 This certainly wasn't the plan today. We're gonna be talking about the Gerard, the completionist situation. And if you're looking for this to be, how shall I say, a timeline of everything that literally happened, I'm gonna say that that isn't gonna be the video for you. In fact, I can link to several videos down below showing the timeline of events, both from Mudahar, who is, I guess, some ordinary gamer I only recently found out that's actually, I guess, his name. And then Carl Jopst as well, and the completionist's responses, and stuff like that, or his one response video anyways. So you guys have the full context of everything that's gone on, if you would like to do that, and you haven't kept up on this situation, I will give you a brief recap and give you my open and honest feelings on this. If you've been following me over on Twitter or what's now known as X, you probably already know my feelings, but there's some additional stuff that I never put out there because I was keeping some of these thoughts to myself. And honestly, because I had so many people reach out, asking me to say something on YouTube, which makes sense, I am a YouTube versus where most of my audience is, I figured I'd make this one video and this is all you're getting out of me. There's no more videos coming on this situation. So let me give you a brief recap of the events as I understand them, as they're shuffled in my head. The completionists was accused of stealing money, if not stealing, at least withholding money from being given to charities. He ran several charity events for the Open Hand Foundation, Indielands and golf tournaments. And there was like, I think Jamie Lee Curtis also giving donations every year or most of the years and sizable donations like that, 10,000, 25,000, et cetera. And the money just kind of sat there in account and it wasn't ever given, even though Gerard the completionist during Indieland specifically and interviews about Indieland kept repeatedly saying the money was going to various different charities. In fact, at one point he said they were essentially the primary funding source for a university of research. And it turned out that none of the money had ever gone to any charity ever, at least at that time. A sizable donation has been made in wake of this drama, but unfortunately for nearly a decade, they did not give that money to the places they said they were going to give it to. And number nine, you can get into the particulars of their arguments about trying to hold onto the money for the X reason to get less administration fees taken out and do a larger donation that makes a bigger impact. Of course, thanks to the pandemic and inflation and everything else, the money they ended up giving isn't actually worth nearly as much as it would have been five years ago, six years ago, and then on top of that, research is important. And I can just throw this out there because we have someone who is a dear friend of mine who I talk to almost on a daily basis and comes on my show every week in Jake Randall who suffers from cystic fibrosis. And it was through the breakthroughs of charitable organizations and research that enabled him to get new forms of care that have extended his life. Things where I've actually donated directly money to things like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation without asking you guys to give a cent. Me and my co-host, Eric of the podcast, have given money because we have seen the actual results of that research lead to our friend Jake having a longer, more fulfilling life. He has talked to us in private and also on his own channel about this situation and how these life-saving medications have actually fundamentally changed his life so now he can enjoy it. Now, this is not related to the charities that the completionist was dealing with. He actually had this charity going because his mother passed away, sadly, from dementia. And so this was all about dementia research. But the bottom line is the money never being given means the money that could have been used for research five years ago, a year ago, four years ago, 10 years ago, was never given and thus it's possible that they prevented advancements that could have helped dementia patients today. And that, to me, always hit home in this entire situation was we have a friend whose life was extended due to charitable donations to foundations that dealt with Cystic Fibrosis and that money sitting in an account isn't helping anyone. Yeah, maybe there's some administration fees, some extra ones if you were to donate it. I don't care, you said you were donating it. You said the money was already gone to these situations. You said you were a primary funding source for a university that was doing a lot of research and it turns out you never gave them a penny. And the problem with that isn't that you personally committed to give your own money to help these causes or to these different charities, you committed other people's money to those causes. The thing is, I was a very conflicted completionist fan. I have seen many of his videos over the year. His long-winded reviews where he 100% games are really some of the most thought provoking gaming content I think have existed on this platform at least over the last decade. You see me talking about rumors and news and you see a lot of other YouTubers do the same thing. He was out there creating completely original personal experience videos based on his time 100%ing all these very different video games. Something that is not easy to do and extremely time consuming not just to 100% a game but to record everything, turn it into a thought provoking video, scripting, editing all that jazz going through hundreds of hours of video game footage. It's not something