YouTube’s ‘most bullied ginger’ bares his soul: The mystery and tragedy of Coppercab

YouTube’s ‘most bullied ginger’ bares his soul: The mystery and tragedy of Coppercab

In 2010, 17-year-old Michael Kittrell became an overnight celebrity after filming himself proudly proclaiming that ‘gingers do have souls’.

His spirit has burned in the hell of internet fame ever since.

Posted under the nom de guerre Coppercab, Michael’s first-ever YouTube video was an apparently heartfelt broadside against schoolyard bullies and South Park – the TV show which once joked that redheaded people do not have souls.

His film racked up tens of millions of views and became the ‘most discussed’ of the year, garnering more comments than any other video uploaded to YouTube.


But it exposed Coppercab to the full force of the internet’s now-notorious cruelty.



These days we all know that feeding trolls makes them even hungrier. Back then, Kittrell decided to toss them great bloody hunks of meat and started a feeding frenzy which has still not abated.

After posting his first video. Coppercab was bombarded with abuse by online bullies, professional web celebrities and fellow YouTube personalities.

His early videos appear to show him teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, buckling under the onslaught from anonymous bullies who thought there was nothing funnier than posting loads of comments calling some random kid on the internet ‘fat and ginger’.

Yet since he broke the internet almost a decade ago, one question remained unanswered: is Coppercab for real? Or he is an actor, playing a part in videos which are cleverly crafted to go viral and secretly laughing along with the bullies?

I’ve spent years watching the YouTuber’s videos and slowly getting to get to know him from afar.

He fascinates me because I think his story shines a light into dark corners of the internet and even gloomier nooks of the human psyche.

Or at least I think it does, because I too have never managed to fully shake off the suspicion that all is not what it seems with a man who’s happy to describe himself as ‘YouTube’s most bullied ginger’.

He’s never given an in-depth interview, but decided to tell me his moving, hilarious and often heartbreaking life story.

We meet in Bristol, where he’s now living and working with a sadistic, as-yet-unidentified British svengali who goes under the pseudonym Cameron and appears off-camera in Coppercab’s latest videos.

Can I finally discover the truth about the internet’s angriest redhead?

‘People think I’m crazy – or a clown’

Coppercab has a very strange job. To get a sense of the story, I’d advise you watch the video posted above, which was uploaded by comedian Bill Burr a few weeks ago and captures some of his mystique.

Basically, Coppercab got famous because he let himself be targeted by online tormentors and then filmed emotional reaction videos. And the angrier and more unhinged his responses became, the more viewers loved it.

He claims YouTube has such a negative effect on his well-being at times that a psychologist once told him to stop posting content.

‘I was a kid when I posted “Gingers Do Have Souls”, so I was blissfully ignorant and didn’t know how to deal with all these people,’ he tells me.



‘My second video was literally called “Attention Haters”. I kept getting tonnes of subscribers and a lot of them were people wanting to fuck with me.’

It was a baptism of fire that launched Coppercab to global fame, yet also exposed him to a level of abuse few people would be able to handle – let alone a lonely, awkward and ever-so-slightly podgy teenager from the Deep South.

‘Gingers Do Have Souls is the 7th most commented video in YouTube history,’ he says.

‘i think it says something about the internet and humanity when the majority of those comments were from haters.’

A screenshot from Coppercab’s now-iconic ‘Gingers Do Have Souls’ video

A lot of the hate came from people who think he’s a ‘troll’ – an accusation that has been levelled at him ever since he first shot to fame. This is the question I really want to answer once and for all, so I’ve spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time watching Coppercab video’s and delving deep into his story.

During his remarkable life, Coppercab has starred in a reality television series called Hollywood Hillbillies, told the world he had changed gender to become a woman and literally battled the right-wing by getting in the ring to fight (and lose) a boxing match with shock jock Gavin McInnes.

He’s an outspoken proponent of ‘woke’ feminism and argues that ‘gingers’ deserve to be regarded a separate race, rather than lumped in with white people.

To Coppercab, the abuse of red-headed people is literally a hate crime and his ‘people’ deserve to be given the same legal protections as ethnic minorities.


A lot of people found this political stance hilarious. But Coppercab’s not laughing.

