17, everybody thinks porn jokes are funny.”
From 2018 to 2020, Weyman says, he was working on the server as a “full-time job” where he spent “on average eight hours a day,” and that he was never paid for it. He couldn’t sleep, waking “up at two in the morning to 100 messages from 10 different people telling me that someone needs to be banned, demoted, or I needed to call [Tyson].” The schedule and stress were impacting Weyman’s school and personal life making him “miserable,” he says.
But Weyman kept working on the server because his “dream for the longest time was to be a content creator,” and he believed Tyson was the only person who could make that dream come true. “I thought I was just going to be working for [Tyson],” Weyman says. “I thought that I had done so much for [her] that I would wind up being employed by [her] in some regard or get a job with MrBeast.”
A job never materialized, so one day in 2020 Weyman just left the server. Tyson sent him an invite back, thinking it was an accident, but by that point, the stars in his eyes had waned. “The whole situation had made me incredibly delusional,” Weyman says. “I had gone all in and that wasn’t too smart of me.” In April 2021, the whole server was deleted.
JESS KNEW VERY LITTLE ABOUT MrBeast, except that he was massively popular, before Tyson messaged her in November 2022 on X to ask about her transition. Jess had been posting “transition timelines,” photos of herself pre- and post-transition, Jess says. Though most of Tyson’s side of the conversation was lost after she deleted her first X account, in messages seen by Rolling Stone, the pair discussed Jess’ transition and how Tyson wanted her advice. Jess tells Rolling Stone that the conversations felt like a “rush” because she “was talking to someone so influential and so famous.” (MrBeast declined to comment on Jess’ claims.)
“I was a trans girl who had just come out of the closet publicly,” Jess says. “To be reached out to by a celebrity that was in the closet and for them to also tell me that they were transitioning, that created an emotional connection between us, which made it hard to focus on the power dynamic … how famous she was directly influenced how much I liked her.”
As the chats progressed, Jess saw that this could be an opportunity to join the MrBeast team or just appear alongside one of the channel’s subscribers in a video. On Nov. 19, 2022, Jess asked if MrBeast “was hiring for any type of work” and Tyson said, “I will definitely keep you in mind.”
“How famous she was directly influenced how much I liked her,” says Jess, who worked for Tyson from 2023 to 2024.
By February 2023, according to Jess, the pair would chat privately on Discord, where Tyson would ask her to masturbate on video calls. “I always felt like I had to say yes if I wanted to be in a video or get a job,” Jess says. She recalls that on video calls, the pair would also flirt, play video games, mutually masturbate, send memes, and talk about their experiences transitioning.
In April 2023, Jess says, Tyson flew her first class to Tyson’s home in North Carolina to stay at her place. At one point while she was there, she claims, Tyson started “taking her clothes off and asking for oral sex.” Over the next week, “Ava engaged me sexually and ended up receiving oral pleasure several times,” she wrote in her thread on X. “I was too scared to directly ask for anything in return, and she took advantage of that.”
After leaving Tyson’s house, the pair remained in contact. That June, Tyson, who had been separated from her wife for almost a year, offered her a position as an executive assistant for Tyson at MrBeast and said she could live with her. On July 15, 2023, Jess officially got the title of executive assistant, according to an employment contract reviewed by Rolling Stone. During her employment, “Ava continued to receive oral sex from me multiple times and I started to feel like I was being coerced,” Jess wrote in the thread.
Upon starting a working relationship, Jess says that she was “really trying to avoid any physical engagement because of how one-sided everything was feeling.” Though they had not “set any boundaries or had any serious discussions” about continuing a sexual relationship, Jess felt it was “implied” that “working as her employee, there would be a different type of relationship dynamic.” Yet she says that while working and living together the pair would “engage in [acts] such as cuddling, groping, hand holding, and sleeping in the same bed.”
