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When Colleen Ballinger first got started on YouTube, the platform was still brand new. “All these kids started making videos of themselves singing in their bedroom alone,” she said in a 2013 episode of MTV’s True Life. “I just posted a video kind of making fun of them to make my friends laugh.”

That’s how Ballinger’s world-famous character, Miranda Sings, was born, she said at the time. “And now, she’s a monster.”

Ballinger’s True Life episode captured the YouTuber at an inflection point in her career, when she was working overtime to scratch out a different, more durable kind of fame. A decade later, multiple ex-fans have come forward to describe the allegedly inappropriate contact they shared with Ballinger and other members of her circle.

The Daily Beast has spoken with six former fans about their experience in the Ballinger fan community. On Wednesday, after weeks of staying silent online while she continued her tour, Ballinger shared a video simply titled “hi.” with her 3.35 million YouTube subscribers. Rather than address the allegations against her with a straightforward statement, the YouTuber strummed a ukulele, denying and downplaying the allegations with a folksy song. (Ballinger did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment for this article.)

“I used to message my fans—but not in a creepy way, like a lot of you are trying to suggest,” Ballinger sings in the video. “It was more of a loser kind of way. I was just trying to be besties with everybody.” And later, even more glibly, “The only thing that I've ever groomed is my two Persian cats.”

That “loser” assertion obscures the power Ballinger allegedly held in her group chats with fans. The YouTuber claims to be taking “accountability” with the song but does nothing to directly address any of the claims made against her. Instead, she deflects. At one point, she says that allegations against her were made up “for clout.”

“I was a fan for over 10 years, and what hurt me the most was her saying ‘I hope you’re having fun.’ This is anything but fun.”

Adam McIntyre, now 20, first discovered Miranda Sings in 2012 and alleges that she eventually fostered a toxic personal relationship with him as a teenager. When he first spoke out against her in 2020, he told The Daily Beast, backlash quickly drowned him out.

“Absolutely no one wanted to hear me out,” McIntyre said. “No one wanted to hear any take that wasn’t the popular one—which was her take.” The ordeal made him want to die, he said, “because everything was turned against me.”

Things have gone differently this time around.

McIntyre, 16 years Ballinger’s junior, grew up on the internet that she helped create. On Thursday, he released a duet in which he strums his own ukulele and comments on Ballinger’s video line by line. In the video, two distinct approaches to YouTube cast one another in stark relief: There’s Ballinger performing a twee image of purity that’s already about a decade old—and there’s McIntyre, furiously strumming along, rolling his eyes, and asking (repeatedly) when, exactly, Ballinger has actually taken accountability.

Ballinger’s lyrics have already made their way to Genius, where former fans already appear to be annotating them with context and screenshots related to McIntyre’s allegations. TikTokers have been making remixes that get more specific in their description of her various controversies.

A former fan and member of the “Colleeny’s Weenies” group chat told The Daily Beast that Ballinger saying the allegations against her are lies and manipulation is “hilarious” given the number of screenshots the group has.

“I found it funny she said we have mob mentality when literally she had us as her personal mob being shady and talking shit,” the group chat member wrote in a direct message. “I think she helped validate all of our stories by deflecting and contradicting herself.”

Another fan named Alex (who’s also a member of the group chat) said in a direct message that the video “felt like an SNL skit” and “didn’t feel real.”

“I was a fan for over 10 years, and what hurt me the most was her saying ‘I hope you’re having fun,’” Alex added. “This is anything but fun. I found out someone I considered a friend, who I loved and supported through everything, was not the person I thought she was… Many of us tried to speak with her privately, which is when she left the group chat.”

Another former fan, who requested anonymity, said she couldn’t fathom how Ballinger thought this move would win her any allies. “I think it shows such a disregard for the people that were legitimately hurt and/or betrayed by her.”

As Ballinger noted in her True Life episode, close fan relationships drive a YouTuber’s success. In staging her live shows, the comedian said in the episode, she hoped to give her young subscribers access even other YouTubers could not. A member of her management team suggested that they begin collecting fans’ emails to start a “Mirfanda club.”

But Ballinger’s plaintive tune about the online “toxic gossip train” allegedly contradicts her behind-the-scenes behavior.

As the allegations have gone viral, so has a comment fellow problematic influencer Shane Dawson once shared about her. “She is the most hateful, shadiest—I love her,” Dawson says in a resurfaced interview clip. “Whenever we hang out, literally the first words out of her mouth are ‘OK, what do you got? Who do you hate? Who’s next?’”

According to former supporters, Ballinger’s engagement with fans eventually became toxic and hierarchical. The fans who engaged most online, and who had the most followers, allegedly tended to get the most attention. That meant access to some of the fandom’s most coveted group chats (like “Colleeny’s Weenies”) as well as more proximity to their favorite star and even free tickets to her shows.

In this world, direct interactions with Ballinger herself were coveted badges of honor. A former fan named Oliver, who uses he/they pronouns, recalled, “A lot of people had in their bios, a count of how many times they had been ‘noticed.’”

