Stairway to Heaven

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The 33 year old YouTuber, former ALL CAPS member and prominent member of the “Wrock” community Luke Conard has been added to the sexual and emotional abuse allegations ongoing within the YouTube community. Both he and Alex Carpenter are scheduled to appear as guests at Playlist Live.

The allegations against him, initially raised by former bandmate, prominent YouTuber and web series actress and producer Kristina Horner have been added to by YouTuber and fellow former girlfriend Whitney Milam.

http://italktosnakes.tumblr.com/post/79898322770/the-truth-about-all-caps-yes-another-post-about-dating

http://wmilam.tumblr.com/post/79987966729/awkward-boy-stories

Both spoke about their reasons for making their statements, referencing what has been happening within the community in recent days:

“i wasn’t going to speak up about my experiences dating within the youtube community. but as more and more brave women have come forward, i’ve finally convinced myself otherwise. my silence isn’t helping anybody - not even myself. i’ve been crying and i’ve felt nauseous and i’ve felt guilt and remorse and now fuck it, i’m just going to tell my story”

“what’s been surfacing in these online communities this week is bigger than me, and I’ve felt like a coward for remaining silent while too many women I greatly respect & admire have found the courage to put themselves out there and contextualize their negative experiences in the interest of a greater positive outcome”

Abuse

At times Conard is said to have maintained relationships with several women at once, even after initially breaking up with Horner he apparently manipulated her into maintaining a public fascade while he pursued other women. A state of affairs he was apparently happy with until she went on a date with someone else.

“he told me if i didn’t sleep with him on that trip, i wasn’t serious about getting back together and it must mean that i slept with seattle guy on my date. this was absolutely ridiculous, but he forced me to have sex with him to prove i hadn’t slept with someone”

A pattern of behaviour he apparently went on to repeat with Milam after Horner finally ended it for good.

Milam states that he even used YouTube itself as a way to break down her self esteem, forcing her to appear in a video with him and then reading the most vicious comments aloud to her.

Then, months after breaking up with her for the first time:

“I attended a party at his house with friends, drank a lot, blacked out for the first time in my life - I do not remember anything about this party - and woke up the next morning in Luke’s bed. You can imagine my shock. When I asked him to explain, saying I couldn’t remember anything, he swore NOTHING had happened - according to him I was just drunk and fell asleep in his bed […] a girl I didn’t remember approached me to say she had been at that party and tried to get me out of the room after hearing indicative noises inside only to find he’d locked the door”

However, Conard managed to convince her that he had changed, and they began to date again, he sent long romantic emails and discussed the future with her, apparently all the while repeating the same patterns of behaviour apparent in his previous relationships, until she caught him red handed:

“We planned and threw a Halloween party together, and during our party I went up to use my things in his bathroom only to walk in on him in bed with a topless 19-year-old girl he had met on a video shoot a few days ago and previously informed me was a lesbian. He insisted she had cornered him in his room, shut the door, literally thrown him on the bed, and started kissing him entirely against his will. He was sorry he hadn’t ‘resisted’ as much as he should have”

ALL CAPS

ALL CAPS, an Electro-Pop band consisting of Horner and Conard, was formed in late 2009, released three albums “Songs in the Key of Email”, “Lowercase” and “Bmin/E” and toured twice. The band broke up in late 2011, at that time ostensibly because of Horner’s vocal nodes, a painful condition most common among female and child singers:

“people think i quit all caps because of my vocal nodes - and that’s partially true. luke got off easy in that sense. in fact, luke’s part of the reason my nodes got as bad as they did, because he was pretty sure it was something i was making up and encouraged me to sing through it all the time. but the real reason i quit all caps is because the time i spent with luke held some of the lowest moments in my entire life”

Not only that, but apparently Conard used the fact that they never drew up an official contract for the sale of their first album to ensure that he gained all the profits from sales of the first album, which was released independently, subsequent work being released through DFTBA records.

Conard has tweeted about the allegations, promising to make a statement, saying that:

“I’ve had a lot to process the past few days, I’m gonna get some sleep and address it all tomorrow”