I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.
Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill.
“It was a factory town,” Greg said. “I was destined to be at one. But in my lifetime, all but one of the factories closed. My father lost his longtime job making car frames and hot-water heaters when the plant moved to Mexico.” Like many men of his generation, Greg was left adrift, with few of the structures that guided his parents and grandparents.
From there, his life became more difficult. At 17, he was working at Taco Bell when he felt his heart racing. He collapsed, unconscious. He was diagnosed with atrial flutter. After that came multiple open-heart surgeries, which left him with scars and, at 18, six figures of medical debt; his marriage fell apart suddenly when he was 39, leaving him a single father with full custody of two children under 2. But he managed to find free babysitting through a local church, which allowed him to earn money mowing lawns.
And then, one night in 2010, he had his Damascus moment.
“I was watching some random YouTube video,” he said. “This guy was cycling through Australia. He pulled over and pointed at a koala or something, and then he made a speech. He talked about all the negatives in his life.”
He had struggled, he told the camera, and the viewers beyond it. He had lived on the streets and been in jail.
“But then he said: ‘Whatever, I’m out here having a great day, riding my bike and making a YouTube video. You can make a YouTube video! You’ve got a story. Share it! Don’t hold yourselves back! Make a YouTube video and change your life!’” Greg paused. “It was very inspiring, dude. He hit me hard.”
Greg began cautiously. His first video was just him reading out loud a newspaper article about a Florida woman who had accidentally burned down America’s fifth‑oldest tree by smoking meth underneath it. After he read it, he said to the camera, “Isn’t that crazy?”
“The video got 10 or 12 views,” Greg told me, “and a comment: ‘You look like you’ve been smoking meth.’”
It was in reference to Greg’s teeth. They overlapped significantly. “They were the wildest‑looking teeth,” Greg said. “We didn’t get dental work done when we were kids because we didn’t have any money.” But the comment motivated Greg. “I decided to get my teeth fixed. I signed up for adult braces. I had to get a $6,000 line of credit. After that I started making videos about my adult‑braces journey. I learned about tags — ‘adult braces,’ ‘adult braces cost’ — and the next thing I knew, maybe 50 people a week who were looking for adult braces found me. I had regulars. They’d be saying, ‘I’m on Week 3’ and ‘We’re so proud of you.’”
Soon, Greg’s regular viewers looked past his teeth to the lawn mowers behind him. “People started to comment, ‘Why do you have four lawn mowers?’ I’d reply, ‘I do lawn care.’ They were like: ‘Dude, you do lawn care? Do a lawn care vlog!’ I was like, ‘Dude, nobody wants to see a lawn care vlog!’ But they were hounding me. ‘Nobody’s vlogging about lawn care! Do a lawn care vlog!’ So I went ahead and made a ‘Day in the Life of a Lawn Care Provider.’”
Which was how Greg Chism became the world’s first YouTube lawn care influencer.
All over the world, men and women were taking similar leaps. As the old institutions no longer offered structure, community, purpose, a feeling of usefulness and oftentimes an income, vast numbers of people like him were taking their chances as influencers. According to research by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, by 2022 there were more than seven million prime-age American men who weren’t only unemployed, they weren’t even looking for jobs. They had just bowed out. But some of these men, whose energy had no home, were turning to YouTube. It was gaining a reputation as a wide-open country where a man could thrive through grit and perseverance as an influencer — a place for niche creators to share what they had to share, and where an ever-growing audience could find them, and in so doing subtly shape their output.
In 2013, Greg created a channel, Geek to Freak Lawn Care, and filmed himself performing good Samaritan lawn work. If he saw a lawn in need, he would jump out of his truck and blow away the dead leaves or trim the edges and then vanish like the Zorro of lawn care chores. In other videos, he created a kind of lawn care ASMR, meditatively mowing back and forth, up and down, for hours at a time.
“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.
Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”
But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”
In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. All over YouTube, there were videos of cartoon characters, or sometimes real people dressed like Spider‑Man or Elsa from “Frozen,” enacting burying people alive, or smashing babies’ heads open, or dying by suicide, or burning down houses with people inside, or eating feces, or drinking urine or bleach, or setting a pregnant Elsa on fire, or drowning her in a swimming pool, or forcing her into sex slavery at a strip club. There were decapitations, hypodermic needles, impregnations, a dismembered Minnie Mouse, car crashes, abortions, eye surgeries, maggots, childbirth, fellatio, acid attacks and spiders crawling out of people’s eye sockets. And these videos were being viewed millions of times.