He claims to be deadly serious about his view that redheads have suffered serious mistreatment at the hands of ‘straight white men’.

‘You can define a race as a group of people who share common physical characteristics,’ he says.

‘We’ve got freckles, red hair and blue or green eyes. We’re not white. We’re not regular white people.

‘We have a lot of things different.’

At this point, Cameron makes a rare intervention in the conversation and says: ‘You burn more.’

‘You’re such a fucking arsehole,’ Coppercab replies.

He goes on to discuss the idea that redheads come from Mars and insists he’s being totally serious.

‘I don’t think we’re from here,’ he says.

‘Hear me out. I think we’re from Mars, the Red Planet.

‘Listen. We have different pain tolerance levels. We wouldn’t get sunburned on Mars because it’s further from the Sun, yet we’d still get more vitamin D than you guys would.

‘We would fare better on Mars than white people.’

He adds: ‘I know it sounds crazy, but you have to be open to new ideas.

‘For a long time, people thought the Earth was flat. We haven’t explored the oceans.

‘You can’t say you know everything and prove redheads aren’t from Mars.’

Which doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d say if you genuinely were an activist campaigning to end the oppression of ginger-haired people.


But, again, he tells me he means it.

I’m not sure if I believe him. And then the conversation turns deadly serious.

Life before Coppercab

Innocent times: Coppercab as a child (Image: Coppercab)

To understand the story of Coppercab, you have to appreciate the tragedy of his early life.

In 2005, when he was just 12-years-old, Michael lost his mother, Elecia, who slipped into alcoholism before her death.

Michael’s father left home soon after and he moved in with his grandmother, who he calls ‘Mema’.

She has since become famous in her own right and landed a book deal after appearing alongside Michael and several other family members in three seasons of Hollywood Hillbillies.

Michael’s dad, William, was 31 when he met 21-year-old Elecia, who was working as a waitress at a diner.

‘My dad thought she was beautiful and left her a huge tip, so she goes over to him, rips open his shirt, takes a marker, pops the cap out of her mouth and writes the number in big black numbers on his chest,’ he says.

‘She was a very confident woman, very pretty. She was a brunette. He was a redhead when he was younger, but it faded over time to become brunette.’

He thinks for a moment.

‘But let’s not objectify. People always say red-headed women are beautiful while the men are seen as a bunch of fucking idiots or buffoons. Like, we’re seen as clowns, like Ronald McDonald.’

Michael Kittrell before he was Coppercab, shown with his parents (Image: Coppercab)

Michael enjoyed a ‘wonderful’ childhood in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.

‘I lived in a house where I truly believed in magic,’ he remembers.

‘Not like Wiccan bull shit – not to discriminate against people who believe in that – but magic like Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and tooth fairy.’

However, things started to go badly wrong as Michael grew up.

‘It was a very dysfunctional household – my mom used to say we put the fun in dysfunctional,’ he says.

The Kittrell family all struggled with their weight, prompting Michael’s mother to get gastric band surgery to restrict her appetite.

‘She told Mema: “I ain’t gonna die fat like ya’ll.”

‘Then she had surgery where they went into her stomach and made it the size of a golfball so she got a full feeling and couldn’t take much food.’

Elecia and William Kittrell (Image: Coppercab)

Her craving for carbohydrates quickly became so severe that the only way she could satisfy it was to drink alcohol.

Then one night she went out of the house, drunk, and didn’t come back.

‘My dad had problems and wouldn’t get out of bed when she asked him to drive her to the garage – probably to get more beer,’ he remembers.

‘She went outside and tried to hail down a car, but the streetlight was out so it didn’t see her and hit her head-on.’

Michael wasn’t in his home that night, but was staying at a friend’s house. He will forever remember the moment he said goodbye to her, unaware he’d never see her again.

He recalls: ‘The last thing I ever said to her was: “I love you.”

‘It was like God was giving me a moment with her when she wasn’t drunk. She had a real bad problem before the end and was drinking all the time.

‘We kind of lost her before she died.’

Recalling the moment he found out his mother had been hit, Michael says: ‘I was in a car with mom’s friends. We saw an ambulance drive by and run through a red light, and I was like: “I bet that’s going to my house.”

