The YouTuber David Dobrik
is driving his white Tesla through the verdant hills of suburban Los Angeles, explaining the challenges of selling thin-crust-style pizza in L.A., his assistant Natalie texting in the back seat and Billy Joel on pause on the stereo, when he abruptly stops talking. “I got this,” he says. “Don’t worry, guys.” He leaps out of the driver’s seat to help an elderly lady with a walker cross the street.
Just a few short hours ago, on the tail end of several controversies surrounding Dobrik and his YouTube collective, the Vlog Squad, squad member Jeff Wittek had released a video alleging that Dobrik permanently maimed him in an elaborate stunt gone wrong. All over social media, people were calling Dobrik a sociopath and accusing him of mining his friends’ trauma for content. And here he was, blithely chatting about his new pizza franchise and helping an old lady cross the street.
After a few seconds, Dobrik jumps back into the car, giggling. “We did that on purpose for you,” he says. “We wanted to have a grandma crossing the street, but I couldn’t keep my composure.” As we drive away, the woman, who Natalie and David tell me was an actor paid $200 simply to walk in front of our car, waves and grins.
When I ask Dobrik if this scene was staged as a way to distract from or counteract the effects of the Wittek video, he looks at me, confused and maybe a little bit wounded that I would so grossly misinterpret the intention behind a fun prank. “No, no, no,” he says. “We were just trying to do something stupid and silly.” And I laugh, partially because it is stupid and silly, but also because I’m in a $150,000 car in the Hollywood Hills with an extremely wealthy and charismatic stranger and his assistant, and I don’t want to seem like I can’t take a joke, even though I’m not entirely sure what the joke is.
Such is my initiation into David Dobrik’s world: where the lines are constantly blurred between fantasy and reality, what’s genuine and what’s content; where everyone is having fun, no one could possibly get hurt, and the rehabilitation of one’s reputation is just $200 and a call to a casting agency away.
Calling Dobrik a YouTuber is sort of like calling Batman a morose vigilante with a trust fund: While technically true, it’s far from the whole story. Dobrik is the leader of the Vlog Squad, a motley crew of aspiring comedians, Instagram sexpots, and other sundry influencers and creators who zip around Los Angeles filming gross-out pranks, stunts, and lavish giveaways, resulting in an aesthetic that’s a cross of Jackass, Entourage, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Dobrik has racked up more than 18 million followers on his main channel alone and, in 2020, was estimated by Forbes to have earned $15.5 million. His white Tesla has been a fixture on the streets of L.A., portending for unsuspecting passersby free iPads or cash or cars, or, if nothing else, the tantalizing promise of 36 million eyeballs on them.
Those who follow Dobrik’s slickly edited, fourminute-and-20-second vlogs are intimately familiar with the members of his crew: Jason Nash, a 48-year-old former comic turned co-host of Dobrik’s podcast Views; aspiring musician and straight man Scotty Sire; reformed bad boy Wittek; Corinna Kopf, a former Hooters waitress and tinder for dumbblonde jokes; and Natalie Mariduena, Dobrik’s comely 24-year-old assistant and high school best friend, who’s perpetually rumored to be dating him. (Mariduena is actually dating fellow Vlog Squad member Todd Smith, but that doesn’t stop her and Dobrik from playing up a flirtation whenever possible, as she acknowledges: “People love seeing us together. They love us interacting with each other and doing funny stuff. Relationship stuff on the internet always is like good clickbait. It gets good views and whatnot.”)
Functionally, the Vlog Squad primarily serve as yes-men; when they’re not confronting one of their deep-seated phobias or performing some daredevil stunt, they’re on the sidelines, laughing uproariously at the action.
“It’s kind of like the modern-day Friends, with a laugh track,” says Wittek of squad members’ roles. “It tells someone that this is a joke, that it’s OK to laugh at it here.” Many of the more popular recurring characters in Dobrik’s videos are his childhood friends, which helps to foster the gang-of-goofballs dynamic. His housemate Ilya, Mariduena, and Mariduena’s own assistant Reggie are all from Dobrik’s Illinois hometown. “He’s so attached to his childhood and his youth and his inner being as a kid,” says Mariduena.
