I used to say Shane was my first friend on the internet. I don’t know why I liked his, in retrospect, totally inappropriate videos but I remember at the end of each one he’d somehow spin them into a positive message. (His Father’s Day video comes to mind and the one where he imagines what life would be like if he were never born.)

Periodically I’ve dipped in and out of his content over the years but until very recently he never seemed to change. That is, until he met Jeffree and began this misguided “documentary series.”

I so wish I could say Jeffree was the one who changed him for the worse but it’s clear now Jeffree simply uncovered what was always there: Shane has been manipulating people like me from the very start.

More than ten years of my life I gave to supporting Shane; like you OP, I was there from the very start. These past few days I’ve been recalibrating my early relationship with Shane and whether or not I was simply too young to realise what was going on. And when I was older, too clouded by nostalgia and too inclined to look the other way.

I am so ashamed of what I have overlooked. Back in those days, who should have known better: Shane or us? In those days, all the evidence was there. This whole situation has proved to me more than ever that the scariest people hide in plain sight.