A famous Twitch streamer/YouTuber has given a harrowing account of what it’s like to be a victim of ‘swatting’ - when someone reports your house as a serious threat as a ‘prank’.
QTCinderella, real name Blaire, had a sit-down interview with fellow content creator Anthony Padilla (who you may know from his days with SMOSH). Around fifteen minutes into the sit-down QT tells Padilla just how horrifying it is for the SWAT team to show up - genuinely believing her life was at risk - and how she now has PTSD from the experience.
“I look up, and we have a big window in front of our kitchen - and that’s when I see it,” she says at the beginning of her recount. “Just all of these lights. All I see are lights. All I see are guns.”
QT says multiple times she thought she was going to die - “anybody flinches and I’m dead,” she remembers thinking to herself - during the three different occasions the SWAT team was called to her house. With numerous guns, including heavy-duty sniper rifles, being pointed at her it’s completely understandable why she would think that.
QT, who has 818,00 followers on the live-streaming platform Twitch, says she now lives with PTSD from the swattings.
“Ever since then, a car drives by our house my stomach drops,” she tells Padilla. “A light is outside our house, stomach drops. I hear helicopters, stomach drops.”
“There have been times I wake up in the middle of the night shaking Ludwig [her boyfriend] saying ‘we’re getting swatted, we’re getting swatted’ - we’re not. It’s just PTSD. It’s nothing, it’s nothing.”
“The amount of trauma you’re creating from this prank is… miserable. I don’t know when I will be the same,” she tells Padilla. “I don’t know when I will be able to sleep at night.
QT believes that there needs to be more protection for streamers against swatting. She argues for a similar attitude from police towards streamers as they do towards more mainstream celebrities.
Police won't automatically send a SWAT team to addresses they know celebrities live at without checking ahead of time because they understand it is more than likely just a prank, she argues.
You can watch the full interview between QTCinderella and Anthony Padilla below:
