Celebrity

Will YouTuber NikkieTutorials Ever Reveal Who Her Blackmailer Was?

Popular YouTuber NikkieTutorials came out as transgender a couple weeks ago, and the response has been hugely positive. But what about the person who blackmailed her?

by Alani Vargas

Published on January 28, 2020

3 min read

It’s NikkieTutorials’ right to reveal her blackmailers, no one else‘s

On Jan. 28, NikkieTutorials made her first video since her coming out on YouTube. She did a little makeup therapy session called, “Responding To My Coming Out.” She goes into the whirlwind it’s been since her last video, and gets into one of the biggest questions she’s been getting: who is the blackmailer?

NikkieTutorials first urges everyone to stop trying to hunt for said abuser. “If anyone’s gonna have the right to tell more about these blackmailers, it’s gonna be me,” she said in the video. She said that no one should be talking about the blackmailer, because only NikkieTutorials knows the full truth.

But, she assured everyone that she did know exactly who was emailing her. She shared that with police help, she has their name, numbers, emails, address and more. De Jager also knows how they were able to gain this sensitive information about her. “When I found out exactly who was behind this all, I was shocked,” she shared. “Because this is not a person that any of you know. It is someone that I don’t even personally know.”

It’s been “one of the most difficult decisions” for her to decide what to do about the blackmailer

Now she has the hard choice on how to proceed. Does she deal with the blackmailer by revealing them to the world? Pressing charges publicly? She said that it’s been a “frightening” and “freeing” experience, learning their identity. But it’s also created “one of the most difficult decisions” of NikkieTutorials’ life.

“I feel like everybody who does something wrong should be punished. But after all of the responses these last couple of weeks and literally being worldwide news, I know now that comes with the greatest responsibility I’ve ever had in my life,” she said. “I know this is gonna sound so stupid and weird, but with this platform we have right here, I have the power to destroy a life. I have the ability to not only destroy the life of my blackmailer, but also the life of his family, his kids, his friends, his surroundings.”

Would she be stooping to their level if she “outs” their name?

De Jager has 13.1 million followers on YouTube, 13.7 million on Instagram, and 1.95 million on Twitter. So yes, if NikkieTutorials wants to release the name of this person, they will feel the pain of what they tried to do. Because of this, she’s also been fighting the moral dilemma that question brings. “If I out this person, am I gonna be doing the same as this person did to me? Do I want that? Do I need that?” she mused.

This is why she ultimately decided that she’s not sharing their identity right now. “Nobody in this world deserves to get blackmailed or to get pushed or pressured into coming out. And nobody should get away with blackmailing,” she shared. “But when I look at my situation, when I look at my life, at everything that happened to me, that person has been punished… I don’t want to lower myself to his level. I’m creating my own level. I am better than that.”

Her blackmailer already got their punishment

With the massively positive response de Jager received from the world, her abuser got their punishment in the end, even though he still has his anonymity to the public. “[The blackmailer] now know[s] that I know exactly who it is, and I think they’re gonna have a little bit of that fear,” she said. “That one day maybe their name is gonna leak to the press, and they’re gonna feel exactly the same thing as I was feeling. But I think it is my right to determine if I want that name to come out or not.”

NikkieTutorials does, though, make it clear that she is in a special situation. She has a major platform to make this decision. De Jager stresses that if anyone watching is going through something similar, they have the right to feel safe, and that means going to the police, a trusted adult, or someone else to “take back your power.”

Even though NikkieTutorials’ blackmailer gets to live another day without the world knowing their name, de Jager does end the video with some parting advice. “For 2020, we’re gonna let karma do it’s mother-flippin’ thing,?”