It’s been a tough summer for MrBeast, and things aren’t looking to get any better as contestants on the upcoming Beast Games show are potentially filing a class action lawsuit against the YouTube superstar and Amazon.
“I was prepared to be challenged, but I never expected to be treated as worthless, or less than worthless,” the anonymous “Contestant 5” wrote in a heavily redacted complaint.
If awarded, damages could reach millions of dollars, and the complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Sept. 16, alleges that MrBeast and the streamer created by Jeff Bezos “subjected participants to unfair, unsafe, and unlawful employment conditions.” Alleged sexual harassment, failure to prevent harassment, false advertising, and failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, these conditions “resulted in the hospitalization of several participants…,” the 54-page jury trial demand claims.
Perhaps most damaging to Mr. Beast and Amazon as a company are allegations that the makers of Beast Games, which had a reported budget of $100 million, flouted rules to obtain Nevada tax credits. According to the lawsuit, Beast Games “induced Plaintiffs and the proposed Class to enter into unlawful contracts and provide false information to the State of Nevada in order to obtain undeserved tax credits.”
The alleged misclassification of contestants like the original five plaintiffs as Nevada residents or non-residents allowed Mr.Beast and Amazon, who are by no means financially strapped, to obtain approximately $2,252,523 in bounty payments from the State of Nevada.
Based on MrBeast’s already successful YouTube show, Beast Games boasted in the spring that it would be “the biggest reality TV show ever, with 1,000 contestants competing for a $5 million prize.” The show, which attracted roughly 1,000 contestants and will serve as host and executive producer of Beast Games, is set to premiere exclusively on Prime Video domestically and internationally later this year or early 2025.
With MrBeast’s 316 million YouTube subscribers and Prime Video’s massive reach, the still-in-production Beast Games looks likely to be a huge streaming hit, right?
That’s true, but given the uproar that ensued when the Beast Games competitive show, with a $5 million prize pool, was announced in March, MrBeast and Amazon will likely want to put themselves in a good position to respond to these allegations. And considering that most of the allegations in the lawsuit were made public in a major New York Times feature last month, it seems likely that MrBeast and Amazon will have some kind of response up their sleeves.
Unfortunately, no.
Neither a representative for the influencer, born Jimmy Donaldson, nor Amazon responded to Deadline’s requests for comment on the complaint. This post will be updated if they do.
Instead, reminiscent of a New York Times article about alleged abuse on the Las Vegas set of Beast Game, the claims made by the five unnamed contestants who filed the lawsuit detail “chronic abuse, humiliation and, for female contestants, hostile working conditions, causing them to suffer physical and mental complications.”
According to the complaint, this was no coincidence: “Defendants controlled virtually every aspect of the Contestants’ lives during the production of the show, and had complete control over the manner, means, and timing of the work the Contestants performed.” This control was facilitated in part by the so-called “How to Succeed in Mr. Beast Productions” manual, which imposed false mantras such as “empower the boys” and “keep them stupid.” Yet the complaint asserts that “Defendants’ management, senior management, and owners” were fully aware of the alleged “violence and sexual harassment” at Beast Games but did nothing.
“Defendants’ above-mentioned actions created an environment during the Beast Games that lacked humane standards, conditions so severe that Defendants ultimately voluntarily covered the medical expenses of contestants,” the lawsuit alleges.
This seems a bit far-fetched from a promise made last month that the fast-growing MrBeast company would “hire a chief human resources officer and mandate company-wide sensitivity training.”
The allegations in the Beast Games class action lawsuit also don’t square with Donaldson’s hiring of the expensive law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to investigate former co-host Eva Tyson, who left Mr. Beast in July after allegations surfaced that she had sent inappropriate sexual messages to minors. In addition, this summer, The New York Times uncovered that Beast Games and Mr. Beast were being accused of libelous conduct he made in videos from his youth.
That’s why it’s called survival of the fittest.