that's easy to do and I had a lot of respect for him. When G4 spun back up with Adam Sessler and the rest of that crew not gonna get into too much on that situation but Gerard the completionist was one of them primary reasons because he joined the team that I even tuned in to things like X-Play and other things during that very brief time that they tried to come back because I had such a respect for him it was nice to see him outside of his usual hey I'm 100%ing games and actually give opinions on gaming news and other things happening. And I honestly had a lot of respect for him. He is somebody that was arguably an inspiration as a content creator. While I'm in a completely different field of video game content creation the respect I had for him showed me where I possibly could go one day. Maybe someday if I did reviews it would be of the 100% variety, right? And I could use him as an inspirational tool for that but the problem is when you have people that have such a good reputation as Gerard does is you get a lot of friends and in this industry friends can mean a lot and they can mean a lot. I've got friends. You guys know about Andre's restart. I just want to talk about Jake Randall, Eric Moore. You know I can go on and on and on or all the friends I've made and there are people involved that have been defending him Gerard that seem to not be able to assess facts from you know reality and everything. Look I kept thinking if Eric had ever done anything like this my best friend you guys know from the podcast if he had ever done anything like this my initial reaction probably would be to defend him but I also can't just keep ignoring fact-based evidence when it arises and that's what happened here in this situation with Gerard is that these accusations were made and they were made because well they dug into tax reports. Actual factual tax filings that charities have to post publicly and they went through them and things didn't add up. There was money not missing. The math just wasn't mathy. Not just the money wasn't donated but that things weren't adding up because all of a sudden the money that came from a golf charity tournament which is very hard for me to talk about right now because it's such a taboo thing started to not appear on the forums. He did things like promise that all of the bits all of the donations, all of the merchandise sales all the gifted subs all the gifted memberships on YouTube whatever it was during those Indieland streams were going to be given directly to Openham Foundation and directly to charities to help with that. That all that money was gonna go there. Then when he made his response video he said where the money went. The money from those bits and those subs and the merch it went to expenses to run Indieland. That is not what he said that money was going to go to. He said it was going to go directly to the charities. Directly to Openham to be given out. It was not to be reallocated for personally, he just lied. And I feel like for whatever goodwill there can be with Gerard and I don't know him personally. Lies stacking upon lies, stacking upon lies. And as you try to keep the great lie going more lies come forward. I'm not gonna go as far as to say he committed charity fraud. I'm not gonna go as far as to say that he's been embezzling money or his family's been embezzling money. I'm not gonna go as far as to make these accusations that need to be proven under the letter of the law. But what we can definitively say is people's lives could have been saved with this money and he didn't give it. He lied about giving it. He lied about where other funding sources came from and where they're supposed to go. Oh, and in his entire response video, again, all of this is linked down below where he sounds angry and upset and he's going on the attack and threatening legal action and all of this stuff. If you actually look at the evidence and the proof he provided, none of it actually backs up anything he said. He provided a death certificate essentially for his mother which by the way, no one was questioning if his mother actually died from dementia. That wasn't something that was ever of question so that proof didn't really mean anything other than that your mother did actually die. I mean, if this whole time your mother hadn't died that would be a whole nother controversy on top but no one was doubting that. And then he provided proof of a 2014 audit which was like the second year the charity ever existed. No one was even questioning 2014. We understood that they only had very little funding at that point and so they'd probably sit on that funding to make sure they could run future funding events. There was no questioning of 2014. So that audit had nothing to do with the years or actually accused of misappropriating funds. And then he provided another piece of evidence that really didn't make any sense and wasn't even talked about in the video and really didn't add up to any of the accusations. And that was it. He didn't have anything else. He kept saying, I have the receipts. The receipts are below and the receipts below were not the receipts that he made them out to be. He went over his funds in 2023 and the money they raised and all of this which none of us can prove right now the tax filings aren't actually done so we don't have public evidence of that. Of course, he has all the evidence behind the scenes and didn't provide it and he didn't go over any of the other years he was actually accused of this happening. They weren't being accused of 2023 yet because we don't have the tax filings for 2023 yet. But the bottom line is he did make a sizable donation his charity did $600,000 donation. And that's a lot of money. It's not all of the money. There was about $650, $660,000 