‘Maybe my mom and dad are fighting? Perhaps she’s thrown a purse at him or some crazy shit’s happened?

‘Then I saw an ambulance blocking the highway. I got out and the ambulance was, of course, outside my house.

A young pre-fame Michael Kittrell with his grandfather, who ‘used to collect snakes in jars and was a wild kind of guy’. He nicknamed Michael ‘Copperhead’ (Image: Coppercab)

‘I walked into the front room and my dad was there with a preacher, who said he had some bad news.

‘So I went outside. It was snowing. I looked up at the sky and cried a little bit as I thought about it.

‘It sounds really bad but I was kind of relieved. Not that my mom died, but because she was out of pain. She was suffering a lot.

‘Some nights she would scream at me telling me I was a mistake. It was the alcohol. She wasn’t herself.

‘Now she had passed away I felt like she was at peace, like I’d gone through a dark storm and everything was suddenly quiet. It was was peaceful in a very sad sombre sense.’

His father left soon after and Michael moved in with Mema and a large extended family.

And then everything changed.

Gingers Do Have Souls

The year 2010 was a golden era for YouTube, with viral hits including the Bed Intruder and Double Rainbow racking up hundreds of millions of views.

But it was a very bad time for redheads.

In 2005, a South Park episode in which Cartman claimed that ginger people didn’t have souls marked the beginning of a global outbreak of redhead terror – and would later inspire Coppercab’s now-legendary video.

In school playgrounds around the world, bullies observed annual ‘Kick A Ginger Day’, which started as an online joke but resulted in a few incidents of real-life violence and heaped misery onto flame-haired folk.

With no parents around and a limited understanding of the power of YouTube, Michael Kittrell decided to stand up to the bullies and uploaded a video which insisted that ‘gingers do have souls’.

‘I was bullied pretty bad because of my hair colour,’ he remembers.

‘All the shit just piled on and kids don’t know what you’re going through at home. They are ruthless.’

A billboard for Hollywood Hillbillies, a reality television show starting Coppercab and his extended family (Image: Coppercab)

The night after he uploaded the video it got 100,000 hits, before going on to be watched more than 100 million times in various formats.

He says: ‘I didn’t understand what YouTube really, truly was at the time. I was kind of in over my head.

‘It’s cool in retrospect, but at the time the video going viral was terrifying. All these people could see me like I was a fish in a tank.

‘I thought YouTube was a place to reach out to others, but they just started laughing at me and I felt more alone than ever.

‘Now I’d say it was one of the best things which have happened to me – but at the time and for years afterwards, it was the worst thing in my life.

‘Everyone thought I was joking – but I wasn’t. It was five years after my mom died and was a kid getting bullied at school, so I made a video which went through all the bullshit.

‘Then everyone is picking on me again taking it for a joke.’

He leans in close to my dictaphone and roars: ‘It is really fucking annoying.’

The birth of Coppercab

After Gingers Do Have Souls went viral, Coppercab was bombarded with abuse on YouTube and found himself at the centre of a troll storm of almost unprecedented fury.

His persona was cemented in a second video, which was called ‘ATTENTION HATERS!!!’ and showed him losing his rag whilst shouting about all the bullying he received online.

‘It’s like you people aren’t even human,’ he said in one video.

The more over-the-top his reactions, the more clicks, views and clout he received.

Yet people immediately started to question if he was joking, asking if his rage was an act and suggesting he was only in it for the money.

This impression was hardly helped by the fact he would be hired to star in Hollywood Hillbillies along with his Mema and members of his extended family.

‘People like [YouTubers] Ray Wiliam Johnson and Smosh were talking about me and calling me a troll, as if I was joking,’ he says.

‘How was I supposed to know my video would get 100 million views?

‘I just saw YouTube as a platform where I could express myself and get help or advice in the comments.

South Park’s caricature of CopperCab (Image: YouTube)

‘It went way wrong. I didn’t know how brutal the internet could be. 4Chan, Cracked, Encyclopedia Dramatica and all the big sites were going after me.’

As his fame grew, trolls started posting his address online and people began turning up at the house to shout abuse. The comments on all his videos were filled with people calling him a ‘fat ginger’ and mocking him mercilessly.