In the center of it all is Dobrik with his camera, affable, puppy-eyed, and perpetually amused by everything and everybody. In person, he is just as unfailingly enthusiastic. “Everybody that has money, everybody that has success, hides all of it. It’s something you shouldn’t talk about, or like a secret,” he says. “And I like sharing all of it. I love showing people things. I’m obsessed with it.”
The moment I step into his $9.5 million Sherman Oaks mansion, he does just that. First, he brings me over to his Hawaiian Punch water fountain, inspired by the Adam Sandler film Mr. Deeds. Next, he shows me his office, where he records his podcast, and which I recognize from one of his recent apology videos, where he was flanked by a Kids’ Choice Award and a potted Baby Groot. We end in the living room, which looks as if it’s been decorated by a 12-year-old with an unlimited budget: There’s a life-size R2D2 animatronic he bought via his friend John Stamos; a Buzz Lightyear portrait made of Rubik’s cubes; a framed photo of a text exchange referencing his losing $288,000 on GameStop stocks (“I wanted something out of that negative situation, like some kind of art piece,” he says. “I told the internet I only lost 80K, so if you could tell them I didn’t lose that much, that’d be great”); rows upon rows of hard candy. Mariduena and Dobrik’s other assistant, an amiable young blond woman named Taylor Hudson who also regularly appears in his videos, stay anchored to the kitchen island on their phones and laptops, the adults in the room, even though both are also in their mid-twenties.
Shaggy-haired and casually dressed in a Dodgers cap, track pants, and a T-shirt from the restaurant Jon and Vinny’s, Dobrik reminds me of Tom Hanks’ character at the end of Big, after he finds the Zoltar machine — a child cosplaying in an adult man’s body. At one point, his attention wavers and he starts casually roaming around his kitchen on a penny board. I half expect someone to come out and yell at him to stop doing that in the house; but, of course, he is 24, and it is his $9.5 million house, so no one does. In all, he comes off as someone who is constantly in awe of the cosmic ridiculousness of his own good fortune. “David hasn’t really experienced much pain in his life,” notes Wittek. “It’s been a pretty smooth upbringing for him. His life has kind of been just straight up and not really many downs.”
Dobrik moved to this new home in January, but he has not yet sold his old house nearby, allowing friends to use it for shoots. The next day I’ll get a tour of that one, too, with Dobrik pointing out the detritus of old stunts, videos, and branding campaigns: a Chipotle
“Everybody that has money, that has success, hides all of it. It’s something you shouldn’t talk about, or like a secret. I like sharing all of it. I love showing people things. I’m obsessed with it.”
burrito claw machine the company gave him after releasing a burrito in his honor; a miniature Tesla; a ceiling damaged by an elephant toothpaste prank. As we walk through the garage, he tells me about a time a few years ago when he found a homeless person asleep on his couch at 2 a.m., wearing his merch; the man had defecated all over his couch. I ask if he posted it to YouTube, and he says yes.
“Why was your impulse to film that?” I ask. “Because I’ll never remember it better than if it was on film,” he says. “I just love filming things. I don’t get why people don’t film everything. Everything should be filmed.”
At the stArt of 2020, Dobrik was uniquely positioned for crossover success, something he is not shy about admitting he has always craved. “Right now, there’s almost like a caste system in the entertainment world, where if you’re a YouTuber or a TikToker, you’re just branded as that,” he says. “I’ve struggled with accepting myself because I’ve always wanted the respect of the traditional world. But I’ve always known that at one point, the traditional world is going to meet up with being here, and it’s all going to be the same.”
With the 2019 launch of his photo app Dispo, which mimics the look and the experience of developing disposable-camera pictures, Dobrik had crossed over into the tech space. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian was a lead investor, and at one point, the app had a nearly $200 million valuation. Also in the works were a Discovery Channel series and a pizza franchise called Doughbrik’s, as well as brand deals with corporate giants like HelloFresh, DoorDash, and SeatGeek. “He’s inherently entrepreneurial,” says Joe Gagliese, CEO of influencer marketing firm Viral Nation, who’s known Dobrik since he was getting started on the now-defunct platform Vine in 2013. “He was knocking on the door of being the face of major brands across the U.S. He was right there.”
