Four years ago Twitch permanently banned Dr. Disrespect, who at the time was one of the platform’s biggest and most recognisable stars. The Amazon-owned streaming platform has had various fallouts with high-profile users over the years, the difference being that when it comes to someone like xQc we know the reasons behind the split (in that case, lots of gambling). With Dr. Disrespect almost nothing is known about what caused such a breach, and the streamer’s subsequent choice to take legal action (settled in 2022) means everyone involved has stayed tight-lipped.
Dr. Disrespect has now spoken about the period of the ban on-stream (the timestamped video is below) and while he steers well clear of filling in any blanks, he makes it abundantly clear there’s no love lost between himself and Twitch. In response to a viewer asking about the prospect of any new music from the streamer in future, he answers:
“Like I’ll admit when the purple snakes, and I mean slithery disgusting purple snakes, did what they did to the two-time [champion] that was tough,” says Dr. Disrespect, “that was a tough time.”
In case you’re not a Dr. Disrespect fan, part of his schtick is claiming to be the “two-time champion” of Blockbuster video games tournaments held in 1993-4. The streamer goes on to reference the period immediately after the ban and the fact that, as he and his team have consistently said, they were given no reason for it by Twitch for around a year.
“Not gonna beat around the bush man that was a tough time,” says Dr. Disrespect. “We didn’t know [why], we didn’t find out until a year later, [and] during that year, that time, y’know we’d built everything up to that point. We lost out on a lot of big deals, a lot of sponsorships, shit we had Nike, we were talking to Oakley, and that’s no joke: I can bring up Oakley prototypes right here.”
Dr. Disrespect does not, in fact, crack out the Oakley prototypes, though I’m sure we can all imagine what they look like. Finally, he returns to the original question about his sideline in music tracks.
“That shit happened man and I was in a spot that I hadn’t been in before emotionally,” says Dr. Disrespect. “And long story short, it’s no joke when people write songs because they’re going through something and it adds to the quality and emotion of the song. I’m not saying I produce massive hits or whatever but y’know it’s a lot easier to be able to put together some quality ideas for music when you’re going through something that’s tough. So…. long answer. No, we’re not making any music right now.”
So: no particular new insight into the reason for the ban, but the “snakes” language in particular is as unambiguous as it gets. It’s also clear that this seems to have been a time where the streamer thought his entire business was at risk and, even though it’s long past that stage, the scars haven’t healed. You can find other references to things like the sponsorship with Nike dotted around, such as this Tweet around a year ago bemoaning he’s never been able to seal that deal.
The ban happened in summer 2020. In August 2021 Dr. Disrespect announced that he was “suing the fuck out of” Twitch, bringing a lawsuit that was settled by mutual agreement in March 2023. At the time Dr. Disrespect commented: “I have resolved my legal dispute with Twitch. No party admits to any wrongdoing.”
Subsequent to this, the Dr. Disrespect name and brand has been an absolute no-no on Twitch, with the streaming platform coming down hard on re-streams and even references to the star. This has reached absurdly petty levels: Twitch banned a chess grandmaster’s channel because he was watching Dr. Disrespect playing chess, and banned a streamer from a Warzone tournament for cosplaying as Dr. Disrespect. No love lost on either side, then, though who knows whether we’ll ever know the reason for the mutual animosity.
