Ancil
Abusing children for clicks and views in the name of a ‘prank’ isn’t funny.
After uploading’sadistic’ YouTube videos of their children, one of which showed a gun pointing at them, Michael and Heather Martin faced five years in prison.
They own DaddyOFive, which had over 175 million views before YouTube banned it.
Physical and psychological abuse of their children were featured in some of their more than 300 videos on their 2015-to-2018 channel.
In one video, the pair asked their children to each slap their daughter, reducing her to tears, while another included Michael pointing a gun at Heather and one of his children, which was titled ‘PRANK GONE WRONG DAD PULLS A GUN!!!’.
However, one of the worst they shared showed Michael spraying disappearing ink over his carpet before he and his wife Heather screamed at his youngest children Cody and Alex, who were clearly upset.
It led Cody’s birth mother, Rose Hall, to take custody of him and her daughter Emma, whom she shared with Michael.
Both Michael and Heather can no longer have contact with Cody and Emma ‘unless permitted by court’, while they are forbidden to post anything about them on social media ‘unless it is for legitimate family purposes’.
The parents received five years of probation for child neglect in September 2017, ending in 2022.
Appearing on Good Morning America Lawyer, TV personality Sonny Hostin was asked whether biological mom Hall had a legal stance against the pair.
She replied: “Oh absolutely, I mean think about it these people make between $200,000 to $350,000 a year off of these YouTube videos. So does she have grounds for intentional infliction of emotional distress of her children? Absolutely.
“Do they have the money to pay her? Absolutely, they made money off of these children.”
After Michael and Heather were booted from YouTube, they released a statement to WUSA9, the local news station that led a campaign to ban them from the site and first reported on the account closure.
It read: “Our family has worked very hard to heal and re-establish ourselves over the past 18 months. Through a lot of hard work and introspection, we are all doing well, and are happy.
“YouTube is something we enjoy as a family, and we will continue to do it, within the strict boundaries we have set for ourselves. For the sake of our privacy and continued healing, I have no further comment on anything past, or present at this time.”
