Pranked by a Psychopath — Sam Pepper
Content warning: Mentions of sexual assault, grooming, and murder
Would you kill your best friend? Or rather, make the whole world think that you did? While the idea is unthinkable to most, fallen YouTuber Sam Pepper saw it as the perfect stunt for views.
English YouTuber Sam Pepper created videos from in the 2010s, amassing a following of 2.4 million subscribers. After starting YouTube, he moved from London to LA, where his content started as your average 2013 prank videos. But Pepper was willing to do whatever it took to be in the spotlight.
As his fanbase grew, so did his disturbing ideas.
The first video that put Pepper’s name in headlines was in 2014 with his Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank. Here, he put a fake hand under his jumper and walked around grabbing women’s asses.
The video received huge amounts of criticism from the internet. To counteract this backlash, Pepper made another video depicting the same prank, but with a woman groping a man. He claimed he was trying to make a point on the lesser reaction this prank got compared to his first video.
At the time Pepper claimed that the clips were designed as a “social experiment” to shed light on society’s flippant attitude to sexual abuse, which affects men and women equally.
On his YouTube channel Pepper said, “I chose to use sexual harassment as the focal point of the experiment. That way, I could pass it off a prank, pretend it’s harmless and watch you all go crazy in the comments.”
As a result of using sexual assault as a social experiment, YouTube banned both videos, believing they’d violated their terms and conditions.
Following this ‘prank’, numerous women shared their experiences of being sexually assaulted by Pepper.
Dottie Martin shared her story of being groomed by Pepper when she was 16 and he was 23. Then, screenshots began surfacing of him calling a 19-year-old a slut, and asking a 15-year-old for nudes.
Despite the hate he received, Pepper remained on the internet. Blinded by the fame and greed the internet had given him, Pepper released the craziest ‘prank’ the internet had ever seen.
In November 2015, Pepper uploaded a video titled, Killing Best Friend Prank. Pepper convinced Vine user Sam Golbach, that his best friend Colby Brock was kidnapped and murdered. Pepper teases to the camera, "Let's see how he reacts to his best friend of five years being killed in front of him.”
In the video, best friends Golbach and Brock are driving when their car is suddenly stopped. A masked man approaches, tying up Golbach. The scene then cuts to a rooftop, where Brock sits bound to a chair, a bag over his head, and a gun pointed between his eyes. Golbach, strapped to another chair, is forced to watch a nightmare unfold.
Audiences watched Golbach plead for his best friend’s life as Pepper got off on the chaos. Pepper could have chosen to end it here, but he took it one step further — he pulled the trigger.
After watching his best friend’s body fall to the ground, it was 30 seconds of horror before Colby rose, revealing the prank. Pepper reveals himself, laughing as though he’d just watched someone slip on a banana.
The purpose of a prank is to have fun and watch the victim smile and roll their eyes once the truth is revealed. But this one was met with no eye rolls, only Golbach’s screams.
The video blew up, reaching four million views within days. YouTube was bombarded with requests for the video to be removed. At the time, YouTube’s guidelines were hazy, and claimed the video did not breach their guidelines. Today, YouTube’s misinformation guidelines have been strengthened, stating that they do not accept videos which “fabricate events where there’s a serious risk of egregious harm”.
As backlash grew, a petition started to shut down Sam Pepper’s channel. Pepper eventually made all his videos private, deleted his tweets in February 2016, and uploaded an apology pleading for forgiveness while tears streamed down his face.
Pepper claimed all three of them — including Golbach — were in on the prank. However, many users online don’t believe this, with one Reddit user saying: “I’m surprised at how many people actually believe that the prank was planned, that Sam [Golbach] knew about it and was acting. It’s so obvious they only started saying that so that it would stop the backlash Colby and Sam Pepper were getting.”
Whether it was staged or not, this fact does nothing to erase the torture scene — labelled ‘prank’ — forever stuck in viewers’ minds.
This prank wasn’t the last of its kind. Fake car crashes, cancer diagnoses, and bankruptcy pranks brought other YouTubers to fame, including Jake Paul, Smosh, and David Dobrik. Content like this has spread beyond YouTube, with disturbing pranks and skits now being posted on TikTok and Instagram.
Internet sites are still lenient when it comes to what people can upload. However, with the rise of cancel culture, online outrage has become a powerful tool to push creators off the internet. It appears online strangers are stronger than the guidelines which were made to protect us against harm.
Pepper never quite regained his popularity on YouTube. So, he took to TikTok instead, with a younger audience that wouldn’t remember his old content. He now has 4.5 million followers on the app, more than he ever had on YouTube.
An unsatisfying end to the story of the ‘prankster’ turned psychopath.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to be around him on April 1st.