MrBeast, Amazon sued by Beast Games contestants for "chronic mistreatment," sexual harassment
The suit comes from five anonymous contestants on the YouTube star's Beast Games competition show
Photo: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic (Getty)
Apparently, Prime Video didn’t learn from the backlash to Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge last year that large-scale competition shows need actual regulations and safety measures for their contestants. Beast Games, the upcoming Prime series from YouTube personality MrBeast, is the latest game show to face allegations of mistreatment and “chaos” from its contestants. Now, five of those anonymous participants are suing MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) and Amazon for, among other things, failure to pay minimum wages and overtime, sexual harassment and failure to prevent harassment, negligent infliction of emotional distress, failure to provide uninterrupted meal breaks, and false advertising. The suit is currently seeking class action status.
With over 1,000 participants competing for a single $5 million cash prize, Beast Games is touting itself as the largest reality show in history, according to Variety. MrBeast is known on YouTube for over-the-top challenges like “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive” and his own version of Squid Game, which he launched two years ago. Still, participants of the latest challenge are saying he wasn’t remotely up to the task of organizing something on this scale. “It’s a Fyre Fest kind of feeling,” an anonymous crew member who “left the production early” told Rolling Stone. “There’s a reason why this level of production hasn’t been attempted before, and it certainly should never have been attempted without people that know what they are doing.”