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Roman Atwood is a YouTube star from Ohio who says he and his wife, Brittany Atwood, were forced off social media because of a harassment campaign by “extremely scary stalkers.” He posted a video, “Forced Off YouTube — Full FBI Story,” alongside his wife and newborn son on his “Roman Atwood Vlogs” channel to discuss why he had been mostly absent from the site in 2020.
Atwood, who has more than 15.5 million subscribers on his family vlog YouTube channel, posted only five videos in 2020, after posting dozens of videos a year about his family life dating back to 2013. Atwood rose to fame on YouTube and social media with a prank channel, which has been dormant since 2016, and transitioned to vlogging about his life in 2013. He wrote on the YouTube channel, “this is my life as a Father to my sons Noah and Kane and daughter Cora, along with my wife Brittney in Ohio. This channel is family-friendly and kid-friendly, so everyone can join in on the fun! I love you all!” Atwood’s wife recently gave birth to his fourth child, a son named Knox.
In his January 23, 2021, video explaining his long absence from social media, Atwood said, “This is a tough one, this is an exciting one though. It’s like a wall that we to break down in order to be us again, this video is that wall. We can’t have fun and be us without making this video right here. This is kind of like what we’ve been dying to make for awhile. I’m excited to make this video, but it’s like we have to kind of relive what’s been going on. We have to talk about, we have to explain, to you guys what’s been going on and it’s not really stuff we want to rethink about. So it’s going to be tough. The super obvious question is why have you guys literally disappeared.”
He added, “We’ve been dealing with some extremely scary stalkers. I don’t mean like the stalkers that just get ahold of your phone and they just keep calling you, prank phone calls.” Atwood said it was “extreme harassment.”
Atwood said he wanted to explain to his fans why they were so absent over the past year. “We have to relive some bad memories here … so we can help you guys understand the justification for why we left YouTube,” Atwood said, adding he is hoping his fans will understand why they had to leave the internet.
Atwood Says Stalkers Called in a Bomb Threat to a Family Funeral & Sent His Family Pictures Taken by Their Own Home Security System
Atwood said he and his wife didn’t plan on taking 2020 off, “it was like we disappeared. We’ve been on YouTube for 12 years, and for us to just vanish, it’s serious. We have left out of the fear of our life. Literally.” Brittany Atwood, holding their baby, Knox, added, “the safety of our kids, our house, our everything we have.”
Atwood said, “At the end of the day, we’re just a family, like we are literally a mom and dad with our kids and nothing is more important than the safety of our family. When the safety of our family comes into play, it’s family. So we left YouTube over the fear of our family.” Atwood explained:
So why leave over fear? Why would somebody on YouTube for 12 years just disappear off YouTube. It would be so serious. YouTubers in general have to deal with certain things, that’s part of the sword. It’s a double-edged sword. It’s a lot of good, and it just comes with certain things, it’s part of our career path.
Atwood said that being on YouTube for 12 years taught him the “difference between harassment, mean comments and then another side where you have to leave YouTube. That’s a big difference. Terrifying stuff, like to the point I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Brittany Atwood said the issues that led them to leave social media also took up a lot of their time, along with being something that caused them to fear for their safety.
“These stalkers, it turns out, they are so scary. I want you to imagine that you have to have a funeral for someone that you love, these stalkers bomb threated a funeral,” Atwood said. Brittany Atwood added that the FBI had to come to the funeral because of the threat. Roman Atwood said the stalkers shut off and turned on his vehicles, set off the alarm in their house, and “turned the power off in the middle of the winter.”
“It’s just so scary thinking, what’s next?” Brittany Atwood said.
Roman Atwood said, “I’m driving somewhere and you get a call from your insurance rep to ask why we cancelled our insurance. … Illegally driving because this stalker, stalkers, shut our insurance off, they got in an cancelled our policies without us knowing.” He said they had to spend hours getting accounts back and prove they were the ones who actually owned the accounts.
“He’d send pictures of our cameras to our cell phones,” Atwood said. “The only thing we could do was shut down and make sure our kids were safe and make sure that these people aren’t coming into our house. These guys would change our mail, we would just get mail, but it would say ‘abortion bombing clinic,’ it was always super like dark and evil. It was super hateful and super demented. It was never something funny or silly.”
They said they’d get threatening text messages, voicemails and online messages saying. They said they would change their numbers and the stalkers would still track it down. “Super scary, when you think of intrusive, it’s the most intrusive feeling that we’ve ever had, it’s the worst experience that we’ve ever had in our lives. Above and beyond the harassment, it was like death threats. He literally would say, he threatened to hang our whole family on crosses, burn our house down…Super evil stuff. I have actual chills talking about this stuff. We try so hard to just be good people, lift people, motivate people.”
Atwood Said He Is Thankful for Their Fans & the FBI & Said He Wants to ‘Bring the Excitement Back’ & ‘Try to Focus on the Fun Again’
The Atwoods said in the video they plan to start documenting their lives again. They also said they didn’t want to talk about everything that has happened yet and said more information would be coming. Atwood thanked the FBI for their help, but it was not immediately clear if the stalkers were caught and charged in connection to the harassment or if an investigation is ongoing.
“You don’t know how it feels to just have to disappear guys,” Atwood said in the video. “It became a point, fearing for our lives, we literally have police all around our house all the time.”
Brittany Atwood said it went beyond “swatting,” and people showing up at places after they posted Instagram photos or videos, “it’s not like that,” she said, “we’ve dealt with that for years and years.” Roman Atwood said it was “at a different level.”
“The amount of things these people have done to us is unbelievably long. It is scary, scary, creepy, stuff,” Atwood said. “It goes on and on and one. I think that there’s a bigger story to come, but this is at least our way to move on.”
Atwood added:
There is light at the end of this tunnel. We are so thankful for the FBI, above and beyond, that’s the only reason we are able to make this video right now, and breakdown this barrier and move on. You don’t know how hard it is to put that smile on and try to give you my pure energy while this stuff is going on in my life. But things are looking very good. So much in our life has changed. There are so many videos we can make just based on catching you up with our life. I think that sounds really fun. There’s just so much. The scariest time of our life, the most anxiety I’ve ever had in my life, the most fear I’ve ever had in my life, it’s all from these stalkers and again, I’m so thankful for the FBI. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
We will have even more to this story. But this is our breaking through it. Let’s get back to having fun. Please let’s get back to having fun. I can’t wait to have fun with you guys and to continue to share our life. And to motivate you and to inspire you, that’s all, I want it so bad. So here’s to a fresh start, season two, chapter two.
Atwood added, “Let’s bring the excitement back, let’s really try to focus on the fun again, and making you guys feel good. I can’t tell you how important that is to us.”
Atwood Recently Posted a Video Celebrating the Birth of His Son
The Atwoods recently posted their first video of 2021, on January 11, celebrating the birth of their son, Knox. Roman and Brittany Atwood have been married since 2018 and have three children together, Knox, Kane and Cora. Roman Atwood also has a son, Noah, with his first wife, Shanna Riley.
In a December 17, 2020, Instagram post, before Knox’s birth, Roman Atwood said in an Instagram post, “There is something about laying here with my children looking up at my wife who is 9 months pregnant trying to take this picture for us knowing that in two weeks I’ll be holding another child that has my heart completely full of happiness. Pure happiness.”
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