And then, he wasn’t. In the spring of 2021, former Vlog Squad members like Seth Francois and Nik Keswani, a.k.a. Big Nik, started to accuse Dobrik of building a culture of bullying, cultural insensitivity, and consent violations. In March, Insider published the account of a woman named “Hannah,” who accused Dobrik’s longtime friend and Vlog Squad member “Durte” Dom Zeglaitis of sexually assaulting her in a 2018 incident that was partially captured by Dobrik on video. Major brands started to distance themselves from Dobrik, and he resigned from the board of Dispo. His fans, primarily zoomers who had come of age watching his energetic vlogs, also started to turn on him. He lost a total of 400,000 followers during March and April, according to SocialBlade data.
Then came the revelation, the day of our first meeting in April, that he had grievously injured Wittek in a stunt involving an excavator on a lake in Utah, inspired by an extreme-sports YouTuber named Devin Super Tramp. The footage reignited an outcry from people accusing Dobrik of exploiting Vlog Squad members and endangering them for views. And even though this is far from a rare phenomenon in the beef-driven, controversy-fueled, caps-lock-titled world of YouTube, the fact that Dobrik had amassed a reputation as something of a wholesome boy next door (despite the bulk of his content being fairly profane and fratty) made his fall from grace even more precipitous. “He wasn’t on such a pedestal anymore,” says Trisha Paytas, a YouTuber who was briefly in the Vlog Squad. Paytas, who goes by they/them pronouns, has frequently criticized the group on their podcast Frenemies.
During my visit, Dobrik was on a self-imposed social media hiatus; though he’d previously spent most of his time shooting, editing, or ideating content, now his days consisted of little more than the occasional pizza-franchise meeting. Our meeting had been in the works for a while, before the Insider story broke, and in the days leading up to it, as his sponsors fell away and the social media mobs swarmed, I became more and more sure that he was going to cancel. But he didn’t, and as we sat by his infinity pool on a sunny Friday afternoon, it was clear why: He was still struggling to make sense of what he had done to warrant such ire.
“I didn’t understand that what we were making had such power. I didn’t understand it,” he says, looking smaller than his five-foot-10 frame in an oversize sweatshirt. “So when [the Insider story came out], I was like, ‘What? I’m responsible for someone making a bad decision?’ I didn’t get it. But it was all because of this environment of wanting to put on this show.”
As A child growing up in Košice, Slovakia, Dobrik was reserved and “highly sensitive,” his mother, Kristina, says. He’d slept in his parents’ bedroom until he was five, and would cry every morning before he went to preschool. Once, she recalls, she brought him toys to play with in the sandbox, and some bigger kids came over and took them. But David didn’t get upset. “He just sat down and was just very happy watching how they played with his toys,” she says. “I was happy he didn’t make any fuss about it, though I didn’t want him to be a pushover. But he was just so happy he could share his toys.”
When he was five years old, Dobrik’s parents moved to Toledo, Ohio, where Kristina had previously lived for a year with an elderly relative after graduating from high school. Kristina had learned some English from watching Full House reruns and loved how friendly people were in America. “It seemed
like a good idea to go overseas, to make a better life for David,” she says. When the family relocated to Skokie, Illinois, outside of Chicago, David followed them there, flying on a plane from Slovakia all by himself. They later moved to nearby Vernon Hills, an upper-middle-class suburb, where Dobrik’s father started a real-estate-photography company, while Kristina stayed at home with David.
Kristina says David underwent something of a metamorphosis in America, blossoming from a shy kid to a gregarious class clown; his first words in English, she says, were “good boy,” which is what his kindergarten teachers called him. At his home, Dobrik shows me an essay he wrote in high school, in which he recounts his journey from Slovakia and expresses his joy at having left the country. Because of his DACA status, he has not been back to the country of his birth since he was seven years old, but he has little interest. “I was obsessed with America. I thought it was like the coolest fucking place in the world,” he says. “From how I remember it, Slovakia is very much like if you were to watch a documentary about the Soviet Union or Russia that shows kids in a line with trays and an old lunch lady putting beans on a tray. I almost see it, like, in a different filter, like in sepia. It’s so cliché, but here is like the land of opportunity, and you can become anything you want.”
