Stephen Crowder, a right-wing commentator whose fame rose with YouTube's decision to favor his virulent brand of content, is being divorced by his wife. Footage released amid the proceedings shows Crowder berating, threatening and emotionally abusing his then-pregnant spouse: actions that once might have gotten him "canceled" for good but now seem mostly to have focused conservative anger on the right to a "no-fault" divorce–the right that allows his wife to free herself. Today we learned that Crowder is accused of exposing his genitals to colleagues, giving conservatives obsessed with male prerogatives something else to chew on.
In March 2018, Crowder and his crew were driving in a van when a former producer he liked to call "Not Gay Jared" fell asleep in the back row. "Steven was in front, and he was joking about what he was going to do," a witness said. "He climbed over and dropped his junk on top of Jared's shoulder." The same ex-staffer recalled that Crowder had exposed himself to Jared in 2017 while they were filming a parody version of Ghost. And on a flight in 2018, a different employee claims they saw Crowder put his testicles on his childhood friend and assistant, John Goodman. Another employee remembered that Crowder had showed his genitals to Dave Landau, a comedian and former co-host who called Crowder a "bully" last week. (Landau claimed that Crowder installed a "'Dave don't talk' button" on the show to get him to be quiet on air.) "At first, I took it as him trying to be friendly or one of the guys," said an ex-staffer. "Now, I see it was a power play."
Among other examples of Crowder's tantrum-driven managerial style, he reportedly had assistants doing his laundry, threatened to fire people in chatrooms, and yelled at his own father when the latter was doing bookings for him.
Crowder's "downfall", such as it is, was precipitated by something other than his disgusting conduct: he made a point of publicly turning down a $50m deal from Ben Shapiro's company, which he described as "slave labor". Crowder almost immediately became the target of public insinuations about his marriage from Shapiro protege Candace Owens, known mostly for praising Hitler and an amazingly audacious attempt to grift Kanye West. Behind-the-scenes conservative backbiting, awash in vast oceans of money….
