Rabbitholed #15: Why is Jeff Bezos Allowing Millions of Teenage Girls to Watch the Severely Anorexic Influencer Eugenia Cooney Slowly Kill Herself On Stream?

TikTok—which has banned Cooney—has taken extensive measures to remove content that promotes disordered eating, but Bezos’s massive Twitch platform takes no such responsibility.

This post is free because monetizing it due to the subject matter would feel deeply perverse. If you are a member of the media, I encourage you to steal this story, make it your own and tell it far and wide.

Today’s Rabbithole:

Eugenia Cooney is a 27-year-old Twitch streamer who epitomizes what the pro-anorexia and anorexia fetishist community sometimes call “bonespo”—an even more extreme take on “thinspo”—which promotes calorie restriction, starvation and disordered eating in a competitive way. Cooney’s horrific skeletal appearance is documented lavishly by her sick and enabling mother, Debra Cooney, who is seemingly keeping her daughter trapped and isolated at home with almost no contact with the outside world outside of the online predatory men who pay her daughter tips to spin around, crawl around on the floor, act like a cat and show how weak she is when trying to lift things.

Why You Should Care:

Because Eugenia Cooney is one of the sickest stories I’ve ever encountered online, and even sicker is seeing how far her reach goes in normalizing her self-harm.

There are thousands of posts about her in the pro-ana (or “pro-anorexia”) communities, celebrating her emaciated body.

Just one small sampling:

How is it that TikTok of all the irresponsible platforms in the world could care more about protecting young girls from spreading her influence than Jeff Bezos’s platform, Twitch, where she regularly streams?

Eugenia Cooney’s Family Exploits and Manipulates Their Extremely Anorexic Daughter Which Jeff Bezos Then Platforms on Twitch

Eugenia’s mother is one of the more chilling villains I’ve ever come across. Watching her videos with her daughter will make you sick to your stomach as to just how deeply Eugenia has been mindfucked her entire life.

Debra has gone so far as to terrorize Eugenia’s tiny circle of friends who have tried to save her daughter’s life, going so far as attempting to get one arrested for kidnapping in 2019 when they finally successfully arranged a 5150—a 72-hour psychiatric hold—after Eugenia appeared on stream looking like this:

Soon after this occurred, a PR crisis team was clearly all over the situation.

The angle that was sold online was that the friends who did this were actually “bullies.” And someone, likely the mom I would imagine, realized that they needed to serve up a story that people could swallow so that they could make sense of why Eugenia went away to treatment, give people the mental pleasure and closure of watching her reach out for “help” (to a YouTube personality who could be manipulated for money and the promise of views) which she did with Shane Dawson.

The entire thing was a farce.

Even the therapist who is featured in the documentary is a farce.

Jaclyn Glenn, the friend who managed to get Eugenia into treatment with the 5150, actually asked Kati Morton, the therapist who is featured in the documentary, what she could do to help her sick and clearly starving to death friend, and the therapist is the one who told her how to do a 5150.

Later, in order to milk her own content from Eugenia, Morton the therapist does an interview with Eugenia pretending to not have been involved in the initial hold whatsoever.

The propaganda video by Shane Dawson is here:

The response video by Jaclyn Glenn explaining what really happened is here:

A breakdown of how shady the therapist’s involvement was is here:

A general breakdown of Eugenia’s “descent” is here:

There’s also a whole other rabbithole where Eugenia had a Discord server that was completely infiltrated by anorexia fetishist creeps who groomed and stalked young girls and even suggested that maybe they would like to participate in “meanspo,” which is the participation in bullying and coaching young girls that they are too fat in order to encourage them to lose weight.

Here’s one video on that:

Top 3 Rabbitholed Takeaways:

#1 Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard were a terrible tragedy, and currently it seems another terrible tragedy is unfolding in the house of Debra and Eugenia Cooney.