Dobrik didn’t have a girlfriend in high school — he was “too squirrel-brained” for that, says his former tennis coach Shannon Etnyre — but he was friendly and generally well-liked, the type of kid who’d randomly offer hugs to students in the halls. “He was perfectly right in the middle and friends with everybody,” says Mariduena. He was also a mediocre student, putting in just enough effort to pass his classes. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around why it mattered,” says Dobrik.
Yet even though he spent the majority of his time arguing with teachers over doing work, many of them, like his English teacher Jeff Killinger, couldn’t help but like him. “His philosophy was, ‘If I can cheat or in some way get this work done in a way that doesn’t require effort, then that’s fine,’ ” says Killinger, who became a mentor to Dobrik after graduation, fielding FaceTime calls and requests to help with Dobrik’s taxes. “[Every day] I’d say, ‘I’m not gonna let this kid do this to me tomorrow,’ and every day he would. He was just that charming and funny.”
Dobrik took an equally laissez-faire approach to tennis, which he started playing as a young child and continued throughout high school. Etnyre remembers him as an “awkward-looking freshman with a Justin Bieber haircut” who was nonetheless “just destroying on the tennis court.” Ultimately, Dobrik was good enough to become all-state and be scouted by various universities. “I liked that if you fuck up, that you’re to blame,” he says of his attraction to the sport. “I hated the pressure of letting the team down. It’s so much easier when you’re just playing by yourself and then you fuck up. It’s just on you.” (Despite this sentiment, Dobrik has an indisputably competitive side: When I watch him play at Mulholland Tennis Club a few hours later, he is intensely focused, chiding his doubles partner Mariduena for missing shots. “We’re just having fun right now,” Jason Nash, who was in recovery from hip surgery, calls from the sidelines. “Nothing fun about this,” Dobrik retorts.)
Though Dobrik had murky aspirations of joining the entertainment business in some capacity, he was always fascinated by the idea of making money.
“A lot of people that come from overseas that are immigrants and first generation are really, really hungry to be successful, and that was definitely his case,” says Dobrik’s best friend and housemate Ilya Fedorovich, who was born in Belarus. “His family and my family, we’re not the richest. We survive by our means. I think that one of the reasons that he’s supersuccessful now is that he didn’t have much when he was growing up, but he wanted a lot.” In high school, when Dobrik was working as a waiter, he and his friends would discuss their incomes with one another in the school cafeteria. “People say money doesn’t buy happiness. And I completely get that,” Dobrik says. “But I think you can alleviate so much stress and so much burden from money, so it helps you to the road of happiness.”
When Dobrik was 16, Mariduena introduced him to the social media outlet that would change his life forever: the short-form video platform Vine. At the time he joined, Vine was starting to become a launching pad for creators like King Bach, Nash Grier, and Dobrik’s future girlfriend Liza Koshy. Even though he only had a few thousand followers early on, Dobrik saw the potential. “I saw the people making money on Vine and actually getting brand deals and moving out to L.A., and I was like, ‘Holy fuck, I think I could turn this into a career,’ ” he says. He won his first brand deal, $50 for a to-do-list app called Do!, in high school, and celebrated with his friends at Buffalo Wild Wings.
What’s notable about Dobrik’s early Vines is not just how young he looks — he has braces, wears rubber bracelets, and mugs for the camera with his trademark puppyish enthusiasm — but how much darker they are than his more aw-shucks YouTube presence. In one Vine, he pretends to be a disabled person in a wheelchair; in another, he chides a friend for making an Asian joke, saying, “They have enough on their plate. Like cats and dogs”; and in another, he says the n-word. He issued a vague apology for these offenses last summer.
In speaking about his earlier content, Dobrik blames a combination of the freewheeling climate on Vine and his youth. “I was a fucking 16-year-old idiot,” he says. “That was just chaos. And it was just the way Vine was. It was so much darker, and no one batted an eye when you did stuff like that.” But even though he pivoted away from explicit edgelord humor once he started blowing up, there is an element of his vlog persona that has remained consistent. Much of the humor is contingent on knowing the identities of the people in his videos: the skeevy older man (Nash), the slutty girl (Kopf ), the heartthrob (Smith), the fat kid (Nick Antonyan, a.k.a. Jonah), the bad boy (Wittek). Even though it’s his channel, Dobrik is rarely the butt of the joke.