“I can’t even tell you how many group chats I was in throughout my three years of being super active,” Oliver said. The groups could be tight-knit, the 18-year-old noted, and some fans joined as many as possible to work their way up the hierarchy.

McIntyre, who first spoke out against Ballinger in 2020, told The Daily Beast that the “Weenies” group chat was “very, very, very elitist.”

“I mean, we would just spend our time sending tweets from other fans, bullying other fans. She [Ballinger] would engage in it,” McIntyre said. “I’ve also learned that she was doing this in other group chats as well.”

In the private group chats, Ballinger allegedly made off-color comments toward underage fans. The Daily Beast has reviewed screenshots from the “Weenies” group chat—which included underage fans—in which Ballinger asks the questions “Are you a Virgin?” and “What’s your fav position?” Silvestri called Ballinger his “gateway into a lot of sexually explicit things.”

Weeks after McIntyre first called her out three years ago, Ballinger posted an apology video in which she denied being “a groomer” or a “monster” but admitted to mailing McIntyre, who was 13 at the time, an unused lingerie set her assistant had modeled over his clothes during a livestream giveaway, “as a joke.”

Ballinger left the Weenies chat on Instagram at 4 a.m. last Friday, an anonymous former member confirmed to The Daily Beast, after fans repeatedly confronted her about the allegations. The former member also confirmed McIntyre’s allegations that Ballinger denigrated fans (and her ex-husband, Joshua David Evans) behind their backs in the group chat. Often, the ex-fan alleged, the teens would stay up until the early hours of the morning listening to Ballinger’s drama.

None of the formerly underaged fans who spoke with The Daily Beast about their experience in the fandom claimed that Ballinger or anyone in the family’s inner circle propositioned them for sex, in person or online. Still, the boundary-free zones that internet fandoms facilitate can cause significant harm on their own.

Elizabeth Jeglic, a clinical psychologist and City University of New York professor who studies sexual violence prevention, told The Daily Beast that celebrities can hold great sway in relationships “regardless if the person is of age or not.”

When an adult does come in contact with minors, Jeglic added, “boundaries have to be much more rigid, as we recognize that exposing children to sexual content or boundary violations can have long-lasting consequences.”

McIntyre told The Daily Beast that his relationship with Ballinger has damaged his trust in people to this day. “I just don’t really know how to react to people being nice to me,” he said, “because I feel like it’s with intention.”

In the years following her True Life episode, Ballinger’s career has soared even beyond her national and international tours. In 2016, she got her own Netflix series, Haters Back Off, which ran for two seasons. She’s appeared on such series as The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Her books—2015’s Self Help and the scatologically titled My Diarrhe (2018)—both debuted on a The New York Times best-seller list.

Some of Ballinger’s family and friends have developed massive social media followings of their own. Her brother Chris and his wife, Jessica, run a family channel on YouTube with more than 2 million subscribers. Colleen’s sister, Rachel, has her own channel with 2.7 million subscribers. The most devout fans tend to follow everyone in the family.

McIntyre became active in Ballinger’s online Twitter fandom in 2013, and after a while, he recalled, “I started basically getting very consumed in the family, because all the family posted videos—she posted a lot.”

As popular as Miranda Sings might be among young people, Ballinger’s act isn’t entirely kid-friendly. The comedian frequently employs off-color humor, including jokes about the character’s incestuous “Uncle Jim.” Her most recent YouTube video addressing the allegations through song ends with her asking, “But what do I know? Fuck me, right?”

And yet, Ballinger’s brand has made her particularly popular among younger audiences. She showed up in character for a 2012 episode of the Nickelodeon series Victorious. She won a Teen Choice Award for Web Star: Comedy in 2015, and she’s been hanging out with Ariana Grande for years. “Miranda” even appeared in Grande’s “Thank U Next” video in 2019. (A representative for Grande did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)

Silvestri recalled that he first encountered Colleen Ballinger’s work when a teacher played one of her videos for his middle-school class. As a theater kid, Silvestri eventually came to love the creativity on display in Ballinger’s videos—especially the way she played with her identity through her red-lipsticked alter-ego.

“I just ate it up,” Silvestri told The Daily Beast. “I immediately told my family and I was like, ‘You guys, look at what I just discovered on YouTube!… This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Ballinger’s ex-husband, influencer and former YouTuber Joshua David Evans, gave Silvestri his phone number when Silvestri was 16 years old. Speaking with The Daily Beast, Silvestri alleged that Evans told him he was “like a brother” to him and fostered a close relationship with the isolated teen. In 2016, Silvestri was devastated when Evans ghosted the teen during his divorce from Ballinger.

The cracks in Evans’ and Ballinger’s relationship had already begun to show on True Life, which debuted more than a year before they married. (Fans likely remember that Ballinger did not like the edit she and Evans received.) At one point, Ballinger accuses Evans of tweeting at fans to get her attention when she didn’t answer his text. Evans spends most of the episode griping that Ballinger never has any time for him; Ballinger seems mostly unmoved by his pleas.

