13 - The Twitter Crush
Who is Marcus Conlon, anyway?
Need to catch up? Read all previous chapters HERE.
@RadFemRachel - June 14, 2017
127.4K views | 15.2K likes | 3,891 comments
[VIDEO: Woman in mid-20s sitting in driver's seat of Prius, iced coffee in cupholder, speaking directly to phone mounted on dashboard]
RACHEL: Okay, can someone please explain to me—please—how Marcus Conlon is the second biggest podcaster on iTunes right now?
[She takes aggressive sip of coffee]
RACHEL: This man literally just ripped off Joe Rogan's entire format—"The Marcus Conlon Experience"? Really? How creative. And all he did was harass college kids with a camera and now suddenly he's getting Netflix deals?
[She adjusts rearview mirror, visibly frustrated]
RACHEL: Like, Irina Sterling has been building her platform for YEARS. Actually helping women. Actually changing lives. Her podcast barely cracks the top 20. But this guy films one viral video where he ambushes some girl at Brown—
[She holds up one finger]
RACHEL: ONE VIDEO. And now we have people taking him seriously as an investigator? He's got 3 million subscribers!
[She laughs bitterly]
RACHEL: You know what his latest episode was about? Why women's empowerment is a "grift." His guest? Some guy who runs a pickup artist bootcamp. I can't—
[She pauses, takes a breath]
RACHEL: This is the same dude who followed an NBA players wife for months to catch her with her partner. For months! As if the husband wasn’t cheating too. He’s the same dude who—
[Phone apparently falls; view shows car ceiling]
RACHEL: [Off-camera] Shit. Whatever. You get it. We live in hell.
[VIDEO ENDS]
TOP COMMENTS:
user38474: she seems mad 💀
BrittanyAwakened: No but she's right though!! Irina literally saves lives and this man just yells at people
PatriotBoy1776: cry more lib
SarahListens: the pick-me energy from his female fans is honestly depressing
View 3,887 more comments
The Devil You Don't Know
How a Missing YouTuber Led Me Into Humanity’s Darkest Corner
Rolling Stone | March 2018 | By Marcus Conlon
The last time anyone saw Charlie Stine, he was buying Red Bull and beef jerky at a 7-Eleven in North Las Vegas. The security footage shows him joking with the cashier, doing that thing he did where he'd pull out his phone and pretend to film everything like it was content. "My audience needs to know about these truly adequate corn dogs," he said, according to the cashier's police statement. Classic Charlie. Even his final recorded words were a bit.
Three months later, I was sitting in a Denny's off I-215 in Vegas, watching Jackson Reed light his third cigarette in twenty minutes. Yeah, Vegas still has smoking sections.
"Charlie’s not the first," he said, finally getting the Marlboro lit. "I found another one. Last year. And I think she’s doing it."
The "she" was Irina Sterling, the woman he’d just written a best-selling book for. The stunner with a huge Instagram following.
Seemed like bullshit at first.
I knew Charlie the way everyone in our corner of YouTube knew Charlie—as the guy who'd built an audience by pissing off all the right people. He'd gone after everyone from supplements marketers to pickup artists, but his favorite targets were what he called "the wellness-industrial complex." Irina Sterling was exactly Charlie's type of target. He'd been needling her for months, calling her book "a masterclass in saying nothing with conviction."
Then on his show, he said that he had "receipts" on her background. And then he was gone.
When Jackson first reached out through Twitter, I thought he was being paranoid. Marines get that way sometimes, seeing patterns in the static, threats in the shadows. Cops too. And Jax was both.
His message was pure military brevity: "Charlie Stine is missing. The cops aren't looking. I’m in over my head. I need help."
I'll be honest about my initial motivations. A missing YouTuber with that many subscribers and a good amount of haters was content gold. The YouTube algorithm is a harsh mistress—you're only as relevant as your last upload. A true crime series about Charlie would bring Adsense plus sponsors. That equals mortgage money. And my daughter's college fund. Four episodes minimum, probably six if we milked it. Conservative estimate: two million views per episode.
There was also the Marine thing. You don't leave people behind. Even people you've never met. Jackson knew that when he messaged me, knew I'd come running. It's coding that goes deep and I won’t waste ink trying to explain it to civilians.
My working theory was more prosaic than Jackson's. I didn't think Irina was killing people. I thought one of her millions of followers was. Parasocial relationships are the pandemic nobody talks about. Somewhere out there was someone who'd built their entire identity around defending Irina Sterling.
Charlie threatened their goddess, so Charlie had to go. And so did Zack. Maybe others too. The only unusual part in this case was that the stalker went after the critic instead of the celebrity.
Jackson and I started with the digital archaeology that passes for detective work now. He did most of the upfront leg work for me.
The breakthrough was the piece of digital detritus that he’d cast aside as too risky: The Russian escort website. That was what cracked everything wide open.
It made sense. Zack said he couldn’t find anything on her before 2013. Charlie mentioned on his show that there was something he’d found about her startup cash. The empire she’d built was her own, but how did she get off the ground?
Someone out there didn’t like those questions being asked.
END OF SEGMENT