A semester into his first year at College of Lake County in Illinois, Dobrik visited Los Angeles to network with other Viners as a trial period for potentially moving out West. On the plane ride back to Chicago, he says, he had the distinct sense that L.A. was his home. “It was a dramatic, Troy Bolton, High School Musical- type scene. Like, ‘This is my dream, I have to pursue it,’ ” he says. With two of his high school friends, including Dom, and a third friend he’d met on Vine, he moved into a small apartment in West Hollywood. His father was a guarantor on the lease because the boys did not have any income. His decision baffled his parents, who had given him an ultimatum: Get a college degree, or move out so as not to set a bad example for his three younger siblings. “We didn’t understand how he could make money out of [Vine],” says Kristina. “You need an education to do something in your life.”
When Vine collapsed in 2017, many creators had to scramble to other platforms, having lost their subscribers and brand deals overnight. But Dobrik had already started his own YouTube channel two years earlier, where his quick-cut editing style and goofy antics featuring the Vlog Squad (the name came from a fan) swiftly won over hundreds of thousands, then millions, of viewers. “We were all trying to transition from Vine to Facebook, and David started making money and making views,” says Todd Smith, a former Viner who became a Vlog Squad member. “From there, everyone tried to make a vlog.” Killinger says that at one point, while Dobrik was visiting home, he got a phone call from a company that offered him $5,000 to drink a particular brand of water in one of his videos. “He tells me this as he hangs up the phone and says, ‘Should I go to college?’ ” Killinger says. “And I said, ‘Well, clearly not. No college is gonna offer you $5,000 to drink a bottle of water.’ ”
It helped that Dobrik had started collaborating with, and then dating, Koshy, a Viner-turnedYouTuber with manic energy whom he had met at a party during his first days in L.A. Together, they filmed sketches, pranks, and #relationshipgoals content. “Liza was a big turning point in his career,” says Gagliese. “She was amazing for him. They were both exploding around the same time. Their relationship and their personalities jibed so well. When they started vlogging together is when they both kind of catapulted to the moon.” (Through a representative, Koshy declined to comment.) When the couple split in 2018, fans were devastated, yet, ever the consummate content creators, Koshy and Dobrik figured out how to use it to their advantage; their tearful breakup video garnered more than 60 million views.
Though some in the media, including Stephen Colbert, expressed bafflement that the pair would broadcast such a private moment, it was onbrand for two people who had chosen to convert their entire lives into content. “My reaction was, ‘This is the only way to do it,’ ” says Killinger. “They both have such enormous fan bases who are so invested in their personal lives that there was no way to break up without that kind of video. I sent him a long text and told him it was the right move, and I told him it’ll be important for young fans of his to see that people can break up while still expressing their care for each other.”
Though Koshy eventually faded out of the Vlog Squad, Dobrik’s popularity only grew. The group embarked on college tours, where they would be unable to leave their cars when they parked because crazed fans would be climbing on them, Mariduena says. And watching Dobrik’s videos, it’s
“I didn’t understand that what we were making had such power. ‘I’m responsible for someone making a bad decision?’ I didn’t get it. But it was all because of wanting to put on this show.”
not hard to see the appeal: Whether he’s gleefully stalking around his mansion with a flamethrower, gifting his childhood best friends with Teslas, or surprising them with visits from celebrities, he always comes across like an overgrown five-year-old who loves sharing his toys. Though, his friends say, that persona belies an intense work ethic. “He is obsessed with his craft,” says Wittek, citing one instance in which the Vlog Squad waited in Dobrik’s backyard for hours while he attempted to nail one basketball shot for a video. “There’s certain things that keep you human, and you kind of lose touch with that when you get too obsessed with one thing.”
The Marvel character Iron Man is one of Dobrik’s obsessions, too. He has various Iron Man memorabilia (including a $10,000 fully functional suit) on display throughout his home. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to unpack the appeal: The character starts out as a devil-may-care billionaire who gives no thought to the effect his work as a weapons manufacturer may have on society. “Then he finds that his creation was actually hurting people,” Dobrik says. “And then he figures out that he can use his talents to help people, which is fucking cool.” There is one part of the narrative he’s forgetting: In order to save the universe, Iron Man has to destroy himself.