On July 29, 2023, Jess went back home for a week and a half, and when she returned, she says, “vibes were really different” — Tyson was “more flirty than usual.” While watching YouTube on the couch, Jess “started to notice she was starting to touch herself a little bit with her pants on. After that, she pulled her pants down and started touching herself in front of me.”
Jess “panicked,” she says, feeling that “despite really, really not wanting to do it, I was also thinking if I don’t join her or do something here, then that’s going to make our relationship incredibly strained and awkward, and it felt like I was going to be risking my job if, if I just did nothing or if I walked away. So I ended up going down on her for what felt like the safety of my job and my home that I had just started.
“It took me a long time to even admit to myself that what happened to me was sexual assault,” Jess says. “But just looking at it in that way, I feel like if I say I’m not a victim of sexual assault, then I feel like I’m lying.”
On Aug. 2, 2023, Jess sent Tyson a message on Telegram, which was posted in the thread and seen by Rolling Stone, where she shared that she “knows we’ve hooked up in the past before I started working for you, but now I feel pressured and it just makes me uncomfortable.” Tyson responded the next day with, “I don’t want to do anything sexual with each other. That’s a dynamic that can be misconstrued and is unethical for me.” Tyson added, “I guess I should’ve asked you to stop but it just kind of happened so I just let it.” Their final sexual encounter would be in December, Jess says.
One source who worked with both Tyson and Jess in this period, who asked not to be named out of fear of online harassment, says that both Tyson and Jess approached them separately with concerns. “There were ethical questions that both Jess and Ava had brought up,” they say. “They were both worried, Ava was a lot more worried about the implication of it rather than the act of it.”
Things began to crumble in April 2024, when the pair could not settle on what they wanted their relationship to be. Tyson was “becoming more distant,” Jess says, “which led to a lot of fights between us, where it was mostly just me trying to stand up for myself and saying that this is wrong.” In June, Jess says, she hit her “breaking point and just packed up and left on a few day’s notice.”
“It’s hard to be around her because one time she pulled down her pants in front of me and just expected me to go down on her out of nowhere,” Jess told her friend.
From May to July, Jess shared the details of her living situation and how she was planning to go public with her story, with one friend who asked to remain anonymous for fear of online harassment. “She literally refuses to see herself as the bad guy in any given situation and if I ever bring anything up, I get gaslit about everything she’s ever done for me and she brings up money and stuff and it just sucks,” Jess sent in a text message on April 22, 2024, seen by Rolling Stone. Cass Whichelo, a friend who met Jess when they both worked in the cannabis industry, tells Rolling Stone that Jess shared over text that though their relationship had started “consensually” it “came to a point where Ava expected sexual favors of her, without any prior conversation.”
“It’s hard to be around her because one time she pulled down her pants in front of me and just expected me to go down on her out of nowhere,” Jess wrote to Whichelo in May in a text message seen by Rolling Stone.
In June, Jess says, she and Tyson spoke about switching her to a hybrid work-from-home position. After Jess left, Tyson informed Jess in messages seen by Rolling Stone that she would “look into getting an executive assistant who can be here with me and [focus] solely on improving my mental health, creating channels to make getting back into work easier.”
“As soon as I moved out, I was told that I was getting replaced and it was all the confirmation I could ever need that what happened to me was just me getting taken advantage of,” Jess says. “The feelings that I thought she had for me weren’t really genuine.”
On July 10, Jess reached out to MrBeast HR to discuss “some stuff that happened between Ava and I,” according to emails seen by Rolling Stone. On July 12, Jess sent over some of the messages between her and Tyson to the law firm McGuireWoods LLP. On July 23, Jess reached out to the law firm asking for an update, to which they responded in an email seen by Rolling Stone, “Our review is ongoing.” (McGuireWoods did not respond to a request for comment).
“I kind of felt the need to tell my story to not only bring some clarity to the situation with Ava,” she says. “But also to bring attention to how big of a problem it is that online celebrities can take advantage of people who aren’t in as advantageous of a position as them.”
