Just shy of two months after he finally confirmed the reason for his long-ago lifetime ban from Twitch—exchanging “inappropriate” text messages with a minor, if you hadn’t already heard—Guy Beahm, better known to gamers as Dr Disrespect, is teasing a comeback.
“Vacation is just too good right now,” Beahm tweeted. “We’ll be back soon though Champs. We have lots to talk about. Yayaya yayaya yayaya.”
He does indeed have a lot to talk about. Things unravelled quickly for Beahm after a former Twitch employee shared allegations that his ban from the platform was the result of inappropriately messaging a minor via the Twitch Whispers messaging system and attempting to set up a meeting at TwitchCon. Deadrop developer Midnight Society, the studio Beahm co-founded in 2021, fired him almost immediately; numerous other partners, including YouTube, 2K Games, Turtle Beach, and the NFL, pulled the plug a few days later, after Beahm admitted the allegations were true.
But that admission is one thing he apparently doesn’t want to talk about. Beahm first teased a return to streaming at the end of July with a goofy “you’re playing checkers, I’m playing chess”-style image. Prior to posting this newer “back soon” tease, however, Beahm also deleted the tweet in which he acknowledged exchanging text messages with a minor that, as he put it, “sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate.”
The tweet used to be here. Now it is not.
The value of deleting a tweet that received international attention after it’s been up for more than a month is debatable, and in any event esports commentator Jake Lucky (among others) posted images of the whole thing on Twitter:
Dr Disrespect has now deleted his Twitch ban statement in which he admits to inappropriately messaging a minor pic.twitter.com/VUJzOXmY1AAugust 14, 2024
As you might imagine, the reaction to Beahm’s seemingly imminent return is deeply mixed. He clearly still has fans, and they’re just as clearly eager to see him back. But there are an awful lot of jokes, memes, hate, and photographs of an island that might be familiar to people following the US election floating around in response to Beahm’s comeback tease, too.
It’s not at all surprising that Beahm is going to at least attempt to return to streaming—I mean, what else is he going to do?—but the social media backlash may be the least of his worries on that front. YouTube demonetized Beahm’s channel shortly after his admission and prohibited him from making new channels to get around it, so no matter how many fans he has awaiting his return, he’s not going to be able to earn any income on it. Of course, it’s always possible Beahm will move to a different platform, like Kick or Rumble, which may be willing to overlook his bad behavior in exchange for the boost in viewers his presence will bring—whatever’s in the works, we’ll no doubt be hearing about it soon enough.