As 2021 kicked off, Dobrik was one of the top-10 highest-earning YouTubers, according to Forbes. Having been dubbed “Gen Z’s Jimmy Fallon” by The Wall Street Journal, he was uniquely poised to achieve his dream: breaking into the world of mainstream entertainment. He frequently told interviewers of his ambition to host late-night TV.
Then came allegations from Seth Francois (often the sole black person in Vlog Squad videos) of racism and assault (he was tricked into kissing Nash in a prank video). Big Nik, who has dwarfism, also claimed he was bullied. (Francois and Keswani declined to comment. In a video, Dobrik apologized to Francois for “missing the mark.”) And, most damning, the Insider story, in which “Hannah” alleged that she had been plied with alcohol by Vlog Squad members and raped by Zeglaitis. In the video, which has since been deleted, Hannah and her friend enter a bedroom with Dom, who began the night hoping to have his first “fivesome.” Dobrik and his friends lurk outside the room but do not record the encounter itself. At the end, Dobrik says, “Dom just had a threesome and I think we’re all—” Smith interjects, “Going to jail,” and they all laugh. (Through an intermediary, Hannah declined to speak with Rolling Stone about the incident; Zeglaitis did not respond to several requests for comment, but posted an Instagram story in April saying, “I want to sincerely apologize directly to the women involved in this incident. . . . As far as I am concerned, everything that occurred during the night in question was completely consensual.”)
When we discuss the alleged assault, Dobrik is reluctant to speak fully on the record, fearing further ire from the internet. “I hate confrontation. I’d rather take a beating than argue,” he says. But in parsing the incident, he seems to vacillate between taking responsibility for whatever role he may have played and absolving himself of it. “I knew where I went wrong, but I was not in the room, I was not aware of what was going on,” he says. “None of my friends were. They would have kicked that fucking door down if anybody knew what was going on, allegedly.”
As Insider reported, Hannah initially provided Dom with consent to post the video, but she later revoked it, prompting Dobrik to take it down. Dobrik says he confronted Zeglaitis, and when Zeglaitis insisted that nothing nonconsensual had happened, Dobrik believed him. It wasn’t until months later, in 2019, after, he says, he received a call from a different woman who had a complaint about Zeglaitis, that Dobrik says he officially severed ties. “That’s where I was like, ‘I’m done. I can’t film with him.’ And what I didn’t do is, I didn’t do a good job of communicating that with him, and I didn’t do a good job of going back to these girls and apologizing. I let this guy live with me, and I was blinded by the fact that he was from my hometown. No one can do any wrong when they’re from your hometown. I was just stupid.”
Dobrik says the Insider article was the first time he started “putting everything together” and understanding “this was a real thing that happened.” But it was not the first time someone in his inner circle had expressed concern about Dom — Killinger says that when Dobrik bought his first home, he cautioned him not to let Zeglaitis move in. Nor was it the first time someone had publicly come forward accusing Zeglaitis of assault.
In 2017, YouTuber Ally Hardesty made a video alleging that Zeglaitis had forcibly groped her at VidCon. In that video, and in an interview with Rolling Stone, she alleged that Zeglaitis pinned her down, reached into her shirt, and forcibly kissed her, and that he filmed the entire encounter (the footage, she says, was never posted). Following Hardesty’s post, Zeglaitis posted an apology video on his channel. Dobrik wrote in a comment, “Proud of you Dom. Being an idiot is easy. Owning up to it is tough! Glad you made this!!!”
Hardesty says seeing Dobrik’s comment “really hurt.” While she didn’t initially blame him for Dom’s actions, “when you keep that company and enable that sort of behavior, I think you’re a huge part of the problem,” she says. “If [David] had taken a different approach to it, maybe Dom wouldn’t have assaulted other people.”
On March 16th, Dobrik posted a two-and-a-halfminute apology video, “Let’s Talk,” on YouTube. Wearing a hoodie branded with the logo for the Max album Colour Vision, a somber Dobrik said, “I don’t align with some of the actions, and I don’t stand for any kind of misconduct,” before distancing himself from Durte Dom: “I’ve been really disappointed by some of my friends, and for that reason I’ve separated from a lot of them.”
Dobrik’s apology was poorly received, with many labeling it insincere and stage-man- [