Then, a few months after Gingers Do Have Souls, South Park itself parodied his video.

‘I swear I didn’t speak to the creators of South Park before they made that episode,’ Coppercab says.

‘People thought I gave them permission so must be in on the joke.

‘Afterwards, everything got worse.’

With fame came money. Michael monetised his videos and earned enough to buy his first car: a Honda Civic with a Nyan Cat sticker.

But the bullying didn’t stop.

Flashback to the present

A screenshot from one of Coppercab’s live streams. An anonymous person using his dead mother’s name has just made a donation (Image: YouTube)

Nowadays Coppercab is living in the UK after leaving Trump’s America as a ‘refugee’.

He’s working closely with a svengali known as Cameron, who has a successful career outside YouTube and a very young, Scandinavian girlfriend that calls him ‘Daddy’. The pair met on Coppercab’s Discord chat room.

Cameron is very charming in person and claims to have three kids with two other women. He wears sunglasses when we meet to hide his identity.

He clearly has a sadistic side to his character which is reflected in the life he leads with his beautiful girlfriend as well as his work with the YouTuber whose strings he pulls.

He prefers to stay off camera and behind the scenes so I agreed not to reveal details of his identity.

When I ask Cameron why he decided to get involved with Coppercab, he says he only wants to make the YouTuber live up to his potential and cement his place in YouTube history.

There is a strong element of cruelty to Cameron’s interactions with Coppercab, but there is also warmth and kindness. The two obviously have a lot of affection for each other.

Cameron clearly understands that people want to see Coppercab getting annoyed, so has set up various torments for him to endure.

One of the recent mega-viral hits the pair scored recently involved Michael eating a super-strong chilli and then, well, pooing himself.

In one stream called ‘Wake Up CopperCab! (CopperCab cries)’ posted in 2017 – one of the first he made with Cameron – he broke down in tears whilst looking though pictures of his dead mother and absent father.

Although the other guests on the stream offer him a sympathetic ear, the video description says: ‘Copper fell asleep while on camera so… we turned on the stream, woke his ginger ass up, and made a show out of it. Had fun with everyone.’

Cameron also arranged for the YouTuber to appear on a show with the Australian internet personality Bearing, in which five people bombarded him with really nasty and hurtful insults. Eventually, Coppercab became so upset he retreated off camera and could be heard calling out for his Mema.

Yet, strangely, he seems happier in his most recent incarnation as a live streamer and travel vlogger. Although there definitely seems to be some acting up in some of his latest videos, such as one where he falls into a canal in Venice and another where he claims to have lived homeless in Bristol – neither of which seem particularly convincing.

The live streams are set up to stress out and annoy Coppercab (Image: YouTube)

Right now, Coppercab appears on regular streams in which viewers are invited to donate money. Whenever they pledge some cash, a grotesquely unflattering image of Coppercab pops up along with an annoying jingle or a clip from one of his songs.

The videos are clearly troll bait because anyone who gives more than $10 gets their message read out by a robotic female voice – which inevitably annoys Coppercab.

‘I call it torture sometimes,’ he tells me.

‘Cameron is always trying to make me earn money with my channel, even though I’ve never cared about that.’

In one of the videos I watched, a troll pledged $10 and made the robo-voice read out a message which said: ‘If it makes you feel any better I wouldn’t have left you if you were my son. I would have just killed you. because you’re a ginger and have no soul… your curse probably killed your mom.’

Other sickos name themselves after Michael’s dead mother and try to get the robot voice to read out the n-word or other sick, racist and horrific statements praising Nazis or lauding Donald Trump.

‘Mema is dirty white trash. Let’s put a Trump 2020 sign on your dead mom’s grave,’ one person wrote whilst making a donation.

In another of the many streams I watched, a user called ‘Copper’s Mangina’ pledged $2 – which was then matched by an account called ‘Mema’s Mangina’. After this, someone called ‘Copper’s Gaping Butthole’ handed over a small fee.

Later, a viewer writes really shocking and disgusting comments about Coppercab having sex with his sister, which the YouTuber duly reads out.

