While most people had a poor 2021, David Dobrik had an even worse year. At the beginning of last year, the YouTube sensation and head of the crew known as the Vlog Squad was on top of the world and poised to cross over into the mainstream, having lined up countless blue-chip brand deals and even an eponymous pizza franchise called Doughbrick’s.
However, this will change in March 2021. Insider Published a bombshell ArticleHe was accused of having profited from the sexual assault of an anonymous female victim by his former friend and collaborator “Durte” Dom Zeglaitis. According to the article, Zeglaitis allegedly plied the woman with alcohol by Vlog Squad Members, rendering her unable and unwilling to consent to sex. Dobrik, as well as other Vlog Squad member, listened outside the door. Dobrik then uploaded the footage onto YouTube. Zeglaitis denied the allegations and stated that he believed the sex was consensual. Dobrik, however, denied knowing of the sexual assault. “She Should Not Have Played With Fire!!,” was later removed at the woman’s request, though not before it received millions of views.) Many of Dobrik’s sponsors backed out of their deals with him, prompting him to release a widely criticized apology video on his secondary YouTube channel. (He posted a second more detailed apology video.
Further aggravating matters, Vlog Squad member Jeff Wittek sustained serious injuries in an accident involving an excavator. Dobrik, who was driving the construction equipment, was accused of creating dangerous working environments. Wittek initially claimed he didn’t blame Dobrik, but their relationship has since soured. Wittek said on his podcast this March, that they had lost their friendship and that he was considering leaving. Planned to sue Dobrik. “Let’s just let the courts decide and you’ll have to sign a paper that says, ‘Yeah, this was a lie, and I’m guilty of this and that,’ and we can go that route about it,”Wittek spoke on his podcast.
When YouTuber and director Casey Neistat started documenting Dobrik’s everyday life three years ago, capturing the footage that would become his new documentary The InfluenceHe didn’t know how any of it would turn out. Neistat, however, tells the truth. Rolling Stone,He was curious about Dobrik’s new YouTube stardom and what it meant to be a YouTuber. Dobrik was initially posting slices-of-life videos with his Vlog Squad. Soon, he began to post lavish giveaways as well as more extreme stunts. “There was something entirely unique about the videos he was making,” says Neistat. “They weren’t expressions of creativity. They weren’t about filmmaking. They weren’t about things I understood to be what makes a good YouTube video. They were portraits, little windows of life in early adulthood with no limit to resources and no responsibility.”
The Influence which premieres at SXSW on March 12, is a slow-burn portrait of a toxic power dynamic that binds a group of very young, wildly successful people together, and the lengths they’re willing to go to to achieve astronomical levels of fame — as well as the ringmaster at the center of the circus, directing their every move. (Full disclosure:Rolling Stone‘s parent company, Penske Corp., owns a significant stake in SXSW.)
Like many of Dobrik’s subscribers, Neistat was initially entranced by Dobrik’s enthusiastic, puppyish demeanor and the easy rapport he had with the other members of the Vlog Squad. “It’s understandable to watch his videos and not question the friendships you’re seeing,”He says. “It was only gently scratching the surface that I started to realize what was going on.”
Neistat states that it was obvious from the beginning that Dobrik’s boundaries were being crossed. This led to increasingly dangerous stunts being done for the camera. “It’s only funny until someone gets hurt,”Dobrik is seen smiling on camera while performing a stunt with a Vlog Squad member. Neistat said he began questioning the power dynamics of the group after he asked Dobrik in their first sitdown interview if he was friends with or coworkers. “I expected him to be offended by the question,”He says. “But he paused and said, ‘When the camera comes on they know what they’re supposed to do.’”
In one particularly stomach-turning scene that takes place on a private jet, Dobrik directs members of the Vlog Squad to engage in increasingly wild yet largely innocuous behavior — shots of vodka being drizzled into their mouths, etc. — until he commands one Vlog Squad member, Corinna Kopf, to take off her shirt and pretend to show her breasts to the others while they applaud. Kopf complies, yet the degree to which Dobrik directs the action — and the degree to which everyone unfailingly follows his lead — is genuinely uncomfortable, to say the least.
When you areInsider story came out, closely followed by the details of Wittek’s accident emerging, Neistat says Dobrik was reluctant to appear on-camera again for the documentary; they did one final, tense interview, in which Dobrik largely takes an unrepentant stance, claiming to have had no idea what happened between Zeglaitis and his alleged victim and that he did not view the allegations against Zeglaitis as being a reflection on him. This was the stance Dobrik assumed in his interview with Neistat. Rolling StoneIn June of last year, he said that he “couldn’t see how [the allegations] were connected to me”And claiming that he was “not aware of what was going on.”Zeglaitis claimed that he also cut off contact with him after the woman spoke out, although public social media posts seem to suggest otherwise.
Dobrik has not heard from Neistat since the last interview. “A lot has transpired in that time. I don’t know how I would characterize my relationship with him now,” Neistat says. “[I] think he changed over the course of my reporting, my documenting of his career. I think you can see that in the lack of seriousness in his tone where he’s sort of playing a bit of a character and the lovable, goofy David. He takes a much more serious tone and owns who he is in that final interview.”
Some on social media who have not seen Neistat’s film have CategorisedIt is a “redemption documentary” for Dobrik, which it is not: it is unsparing in its criticisms of influencer culture and the damage it can wreak on others’ lives, and how Dobrik specifically abdicated his enormous responsibility as a creator and hurt many in the process. The film ends on a sad note. It shows how Dobrik has mostly rebounded from the controversy and avoided accountability. He continues to post vlogs and podcast episodes and even hosts his Discovery + series that premiered last fall.
But Neistat stresses that the film is less about Dobrik specifically, and how he should best be held accountable, and more about the dangers of the YouTube ecosystem in general, in which sensationalism and clickbait are rewarded and there are few infrastructural elements in place to ensure others’ safety.
“David is kind of part of a pattern. The fastest path to getting eyeballs is with sensational content, full stop. If it’s sensational it will garner more views. That pursuit of sensationalism unchecked invariably ends in disaster. We’ve seen that time and time again,”He says. “[I] don’t know what the solve is for it, or if it even exists. But I think it speaks to 1) the dangers of new media, and 2) human nature. There is an audience for this. And the bigger the audience, the more rewards someone gets. Without absolving David of his wrongdoing or apologizing him, I do think there’s a greater question of culpability when it comes to 20 million clicking subscribers, and countless blue chip companies writing him huge checks. What culpability do the viewers have? And I don’t know if there is an answer to that question.”