As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”
You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”
But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”
That man’s name was Greg Chism.
In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.
“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”
Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.
But then he tried something different.
“OK.” Greg hesitated. “My sister bought the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. So I thought, I’ll film them opening it. They loved it. They were playing in the box. They had the box on their heads, running around the house. It was funny.”
Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.
But it wasn’t only that. Victoria and Annabelle, then 6 and 4, were adorable on camera, bright‑eyed, open and infectiously happy. Thereafter, whenever Greg bought his daughters gifts, he would film them opening them and running around with the boxes on their heads. But the magic was missing, and the views were low.
Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.
“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”
YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”
Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.
“Perfect,” the teacher said.
The stakes were high for this experiment. For men like Greg, with very few opportunities elsewhere, real money could be made by online influencing. According to data published by Goldman Sachs, only 4 percent of influencers make more than $100,000 a year, but with his invitation to YouTube school, Greg was being given a chance to join that high‑earning elite. And he was determined to master it, so he began with sharks. “Shark is a huge S.E.O. term,” he said. “So I got a toy shark, and I called him Sharky. I held him in front of the camera, and it was Point of View Sharky.”
Greg filmed skits in which Sharky chased Victoria and Annabelle through the house and stole their candy. The comments were full of praise. “People loved the girls,” Greg said. “They were rooting for us. I was making $1,000 a month.” But there was a pitfall. The fans were easily bored and forever hungry for novelty. He constantly had to devise new ideas — new “seasons,” as he put it.
So he came up with food fights. “We went to a 7‑Eleven, got nachos, hot dogs, giant Slurpee sodas. We sat in the truck, I set the camera on the dash and said: ‘All right, Annabelle. You ask Victoria for her drink, she’ll say no, you steal some anyway, she’ll get mad and throw food at you. I’ll say stop, then you dump your Slurpee on my head. And then, boom, food fight in the truck.’”
Greg smiled at the memory. “Dude,” he told me, “there was food everywhere, ketchup down in the vents. The truck was ruined!”
A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.
“But why?” I asked him.
Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He meant it. He and his daughters were becoming hugely popular, and he had no idea why. It made no sense to him, then or now. Later, he sent me a copy of the food-fight-in-the-truck video. I could see the appeal. Annabelle and Victoria were fun to watch, and their audience of children presumably enjoyed the transgressiveness of a male authority figure joining in with a food fight instead of demanding it stop.
“We made four of those,” Greg said. “Each one got 10 million views within a week. But the fifth one didn’t.”
And so Greg needed yet another new idea.
One day he noticed Victoria laughing at a YouTube video. Annabelle drifted over, and soon she was laughing too. So Greg joined them. The three of them watched, engrossed.
“It was a teenage girl vlogger,” Greg said. “She was doing a day in the life of what she remembered from being a baby. She had pigtails and was eating baby bananas.” As Greg watched his daughters laugh at the video, he suddenly thought, That girl was onto something, but she blew it. A person can go only so far reminiscing about babyhood. What if he made a video in which Annabelle were magically transformed into a baby?
Greg began frantically storyboarding. Annabelle could wear pigtails. A onesie. She could suck on a pacifier and talk in baby talk. Greg had learned from his previous “seasons” that the more exaggerated their behavior — the louder the screams, the more extravagant the facial expressions — the higher the view count. Maybe Annabelle could talk in exaggerated cartoon baby talk: “Eee!” “Grr!” “Yummy!” “Ooh!” “Aah!” “Poop!”
He knew, too, from the food-fight video, that children loved messy scenarios. So he thought, We’ll feed Annabelle baby food, and she can spit it out.
They shot the video. When it came to the spitting part, Annabelle “literally spat the baby food into Victoria’s face,” Greg said. “Then Victoria turned to the camera and said, ‘Gross!’”
“How were they about spitting food in each other’s faces?” I asked.
“Oh, they liked it,” Greg said. “It was fun, dude.”
Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.
It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?
And then he had it.
In a subsequent “Bad Baby” video, “Sharky held the wand and this time bopped Victoria on the head. Boom. Now she’s a baby too! Oh, my God. Two Bad Babies. We go to a grocery store. I put them in the shopping cart. I’m throwing in groceries and filming the whole thing. We get to the car. Victoria rolls down the window and throws out a gallon of milk. That was the end of the video.”
Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.”
YouTube allotted Greg his own adviser, a bespoke service he could utilize whenever he needed. And it wasn’t long before he did reach out to the adviser in a panic. He had posted a new video that wasn’t “Bad Baby”-themed: “It was just a vlog. And it didn’t even get a million views. I thought I’d ruined the channel.”
Greg’s YouTube adviser reassured him that he hadn’t ruined everything but calmly suggested that he take the new video down. “He said the algorithm didn’t like it. It confused the algorithm. He said, ‘I would just stick with the bad babies.’”
But how could Greg follow “Two Bad Babies”? How could he make it even more compelling?
And then he knew exactly how.
He also knew that there would be no coming back from it. “Those were my words,” he told me. “I said, ‘There’s no coming back from this.’ But I had to do it.”
Everything in Greg’s life had been leading to this moment: the Granite City factories closing; the stresses born from his medical problems and from being a single father; the lawn care work; the search engine optimization; the 100 million views. Greg was surrendering his life to YouTube and its algorithm, to what it indicated Greg should be.
“I had to become the third baby,” Greg said. “I had to turn myself into a baby.”
Greg’s “Bad Baby” videos are no longer online, but he showed me some on his computer. There was Greg cooing and crawling on his hands and knees and babbling in baby talk and sucking on a pacifier. There was Victoria chewing chocolate cream eggs and cookies with her mouth wide open, the half‑masticated food sliding down her chin. There was Annabelle squealing “Eee!” and “Grr!” while shaking her fists.
Their movements — all set to nursery‑rhyme music — were exaggerated and repetitive. Imagine the ritualism of Teletubbies, but instead of Teletubbies you stumbled onto the home movies of an ordinary Midwestern family who were, for some reason, whatever their ages, all babies.
As the videos played, I noticed Greg quietly scrutinizing me. I liked how his children were enjoying being theatrical, enjoying bonding with each other and their father. But I must have looked somewhat baffled, my smile slightly fixed, because Greg suddenly muttered, “Well, 50 million people watched it.”
Fifty million is, in fact, a vast understatement. Greg’s most-watched video, “Bad Baby Real Food Fight Victoria vs Annabelle & Freak Daddy Toy Freaks Family,” had 622 million views.
Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer‑count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made. But YouTube’s partner program was generous — the advertising-revenue split was around 50-50 — so it was a lot (although not so much that Greg quit his lawn care business). They got out of Granite City and moved to an upscale suburban community.
In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.
“She canceled,” Greg said.
Greg had no idea why.
For a while, YouTube Kids functioned as intended, providing normal, non-horrific Peppa Pig videos. The problems began when children started searching for characters like Spider‑Man and Elsa and nothing came up, because Disney and Marvel were keeping their content off the site.
Up in Quebec City, a group of people saw an opportunity. They dressed as Elsa and Spider‑Man and filmed themselves in a nondescript suburban house performing skits, which they posted on YouTube with titles like “Spiderman and Frozen Elsa Superhero Fun in Real Life.”
In one video, Elsa’s tongue turned into a long slab of red jelly and needed to be cut out with pliers. Elsa walking around a living room with a huge jelly tongue flopping from her mouth did look bizarrely sexual, whatever the intention of the YouTubers, whoever they might have been. A doctor injected Spider‑Man in his buttocks with mysterious green liquid, and he ran around in agony. Spider‑Man drank a red potion, and his eyes burst into flames. He repeatedly hit himself on the head to quell the pain.
The production values were crude and, as with “Bad Baby,” the movements were repetitive and set to nursery‑rhyme music, giving the videos a hellish feel. But some of them did have a strange charm, and when the YouTube algorithm fed them into the Kids app, millions of Elsa‑starved children ate them up, just as they did Greg’s “Bad Baby” videos.
And then came the copycats.
“I created ‘Bad Baby,’ and it went berserk,” Greg said. “There were probably a hundred channels doing it.” A number of the videos came from a Russian content farm that specialized in producing quick, cheap cartoon rip‑offs of viral hits. “You could tell by their accents they were Russian,” Greg said. “It was all, ‘Ya, Victoria.’ And they had us do things we’d never do. Dude, there’s a cartoon out there where my kids are playing in a pool, and I walk over and pee in the pool. And the channel is called Toy Freaks, so people thought it was me.”
