The Achievement Hunter team has returned to streaming in the wake of the explicit photo scandal and subsequent fan grooming allegations that forced Ryan Haywood and Adam Kovic to leave the show. After a brief interlude, Achievement Hunter returned to streaming with hosts Jack Pattillo and Michael Jones going live to provide an official statement about how the show will move forward.
The stream tackled the issues facing Achievement Hunter head on, with Pattillo explaining the emotions going on behind the scenes:
“Everything that happened this week has been crushing, it has been overwhelming and watching something we’ve build up be hit so hard, having no idea it was happening, being completely blindsided by it and just going through the amount of emotions just of anger, sadness, rage and guilt and everything.
I have to apologise to the community. I’m sorry we’ve let you down. I’m sorry this happened. Please understand how crushed we are too. Every single story, everything I’ve read, every report that’s come out, it’s a punch to the gut.”
Pattillo and Jones were emphatic about their disappointed in Haywood. “It’s just heartbreaking, seeing the amount of pain he’s caused and I’m so sorry,” Pattillo said on the stream. He later directed fans with any information to conduct@roosterteeth.com, the best point of contact to report staff-related issues.
Jones told the chat the team had undergone counselling and several discussions about the show’s path forward. He also explained their denouncement of Haywood should be taken as an official statement from Achievement Hunter as a whole:
“The reason Jack and I are here today is, this won’t be a conversation on Off Topic, this won’t be ‘let’s discuss it.’ We’re not here to discuss it. This is a statement, and you can take this as the collective from all of us from Achievement Hunter. This is the statement. These are the facts.
If you haven’t come to terms with that, I understand. I see people in the audience that can’t — I know a lot of people, for years, a lot of people since they were teenagers looked up to him, looked up to us, and they just refuse to believe it. You need to accept it … He is not coming back. He’s gone. I hope he doesn’t come back in any fashion, and we’re never going to talk about him again.”
Pattillo added Haywood would be removed from the Rooster Teeth website “as much as possible.” Videos containing Haywood will be taken down, with Pattillo stating the site would be ‘wiped clean’ in order to rebuild it.
You can view the entire stream clip below, courtesy of YouTube user Inept Robot:
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