“Your butt looks good,” Evans tells Ballinger as he walks behind her and some of her fans. “I’m saying that because it’s all I’m seeing of you.”

Evans recently told HuffPost that Ballinger fans sent him death threats after their divorce. Eventually, fans allegedly revealed to him that they’d been waging a covert smear campaign against him on his ex-wife’s behalf. He told HuffPost that Ballinger would “use them to be the voice for her so that she doesn’t say it—so it doesn’t come back to something she said online, publicly.”

While Evans has said he’d hoped to become a mentor to Silvestri, he also told The Daily Beast that he never “used” the teen. He said he’d ghosted Silvestri for the sake of his health during the divorce.

“I never asked him inappropriate questions or had creepy conversations with him,” Evans wrote. “It was like a distant internet big brother dynamic, which never evolved into me disclosing personally intimate information about my private love life or anything like that. I was always kind to him and never wanted anything out of it.”

He added later: “I’m absolutely guilty of thinking I could be an internet big brother to a guy that had expressed not having many friends. Again, I should have NEVER given my number to a minor. That was a mistake. I regret that. I don’t regret caring about his well being.”

After the divorce, Silvestri grew closer to Ballinger, who eventually hired him for her 2018 Miranda Sings tour. Silvestri, then 22, had previously found community in the fandom while he was getting bullied in high school. The tour felt like his big break. In a recent YouTube video, however, he alleged that for the entire summer, Ballinger and others in her circle stood by while he was being mistreated.

The divorce also allegedly proved pivotal for McIntyre, who turned 14 on the same day Evans and Ballinger announced their split. Ballinger went dark on social media at the time, McIntyre recalled. “But she was actively talking to me about how was feeling; how sad she was; how much the internet [was] dogpiling on her.”

“She only really messaged me when she wanted to get something out of me, which was pretty often,” McIntyre added. “But if there was some shit going down online, it would be throughout the day, all day.”

Online fan communities can become havens for teens, especially those who might be isolated. But without the right safeguards in place, the intimate connections these spaces facilitate can also cause harm.

According to Jeglic, the clinical psychologist, if a minor forms an intense relationship with an adult that’s “not what they think it is, there could be kind of long term consequences psychologically, like depression, anxiety, and physical health problems… as those kinds of betrayals are recognized later on.”

In one screenshotted message sent to McIntyre, Ballinger writes that it upsets her when “rumors” spread that her fans are just “views or paychecks” in her eyes.

“You guys are my friends,” she adds later. “Y’all are my sunflowers, my happiness, my everything.”

As a teen, McIntyre would have done anything for Ballinger, whom he saw as his friend. “I got bullied on gossip sites to defend her,” he said. “I told her everything about me. I told her about my family drama when she would ask. I would listen to her for hours. I would miss doing homework so that I could talk her through situations about her ex.”

In several screenshots reviewed by The Daily Beast, McIntyre and Ballinger can be seen gossiping about Evans following the divorce. McIntyre publicly apologized to Evans in a YouTube video weeks ago, as the allegations against Ballinger began to mount.

Both McIntyre and Silvestri emphasized that their parents couldn’t have intervened any more than they did; Silvestri said his family even attempted to stage an intervention with him regarding his relationship with Evans. McIntyre said his parents accompanied him to shows, and that once his mother found out more about the nature of his interactions with Ballinger, she stepped in and cut it off.

As all parents eventually find out, there’s only so much you can do to control a teenager—especially one with internet access and their idol on the other side. And unlike in the corporate world, Jeglic pointed out, no one ever sits YouTubers down for a seminar about boundaries or sexual harassment.

That said, online fan communities can help promote child safety by selecting a trustworthy moderator and establishing strong ground rules. To help her own kids learn online safety, Jeglic said she talks through various scenarios with them to see how they might respond and advise accordingly.

“You want to try to just be open about a lot of this stuff and talk about it,” she said, “and be there when they do make mistakes.”

Although ex-fan Oliver faded away from the Ballinger orbit years ago, they still have not parted with all the ephemera they collected along the way. The old romper Ballinger sent as part of a giveaway when she got pregnant, a treasure box filled with confetti from her show, a poster, and books both signed and unsigned all sit in a corner of the teenager’s room.

“There’s a lot of stuff that’s not resolved yet,” Oliver told The Daily Beast. “I’m definitely dealing with a lot of complex emotions that I don’t really know how to explain. I wish I did.” Looking back, they’re struggling to determine how much of their personality they adopted from the fandom, “and how much was actually true to myself.”

Silvestri, however, is inspired by the strength he’s seen from his peers. “These people don’t realize they created an army against themselves,” he said of Ballinger’s circle. “They created some strong kids who went to therapy, got real advice on how to deal with these situations. Now look at us—we’re smart. We’re really smart. And they really undermined us.”

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