reported according to the tax filings sitting in a bank understandable if you're gonna sit on a little bit of that money for administration fees, tax filing and stuff like that. Maybe the whole $660,000 wasn't going to be available but that doesn't explain some of the missing money that doesn't explain the lies. It doesn't explain why if they never did anything wrong why is Gerardo the completionist stepping down? In the end, this entire situation, it sucks. It's a harsh reminder of several things. One, you can't believe anything you see on the internet or any person you see on the internet. But more than that, it's a reminder that as you see all these other YouTubers rather big ones at that people that we've interacted with in the past jump to his defense the moment his video drops and maybe they were just ignoring the facts and wanting to believe a friend that sometimes it's our friends that can hurt us the most. It's easy to believe family, friends, personal, acquaintance. Like it's so easy to jump on their bandwagon because you've known them for so long and you know this isn't who they are as a person. The problem is who someone is as a person, it's in here and it's in here. And that is something that only they know. And I think the hardest thing people have a hard time who absolutely were like me and fans of his content that we see this nice person who created this almost perfect online personality and persona, he's had his own personal health struggles and stuff he's gone through and I'm not questioning any of that. However, when they present such a perfect forward pacing thing and now they're doing charity work on top and it turns out they were lying about that charity work for years and years and years. Meanwhile, people suffering from dementia that could have had critical research done that might have extended and or saved their lives didn't happen. And then the donation only occurred after being pressured. And again, when you go through the evidence you'll see he openly admits in a phone call that they only did the donation because they were being pressured. Folks, there's no other way to really say this other than he's a liar. And I am on the side of facts and evidence and Gerard has failed to provide any to defend anything he said. He provided some legal definitions, that's cool. The other sides provided that too but the other side also had hard facts to present as well. They had the tax documents. They had the publicly reported revenues from multiple different areas, including I think it was somebody who actually handled the donation money directly for Indie Land, one of the coordinators posting things about how they raised over $100,000 through Indie Land. That wasn't what was reported on the tax reports. Because by the way, as someone who files business taxes and I'm not exactly gonna pretend about tax expert, this is not tax advice. I have to itemize everything. Any purchases I make, I have to keep receipts of everything. So all the purchases I make, where all the money's going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera because that's what you have to do when you're filing business taxes. And a charity is still a type of business, it's just a tax exempt business. And I'm not gonna get into the whole him defending them being a public charity versus private charity. That stuff doesn't really matter to me. What matters to me is that you worked under the guise of your own mother to raise funds for research to prevent what happened to her happening to others and never gave that money to the places you kept saying it was going to. That to me bothers me when I have a dear friend like Jake Randall who was directly impacted and had his life extended, and not just extended but extended in a positive way where the life he currently had was made better due to the advancements through these charitable donations. This is just not a good situation. And if I lose some YouTube friends over this, so be it, I have to be on the side of the facts and evidence. If I lose some subscribers over this, look I get it for a lot of you guys, this is a very black and white thing, you don't wanna live in the gray. And for me, it's also kind of black and white. Here's proof, here's someone defending themselves with no proof. I'm gonna lean on the side of proof. If there's any more legal actions or anything that comes out of this or we discover more and there's more evidence out there, look, at the end of the day, I probably will never talk about this again on my channel. I will give one caveat to that. Obviously, if there's a legal conclusion to this at some point, a year, two year, three years down the road and it definitively shows that he lied or maybe it backs him up and everything's all good, I might talk about it on a live stream or something because you guys ask questions and so I'm always willing to answer. But in terms of making individual content, making individual tweets and all of this stuff, I really don't wanna keep this going anymore. I'm not a drama YouTube channel, but I understand a lot of my YouTube friends are related to this in some way and a lot of people are hurt right now or confused or just being vehement defenders, which I get because, hey, I'm a fan of the completionists as well or at least I was. I'm not sure I can ever watch his content again today without in the back of my mind going, dude, he lied and took people's money and could have saved people and didn't. Like it or not, I know his father, I guess, is probably the one who founded the charity. He was the face of it and he was the one raising most of the money. It is what it is. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Whew, that was a rough one to get through. I'll catch you in the next video.