Later, Greg mailed me a USB drive of videos made by his imitators. I watched Russian and Ukrainian men diligently re-enacting Greg’s videos. If Greg had filmed himself pushing Annabelle and Victoria in a shopping cart through a Walmart, somewhere in Kyiv a man would duplicate it with an eerie precision, and with adult women playing the parts of his daughters (pretending to be babies). Everything was identical — the facial expressions, the camera angles, the dialogue, the pacifiers, the onesies, the music. The only thing Ukrainian Greg failed to simulate was Greg’s American accent and cadences.
In Quebec City, meanwhile, Elsa and Spider‑Man were inspiring their own copycats — knockoffs of knockoffs, each generation sketchier than the last. Suddenly Spider‑Men and Elsas from far‑flung countries were enacting abortions or cannibalism or dismemberments, and YouTube’s algorithms were indiscriminately feeding them to millions of unsuspecting viewers.
Online detectives set about trying to unmask the culprits. They got nowhere with the Russian content farms, which were far away and mysterious. The Quebec City Elsa and Spider‑Man somehow managed to evade detection too. But there was one piece of low‑hanging fruit: Greg.
Greg was easily identifiable because his Toy Freaks channel was linked to his lawn care channel. Which meant that every corner of his life was suddenly being scrutinized by internet sleuths.
“I don’t want this to come off the wrong way,” Greg said, “but there were all these pissed‑off women who were not happy with me. It was a heated world in 2017. #MeToo had hit its zenith and rightly so. They were taking down bad people. But the witch hunt was going in all directions, and I was an easy target, because I’m a guy with two young girls, and we’re dressing like babies.”
I paused. “I mean. …” I said.
“Dude, it looked bad,” Greg agreed. “I get why certain adults would be weirded out seeing a grown man with a binky in his mouth. But a million parents had thought it was funny and harmless too. And now there was a whole investigation going on.”
Greg’s voice was rising. He paused to calm himself. “So that’s why the rep didn’t see us in California.”
His channel was demonetized, and soon after that, it was banned from YouTube entirely. (YouTube declined to comment.)
People with knowledge of #Elsagate may well be thinking I’ve been too kind to Greg, for a reason I haven’t mentioned yet: When Redditors and BuzzFeed journalists dug deeper into his video archive, they uncovered a handful of clips that really did sound very disturbing. As a Reddit post from 2016 put it: “One of their latest videos sees the father follow his little girl into the bathroom and film her as she’s crying in severe pain, blood flowing from her mouth and her tooth falling out. It’s barf-inducing, and no mentally stable person or child should ever have to watch it.”
That bloody tooth video is no longer online. Only a still image remains in which Annabelle is sobbing with her mouth wide open, her face smeared with blood and tears.
The Reddit post continued: “Another video sees him jump the two girls while they are taking a shower and dump a bucket of frogs into their tub, while happily filming them.”
BuzzFeed’s Remy Smidt also focused on the frogs: “In at least two [videos], Chism walks into the bathroom as his two young daughters are bathing and scares them with animals [a frog and a lobster]. He tells them that he has a surprise and asks if they want to see it. ‘No,’ the younger responds, her voice inflecting upward. Then, as the bucket approaches the water, she says it again, ‘No,’ and moves away. ‘No, Daddy, stop!’ she screams. She continues to scream, while balancing on the edge of the tub. ‘Daddy, stop!’ she yells again, her voice cracking into a cry.”
“Tell me about the tooth video,” I asked Greg, “the one where you filmed Annabelle while her tooth was falling out and she was crying and covered in blood.”
“Oh,” he replied, without any hesitation. “I have to show you that.”
He found the video and pressed play. The reporting had made it sound like it was part of the “Bad Baby” series, some garish slapstick that crossed a line. But it wasn’t: It was one of his home videos from back in 2013, which no one had really watched. I watched the whole thing. In it, Annabelle’s tooth was wobbling and bleeding, she was scared, and Greg was comforting her: “It’s OK. It’s just a loose tooth. Nothing bad’s happening.”
Notwithstanding the slightly odd fact that he was filming it at all, the video showed a father dealing with a household crisis in a normal way.
“How about the frogs and the lobster?” I asked.