‘You remind me of Stone Cold Steve Austin if he was a beta autistic SJW cuck,’ a fan added in the comments.

It’s really nasty stuff which is only slightly lightened because, at times, it can feel like Coppercab is leading people on a bit.

For instance, there’s one regular viewer called 64BeastyMan who really enjoys handing over cash to ‘annoy’ him. But who wins when a troll hands over hundreds of dollars?

Even though it’s earning him money, the YouTuber does look genuinely irritated when yet another message pops up on the screen as he’s trying to make a point.

Sadly, that’s what people want to see. They hope for videos showing Coppercab close to breaking point and suffering. That’s the sort of content that’s always been his most successful.

The views on his latest streams are small, but the profits reasonably high considering how cheap and easy it must be to make the clips.

It’s an unusual way to make money that has nonetheless earned Coppercab and Cameron enough cash to buy a new camera rig, which they are hoping to use to film a boxing match with the YouTuber Count Dankula, who achieved worldwide infamy after shooting a video showing his pug doing a Nazi salute.

Yet despite seeing the dollar signs popping, I watched several episodes of the new live stream show and got the feeling that I was watching a man being psychologically tortured for the entertainment of an uncaring, remote audience. It wasn’t pleasant viewing.

‘It’s getting to the point where the money is not worth the stress,’ Coppercab sighed during one video.

Feminism and the alt-right

For someone who presents as woke and politically correct, Coppercab is very popular among the sort of internet right-wingers who wave Pepe The Frog flags, watch Infowars and support Donald Trump.

Which is mostly because they like hurling abuse at him and laughing at his political ‘beliefs’.

In 2016, Coppercab announced a new persona and declared himself a feminist ‘white knight’, even releasing a song (posted above) which – once more – he claims is totally serious.

‘Most men are rapists – they just don’t want to admit it,’ he tells me.

‘I take that back,’ he adds, leaning into the microphone and roaring a little.

‘Most straight white men are rapists.

‘Every man should be a feminist from birth. We all have mothers, sisters and daughters.

‘We all have girlfriends or wives and want them to succeed. They should be helped to progress and treated equally.

‘Feminism is not anti-men, it’s pro-women.’

Coppercab also enraged right-wingers with his passionate critique of racism in the US.

‘In America – I can’t speak for England – we’ve seen the rise of Donald Trump and the patriarchy making a resurgence,’ he says.

‘We had a black president, but racism reared its ugly fucking head and showed itself for what it really is. There is a lot of dirty laundry to air out in America.’

During this period, Coppercab made himself a number of prominent ‘enemies’ including Paul Joseph Watson, who worked with InfoWars at the time.

Coppercab and PJW spoke behind the scenes, sending each other Twitter DMs before releasing videos discussing feminism from very different perspectives.

Both the videos were huge hits, with Coppercab passionately defending his ‘social justice warrior’ ideology and Watson attacking his beliefs so savagely Facebook later hit him with a three-day ban.

I asked Watson if Coppercab was a troll, to which he replied: ‘Yes. He’s playing a character.’

PJW did not answer further questions about how he knew this.

Suspended for 3 days by Facebook for criticizing feminism (by posting a parody video). This is beyond a joke now. 😄 pic.twitter.com/hDXDNWiy7E — Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 10, 2017

On Infowars this year, Alex Jones discussed the incident and said Coppercab and Watson were friends – which would prove the video was a stunt and would be strong evidence suggesting the YouTuber was acting.

Copercab denies being friends with ‘Pyjamas Watson’ or the Infowars boss himself.

‘He doesn’t know me so he only has his opinion, as I’m sure many have opinions about him,’ Coppercab said when I asked what he made of the allegation.

‘I’ve never once talked to Alex Jones. I know who he is, but we’re not friends.

‘He must have been smoking gay frogs that day.

‘I’ve never had a long conversation with Paul Joseph Watson. We’ve just had the odd DM here, and there.’

One of Coppercab’s most famous videos also came during this period, when he appeared on an online talk show in 2017 hosted by right-wring shock jock Gavin McInnes.

During a brutal exchange, McInnes insulted his guest in the most shocking and appalling terms, calling him a ‘sub-fag’, mocking his upbringing and then saying: ‘I think your mother died of shame.’

If you're wondering what Gavin McInnes is up to these days, he just did a boxing match with the kid from the "gingers have souls" video. pic.twitter.com/J1KxT0ku5F — Will Sommer (@willsommer) June 11, 2019

It’s difficult to imagine anyone laughing along with insults like that.

McInnes then concluded the video by saying: ‘I have no idea if that guy is a troll or not.’

Nonetheless, the video went massively viral and helped to make boost the fame of both YouTubers.

It also started a rivalry that continues to this day and culminated in a boxing match earlier this year – which Coppercab lost after McInnes predictably overstepped the mark and smacked his opponent in the face after the bell had rung,

‘He’s a fucking compulsive line crosser,’ Coppercab said.

‘He pissed me off and I punched the shit out of him when I got into the ring and enjoyed every fucking minute and loved every time my first met his face and his bony fucking cheeks.’

Changing gender

Coppercab changed her name to ClaireCab in 2016 (Image: Coppercab)

I first spoke with Coppercab after she renamed herself ClaireCab in 2016.

She took a six-month break from YouTube before releasing a video entitled ‘I’m done pretending. #TransPride’ which is so intense and emotional that it’s hard to watch.

Michael says he started transitioning three years beforehand during the filming of Hollywood Hillbilles, which is why he appeared thinner than usual before becoming a she.

Did she have a breakdown during her time away from YouTube?

‘A little bit,’ Michael, who is no longer Claire, says.

‘I wouldn’t call it a full breakdown out of respect to people who have really suffered breakdowns. But I was really going through some shit.

‘It was a journey of self-discovery – which I don’t mean to sound corny.

‘I wasn’t going to come back to YouTube, but thought maybe there was a kid out there who was going through something similar to me and feeling alone.

‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if suddenly Coppercab came out as trans? Wouldn’t they feel less alone, less sad and a bit better?

‘If I helped someone it was worth it for me.’

He once again appeared on the Gavin McInnes show during this period, where he flashed his growing breasts but refused to show the shock jock his hormone pills, once again allowing McInnes to hint that the transition wasn’t entirely genuine.

Coppercab tells me he stopped taking hormones because they caused heart problems.

‘I didn’t want attention. I didn’t know that video would go viral, because I was away for six months,’ he goes on.

‘Then it was number one trending thing on Facebook but again people were hating on me as always.

‘That was the most stressed out I’d ever been.’

With the stress came new career opportunities. Coppercab claims he was approached by a representative of the production house which made I Am Cait, a documentary series about the transition of Caitlyn Jenner, and Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

‘They offered me a show,’ he alleges.

‘I spoke to a producer on Skype video chat.

‘They asked me what I wanted to do and said that if I was willing to do everything and was comfortable being on camera, they would fund it.

‘In retrospect, it does seem a little exploitative. But I think they were looking to help me.

‘I didn’t go to them. They came to me.’

He goes on to criticise ‘trans trending’ – the word for people who claim to be trans as a fashion statement.

‘You have transtrenders and I was the transginger,’ he says.

‘Hollywood was taking advantage of these poor souls and using them for views.

‘This isn’t fucking Jerry Springer. It seems a bit white trash to take advantage of people for ratings – it’s very cold.’

We asked a spokeswoman for Bunim/ Murray Productions, makers of I Am Cait, if the company offered to pay for him to undergo sex-change surgery on camera.

She said: ‘We’ve checked our records and spoken to the whole team and there seems to be no record of the person in question.

‘Given the company takes duty of care incredibly seriously and sensitively handles its approach to all of its productions, an “exploitative” approach would never be taken.’

The Coppercab ‘character’ confession

This is Coppercab in his most recent incarnation, where he called himself Ironcab and fought a boxing match against the alt-right shock jock Gavin McInnes

The more I got to know Coppercab, the more I believed him. His videos are so emotional, so tense, that I sometimes worried he was suffering from some sort of mental health problem.

I also feared this is what made his videos so compelling. People want to see him crack.

As I wrote this article over many long weeks and watched more and more of his videos, I started to think that the haters had got it wrong. Coppercab is for real and he needs our love and support.

And then a video dropped to YouTube which changed everything.

Michael quickly deleted the footage after recording it a few years ago, but one of his tormentors must have recorded it.

In the clip, which was originally filmed for a small audience, he says it’s the haters and cruel comments which make his channel funny, describing his work as ‘performance art’.

‘It’s been that way since the beginning, since Gingers Have Souls,’ he says.

‘I took two takes of the video and was laughing in one of them, saying “watch this go viral” or some shit like that.

‘I blend fiction with non-fiction.’

He says the abuse doesn’t bother him and claimed to be ‘acting’ as a feminist, describing the ideology as ‘bullshit’.

‘I’m not flat out saying I’m a troll,’ he added.

‘But once you say you’re a troll, the troll is over.

‘Being a bully on the internet doesn’t make you a troll. You’ve got to do something clever and original.

‘I struck YouTube at a time where I kind of knew what was going on.’

The video has now been removed from YouTube.

There are several clips in which Coppercab is clearly acting, such as one in which he sets up a dating profile and another with the travel vlogger Harald Baldr, showing the pair pretending to have a fight `on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia.

He also once claimed to have been hospitalised for stress and posted a picture to Twitter showing him wearing a breathing mask. This was actually his Mema’s respirator, he admits when I press him.

When I phone Coppercab to ask about the confession video, he tells me it was shot to basically make a girl’s parents think he was an ordinary guy.

‘I am not a troll I am not an actor. I have struggled in a romantic sense my entire life,’ he insists.

‘That makes me sound cringey, I’m just like a normal person, although maybe I am a little crazier

‘I’m not an incel but I have issues getting with women, because they recognise me or their parents find out who I am. People get weird about it.

‘That video is one of my biggest regrets in my life.

‘I was trying to impress a girl’s parents – that’s why I deleted the stream in the first place.’

He went on to discuss the dating woes which come with being a YouTuber known for anger and ‘blowing steam of out my nose’.

He adds: ‘If I swipe right on Tinder, every time a girl swipe rights on me first thing they say is 99% of the time: “Aren’t you the ginger kid? Are you really that angry?”

‘If I say yes, then either I’m crazy or a clown. No-one will believe me. I can’t win. People don’t want me to win. They never have. Not in school, not online, not offline.’

‘I was trying to seem like an actor, a method actor.

‘I made jokes – like the video about my dating profile, that was meant to be a joke. I can laugh at myself.

‘But when I’m talking about being bullied at school or saying gingers are their own race or talking about my issues with gender, none of that is a joke.’

‘I could disappear tomorrow or something terrible could happen and people would say: “Oh, he’s joking.”‘

The truth about Coppercab

I’ve been struggling to explain to people why I’ve spent most of my free time recently watching videos by a YouTuber who first went viral 10 years ago.

When I showed my friends some of his early videos (and a few ones of the later ones too), they didn’t even question whether he was acting or not. They thought he was on the verge of a total mental collapse and, frankly, so did I.

The internet has become a conduit of cruelty – a channel for the darker side of humanity – and Coppercab’s videos have always reflected this for me. I can’t imagine why anyone would log on just to scream abuse at a stranger.

Neither can I understand why celebrities like Gavin McInnes or the YouTuber Bearing would post content showing them basically bullying him.

Online society is a lonely place with few protections for the unwary. So when I first watched Coppercab all those years ago, it felt like a metaphor for the grim, atomised, casual brutality of internet culture.

At first, it didn’t even occur to me that he might be a troll or an actor – and then once it did, I couldn’t of anything else.

So here is the truth about Coppercab. Is he an actor? Not all the time – but sometimes, for sure.

But I don’t think anyone could laugh along with someone telling them their mother died of shame or simply shrug off endless criticism about their weight, attractiveness or hair colour.

Coppercab is obviously very funny and he’s clearly joking at times – but also dead serious at others.

If he really is a troll, then everything he’s said about feminism, civil rights and transgender issues would be a lie – and I just can’t square this kind of cruelty with the person I’ve got to know whilst writing this article.

We will probably never get an unequivocal answer to the question of whether Michael Kittrell is a troll or the most bullied man on the internet. Personally, I believe in him. And I hope his soul can find some peace at last.