Are you familiar with the DaddyOFive Youtube account and all of the insane drama surrounding it?
If not, then sit back and prepare to be infuriated.
DaddyOFive is a YouTube account belonging to Mike and Heather Martin, a Maryland couple who enjoys pranking their five children.
Which sounds fine, right? Some good old-fashioned family fun, readily available for us to enjoy.
But if you watch the videos — Mike’s deleted them all from his account, but other users have reposted them — you’ll see that the kids are not having fun. Far from it.
For an example of the kind of people we’re talking about here, check out this video in which Heather decides to “prank” nine-year-old Cody by spilling disappearing ink all over some carpet.
The idea is that she’ll blame Cody for the spill, freak him out a little, then reveal that it’s all a joke. But the execution … it’s actually pretty hard to watch.
She and Mike scream and curse at poor Cody and one of their other sons for four straight minutes, so much that the boys are left hysterical before learning that it was all meant to be a joke.
Pretty twisted joke, really.
In other videos, Mike destroys Cody’s X-Box with a sledgehammer as the boy cries, he pushes Cody down, and he follows Cody around with a camera as the poor little boy screams and begs him to leave him alone.
In recent weeks, people have started paying a lot of attention to the family, even going so far as to create an online petition urging Maryland authorities to investigate Mike and Heather for child abuse.
When the controversy first began, the Martins shrugged it off, making a since-deleted video about it all in which Mike said “This is how we run our house. This is our family.”
Heather added that they’ve already been investigated for child abuse because of their YouTube channel, but nothing came of it.
But once they saw that the outrage wasn’t going away, they changed their tune a bit, releasing a tearful public apology for their behavior.
“This has been the absolute worst week of our life,” Heather says in the video, “and we realized that we have made some terrible parenting decisions.”
It’s a little alarming that they made all these videos, that they were able to laugh as their kids screamed and cried, and that they’re just now realizing how terrible they are, but OK.
They explained that when their videos started getting views, they decided to get crazier and crazier with their pranks to get more and more viewers.
And though they seem to regret the things they’ve done to the kids (or at least like they’re willing to admit they’re wrong to save face), it’s too little, too late.
On Friday, Rose Hall, the biological mother of Cody and 12-year-old Emma, received emergency custody of the two children.
“They’re doing good,” Rose, who lost custody of the kids in 2014 after Mike and Heather allegedly forged her signature on some custody paperwork, said in a statement. “They’re getting back to their playful selves.”
She added that it’s “very heartbreaking and disturbing to see my kids abused.”
It’s unclear at this point how long she’ll keep custody, but the Martins are currently being investigated for any possible crimes related to their videos.
Here’s hoping that, whatever way it happens, they’ll actually learn how completely and unforgivably horrible they’ve been to those poor, poor children.
