He told BuzzFeed News that, before that, he spent 10 months in detention as part of a Belgian legal process called arrest huis, where law enforcement can hold you for a period of time out of fear that you may be a danger to society or tamper with evidence pertaining to their investigation.
Wilton has spent the last several months in a psychiatric hospital outside of Antwerp, Belgium, as part of the police investigation that has been open for the better part of the last year. But what would play out online would lead to police in both Belgium and the UK investigating him for distributing child pornography and statutory rape. Allegations from two more minors accusing Wilton of sexual harassment and abuse would surface in a Vice article. Paige, now 18, requested to have her last name withheld for privacy reasons and declined to comment.Īfter Wilton’s 2015 Twitter meltdown, the online backlash mounted. After the tweets were deleted several hours later, Wilton claimed he had been hacked.Īnd two months ago, a British YouTuber named Colossal tweeted a screenshot of an email Wilton wrote where he confessed to having had a sexual relationship with the underage girl. Wilton, who has yet to be formally charged with a crime, met Paige when she was 14.
Things came to a head in December 2015, when Wilton confessed in a series of now-deleted tweets to having a sexual relationship with a UK-based YouTuber named Paige, known as Paige the Panda online, when she was underage - and to posting nude images of her on the platform. But rumors circulated in chat rooms for Minecraft - considered one of the most popular video games of all time - about Wilton’s behavior toward his young fans. His quiet reemergence is happening at a pivotal moment for how YouTube moderates its platform and for how society at large deals with allegations of sexual abuse.īefore Wilton’s disappearance, his LionMakerStudios YouTube channel had around half a million subscribers, with more than 30 Minecraft videos numbering view counts in the millions. After going dark for more than a year amid accusations on social media of soliciting and distributing nude images of his adolescent fans, a Minecraft YouTuber named Marcus Wilton, better known online as LionMaker, has resurfaced.