Are we focusing on the wrong details?
I want to preface this by saying I'm a Ben fan, have been subbed on Youtube since the cult series years ago. With that being said, I also love murder mystery games, social deduction, internet detective shit, etc. and I feel we as a community need to try to be as objective as possible when looking at this if we really want to help Bryan. Of course Ben comes from a great place, but he also very much uses content virality to pressure people when other things don't work. I think there have been several things that have been kind of exaggerated for storytelling effect, but he's a content creator so its expected. I will say, after watching the 2 videos I was pretty much all-in on BAM and AFPD being super corrupt and it seemed quite cut and dry. As most of us were, I got quite enthralled by the whole case and started digging for more info. Some of the key things that kind of surprised me when looking into things more:
-The fact that the collection had been in the store for a year and a half before all this went down
-The fact that 50% or so had already been sold and paid out to Bryan
-The fact that the collection retail value is estimated between 1/3rd and 1/2 of what was initially presented to us (Obviously still a large sum of money, but worth noting
-The apparent fact that Ben didn't actually win any court judgments against the previous owners as stated in the videos? Maybe this is still debated and someone can find actual docs, but IF there was never any judgment that corporate or the new owners would have to pay, it just seemingly throws the narrative of the store closing and kind of the whole 1st video into question a bit for me.
To me a lot of this comes down to proving WHAT was left of the collection when the takeover happened, where those items were located (store, storage, etc.), and the value of those items. It feels like we're getting so lost in the weeds on details that don't even REALLY matter to the core case of the stolen collection. Of course corporate handled this super poorly, the police were way overstepping, and the Josh guy is pretty clearly one of the biggest D bags ever just from those phone calls, but if I look at this case like I'm playing a detective game with my friends, shouldn't we first kind of nail down the key details as they pertain to the collection and fight on those?
For example, if we know with 100% certainty that X amount of product was still in the store when corporate took over, and we can prove it, is that not all we should be demanding a response for from Corporate / the new owners? I don't believe we have that, but I also may be missing something.
I know people said we have photos with metadata of sets in the store but what I saw in the shared evidence seemed to kind of back BAM's claim of 3-5K in related inventory if those were all that remained. I also saw in Chrystal's written interview that she was trying to print receipts for items sold August-October while corporate was pushing her out, so that she could know how much Bryan needed to be paid. I thought I also saw somewhere that Bryan was coming in personally to collect payment every month? Is there any chance that there truly was only 3-5K of inventory left? Do we have any hard evidence to the contrary that I just overlooked? Also, wouldn't it mean that Chrystal would be the one owing Bryan for those several months of sales as she was the store owner and the one collecting money at the store? As I understand their agreement, Chrystal operated the business and was meant to pay royalties to corporate and 65% of the sold price of the collection to Bryan. I guess I'm not sure why corporate would be liable for the 65% consignment fees to Bryan for items sold previous to their takeover, aside from just making things right with a customer (which for the record, I think they absolutely should have).
Would love if anyone could share their thought process on this and their reasoning for kind of moving on to different details of the case in their investigative process. They just seem so core to the case to me. This is obviously such a messy situation with pretty much every party having a little bit of culpability, though obviously some parties with much more. Genuinely just want to help get to the bottom of this and not trying to piss anyone off. Hope there are some open minds willing to share their thoughts!
Posted Jun 2, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC