When Anna Scanlon logged onto the video streaming site YouNow last Halloween, her stomach sank. Vegan Cheetah, a popular vlogger within the online vegan community, had uploaded a four-hour video in which he accused Scanlon of flashing him her genitals against his consent and propositioning sex via Skype.

“I felt sick and horrified and humiliated. I even threw up,” said Scanlon, a PhD student at the British University of Leicester who denies the exchange ever happened. She challenged Cheetah, whose real name is Charles Marlowe, to provide proof that they’d Skyped.

Roni Jacobson is a freelance journalist based in New York City. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

A 29-year-old vegan from New York, Marlowe has about 44,000 subscribers on YouTube and roughly 54,000 on YouNow. He’s best known for his series “Dumbest Vegans on YouTube,” which features near-daily rants about edible marijuana, women, good TV, women, and—of course—veganism. In this case, Scanlon said, Marlowe didn’t provide any of the proof she demanded, but rather doubled down on his allegations. “I think we should give this fat bitch, who’s not even vegan”—he paused and sighed as he addressed his call-to-action to the camera—“a campaign to try and scare her off.”

Marlowe then directed his public comments directly to Scanlon, saying, “You are going to get fucking trolled and hated as each day goes by.”

This wasn’t what Scanlon, who is 33, had signed up for when she began vlogging in 2014. A scholar who researches the Holocaust, she had started a beauty and lifestyle channel on YouTube for fun. After she was diagnosed with lupus and a chronic illness called interstitial cystitis in 2015, she started talking more about veganism as a way to cope with newfound dietary restrictions. Scanlon was accepted quickly into the vegan vlogging (short for video blogging) community, a tight-knit group occupying its own little chunk of the internet. For awhile, vlogging was awesome—an affirming way to feel connected to other people struggling with illness and to share what she was learning about life without dairy.

Scanlon’s beef with Marlowe started back in September 2016. She’d been watching his shows for a while and at first appreciated the way he called out other vloggers for spreading harmful pseudoscience around veganism and promoting overly restrictive diets as medicinal cures—a real problem within the community. She said things took a turn when he started making personal attacks, saying that one vlogger had AIDS and herpes and encouraging his followers to make fun of her. Scanlon posted a comment on a Facebook group criticizing this change. That’s when Marlowe set his sights on her, first posting about their alleged encounter on Tumblr and then staging his Halloween attack.

At first, Scanlon ignored the hate. She blocked Marlowe on YouNow and didn’t watch his videos about her. She also refused to read the sexist and anti-Semitic hate pouring forth about her in the comments section next to the stream, where commenters called her a “hideous jew” and said that they wished her family had “burned in the ovens.” But Marlowe’s followers nonetheless swarmed the comments section of her own profile. “Anytime I would make a video or go online, there would be comments saying I had masturbated on Skype, that I’m a liar and a slut and all these things,” Scanlon said. The trolls threatened to call her school and her family; they said they would tell her boyfriend that she was cheating on him. A smaller group of truly dedicated trolls—Scanlon estimated that there were about 10 of them—took it further, posting their own videos about her and actually contacting her family.

Scanlon said she reported Marlowe to YouTube and YouNow. By then, she’d stopped using the sites altogether. YouTube deleted some of Marlowe’s videos and removed the ads from others, after determining the content wasn’t “advertiser-friendly.” (It also briefly suspended Marlowe’s account for unrelated violations.) But YouNow did nothing, according to Scanlon (YouNow declined to comment on individual users; Marlowe confirmed that at the time he had never been suspended or had a video taken down). After a short exchange of emails, a representative emailed Scanlon asking her to provide timestamps, noting the links she’d submitted were several hours long. She sent the timestamps but said she never heard back. The only response she received was a survey asking her to rate her experience.