In cases of Munchausen’s by proxy—as was the case with the Blanchards—we had a mother who made her daughter sick to get monetary benefits, attention and to ensure lifelong dependency.

With the Cooneys, doctors and treatment appear to be actively kept away, and as with the case of the friends who seemingly saved her life in 2019 by initiating the 5150, others who try to advocate for her are threatened and terrorized.

It does not seem to be Munchausen’s by proxy but it could very well be anorexia by proxy.

Her mother struts her skeletal daughter about, zooms in on her legs, seemingly attempts to take upskirt shots, at one time demanded that she undress in front of other people to put on a bikini inside of a store and never once exhibits a caretaker instinct as men pay for Eugenia to demean herself on camera and show off her childlike frame and deteriorating, helpless, fragile mental state. In one of the few videos that feature her father, you can hear her father actually congratulating her for not looking a day over 14.

The daughter is treated like a doll, an accessory, a cash cow and a supportive, affirming caretaker in reverse for the morbidly obese mother. Constantly smiling and apologizing, Eugenia is an empty vessel, and the ravages it has taken on her are extremely clear.

Without parents who actually care for her, she is an anorexia fetishist’s dream served up for enjoyment and role modeling on the livestreaming platform of the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.

#2 When there are 42 documentaries in development after Eugenia Cooney’s passing, I hope that every single one brutally shames the parents and the billionaire platform owners who let such a thing happen.

Performative grief after the fact for preventable tragedies like this are revolting to me. 

Endless documentation online shows how Eugenia has been infantilized and kept dependent by her family who actively terrorize and put the fear of God into anyone who tries to extricate her from what is essentially a live-streamed Stockholm Syndrome hostage situation.

Of course, Eugenia does not see it that way.

The only person she is close to in her life is her mother, which is exactly the way her mother wants it. There’s one extremely disturbing video where Eugenia and Debra switch roles, and we can see as Debra does a high-pitched baby voice and acts helpless while Eugenia repeats what her mother clearly often tells her—“What would you do without me?”—what the reality of her home life is like. Allegedly, when her friends intervened they found out that Eugenia had not been to a doctor in 5 years and that she didn’t want to leave her mother because she once told Eugenia she has a bad heart and she could hurt her mother if she left her. Just monstrous.

The police have been called frequently for welfare checks and the family keeps them away.

And meanwhile, Bezos’s platforming of this living nightmare is ensuring that sleazeball men who get hard-ons for how weak and emaciated and childlike Eugenia is can support her with tips and ask her to crawl around like an animal as she wastes away in front of us, unable to leave her house, with a driver who accompanies her everywhere she goes—like any good pimp policeman guarding the goods would.

We are watching a long-term hostage situation.

If you liked Patty Hearst robbing that bank and bonding with her abusers, you will love Eugenia Cooney desperately trying to not make her terrifying mother angry as she parades her daughter’s skeleton around for the old men who jerk off to it and the little girls who look up to it as #goals.

When one tipster told her that she was like a “skeleton queen,” Eugenia asked her mother if that seemed like a good nickname. They both agreed. It was.

Maybe it’s not so much bonespo. Maybe it’s more like corpsespo.

#3 Eugenia Cooney likely cannot be saved, but we can hold the villains in this story accountable.

From the looks of her recent videos, Eugenia looks even more unhealthy than when her friends intervened and forced her into rehab in 2019. We’re watching her die on camera as she streams—her body twitching, her words stuttering, her circulation severely cut off and appearing to have the cognitive decline and capacity of someone whose life has been stunted into her teens. We’re watching as her mom photographs and promotes her emaciated sickly daughter’s body to the delight of predators and anorexia fetishists who pay to see her degradation.

Jeff Bezos is pumping this garbage out for millions of girls to see and call “goals.” Meanwhile, TikTok of all places has taken a firm stance against promoting self-harm.

Democracy really does die in darkness.

And as Jeff Bezos is well aware, Eugenia Cooney will likely die on Twitch.