Greg flinched. “That was a mistake on my part,” he said. “That was dumb. It was a prank. The kids were playing in the bathtub with their swimsuits on. My dog saw a frog on the sidewalk. I put it in a bowl and went in to show them. And it hopped into the tub. Annabelle freaked out. She climbed up on the side, screaming and crying. I uploaded the video. Again, that was in 2013 or something, back when they didn’t get any views.” (I watched the video, and it’s clear that Greg put the frog into the bath on his own. Annabelle was upset, but Victoria was laughing almost the entire time.)
Later, I spoke with Greg’s daughters on a Zoom call, to get a better sense of their perspective. They were still minors, so Greg arranged the call and joined us. “I just remember it being something that brought us together,” Annabelle said. “Yeah, at some points it was gross, but I thought it was funny, and I didn’t really mind.”
Victoria was more hesitant. “It wasn’t terrible for me,” she said. “But now that I’m 16 going on 17, I wouldn’t want to do it again.” She and Annabelle said there were things they didn’t like: staying up too late to film on school nights; getting ketchup in their eyes during the food fight. But they said they didn’t feel coerced into doing the videos.
“Some of it crossed the line,” Annabelle said. “But the stuff that crossed the line was what people liked the most.” Until they didn’t.
In Texas, an online sleuth named Amy became convinced that Annabelle was actually a missing child named Lisa Irwin who was abducted six years earlier in Kansas City, Mo., 250 miles from Granite City. Witnesses had seen a man carry a baby down the street after midnight, and Amy believed that man was Greg. She published facial comparison photographs of Annabelle and Lisa Irwin and theorized that Greg’s lawn care business was actually “convenient cover,” a way of prospecting for targets.
Amy dug up a clip of a CNN reporter who had found graffiti of a pentagram and the words “Freak for Life” in a drainage tunnel close to where Lisa Irwin was abducted. Given that Greg’s channel was called Toy Freaks, this was the final proof Amy needed. She called the police.
“They came in like a SWAT team,” Greg said. “They searched the whole house, went through the kitchen cupboards, opened the washer and dryer. All this while my kids were there. Family services showed up, wanting me to prove that the children were who I said they were. I had to show them birth certificates. I couldn’t believe some woman from Texas could call them with a made‑up story and this would happen.”
Greg was ordered to take his daughters to the local child-welfare department. When they arrived, the officers led Greg one way and the girls the other. They were questioned: “Does your father ever beat you? Does he touch you inappropriately?”
They were let go, but the incident left its mark. “Watching them being led away that day,” Greg said, “I’ve never recovered from that.”
After that, he became a recluse. He stayed home and did nothing.
“I quit meeting people,” he said. “I fell into a depression. I’d take the kids to school, come home, go back to bed, fall asleep, my alarm would go off, and I’d go back to school and get them. I had no life. I was so nervous. I had trembles and shakes all the time. My hair was falling out. I was waking up with hairs on my pillow. I almost started believing I was a bad person — that I did something horrible.”
Greg has discovered, in a painful way, that time works differently on the internet. The past doesn’t remain the past; it suddenly lurches into the present. Sometimes the old articles recirculate on Facebook. “People don’t know it’s an old story,” he said, “so they call the police and family services on me again.” It has happened multiple times, Greg said. They’re watching TV, and then suddenly they’re aware of the police surrounding their home. Or federal agents turn up, demanding that they speak to Annabelle and Victoria alone.
He went into therapy and is somewhat less reclusive now — he was meeting me, after all. And he has even returned to YouTube, with another lawn care channel. (He says he plans to stick to that.) But he is far from completely recovered. He may post videos, but he still sees almost no one, only his family. He has resigned himself to a life of solitude.
“How am I going to put myself on Tinder?” Greg said. “A woman will Google my name, and they’ll be like, Whoa. So, single forever. I feel bad for anybody associated with me. Even the lawn people. They loved me, but now their wives will tell them, ‘That guy is in big trouble for child abuse.’ I mean, dude, I’m ruined. I’m not supposed to talk like that about myself. But for the longest time that’s what I’d say. ‘I’m ruined, I’m ruined.’ And if somebody said: ‘But it was worth it. You guys got out of that town. The kids have college savings.’ No. I’d give it all up for it to never have happened.”
And that was the end of Greg’s story. I thanked him for telling it to me and climbed into my car. Greg waved me off. Then he retreated back indoors.
This article is adapted from “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men,” available in September from Riverhead.
Jon Ronson is the author of several nonfiction books, including “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” “The Psychopath Test” and “Them: Adventures With Extremists.”
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