Motif Esports Reportedly Disbands After Allegations of Sexual Harassment and Racism

Motif Esports has reportedly disbanded after members of its Valorant team Motif Violet shared instances of alleged sexual harassment, racism and verbal abuse during their time at the organization.

Two former players of Motif Violet Joanne “Joanne” Rae and Barbora “Rebecca” Řezáčová shared their experiences on Twitter and were supported by the other team members. All five players and their coach have left Motif Esports and have started a Valorant team called Karma Valorant.

Leaving Motif Esports

Read: https://t.co/aDeECtjoaw

— joanne ️‍ (@joanne_x8) February 8, 2022

According to a report by Dot Esports, one of Motif Esports’ representatives said that the organization has officially disbanded and that its founder Jack “JawsYT” will no longer be involved in building or managing an organization.

Former Motif Violet players share their experiences

Former Motif Violet captain Joanne explained her decision to part ways with the organization and cited that it was nurturing a toxic environment. She also spoke about the alleged sexual harassment from the organization’s founder JawsYT.

In her Twitlonger, Joanne wrote, “In my time at Motif, I was sexually harassed by the org founder. It was “jokes” for him, but it wasn’t for me and wouldn’t be for anyone else either (I saw it happen to many girls with my own eyes). Also telling one of your players that she is ‘boosted’ to one of her teammates and 1 hour before a big VCT game isn’t the most professional.”

She added that she was constantly guilt-tripped by the founder for not duo-queueing with him. While she thanked some people from the organization, she clarified that it was “the founder himself that caused these issues.”

Joanne’s teammate Rebecca backed her statement by releasing her testimony. She also shared a Twitlonger explaining Violet’s decision to part ways with Motif Esports due to harassment, racism, and lack of human decency.

She wrote, “Although I know the founder can do anything he wants, but I really do feel like he should give his players free hand and trust them in certain things. It has started with really minor and small things, such as the organization members invading our team privacy and not letting us have any private chat. We were not allowed to have a chat just with us girls and the coach. When the coach told them that we will create a private server, where we will have our strats etc, they declined and said that we won’t. Basically forced us into something we were not comfortable with and that was way too complicated for us – using Google Disc to save EVERYTHING. Why would the way we learn the game be a problem to the owner, as long as we are getting good results?”

Former Motif member outlines the situation

Though not personally affected, Rebecca also cited several instances of alleged abuse, including racism. She said that the organization was based out of the United Kingdom (UK) and that most of the staff were also from the UK.

She added, “There is a lot of racism going towards non-UK players. In particular our Turkish player, Mercy. She had to deal with targeted racism towards her, which has been shown publicly on a twitch stream of the organization’s member. The person has not done anything with the racism she was being put through by a person the member knows. Although it was in chat, therefore he was at the same time breaking the basics of Twitch TOS. The people then tried to justify racism and did not even want to accept their own mistakes. Although after she’s been apologized to, the racist remarks have been continued and she has never felt comfortable in the organization itself again.”

According to Rebecca’s statement, even the Czech members of the team were targeted and were “laughed at” for their English.

The organization and the team have deleted their Twitter accounts and the profile of JawsYT has been made private. The players have since received support from the community following the allegations.

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