The Try Guys are speaking out about the ousting of founding member Ned Fulmer over an extramarital affair he carried on with an employee.
Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang, the remaining members of the YouTube channel that began its life at BuzzFeed, spoke about Fulmer’s firing in a video posted on Monday titled simply, “what happened.”
“We’re obviously incredibly shocked and deeply hurt by all of this,” Yang said, speaking for the group. “This is someone we’d built a brand and a company with for eight years. We feel saddened not just personally but on behalf of our staff and our fans who believed in us.”
“We’re losing a friend, we’re losing someone we built a company with,” Kornfeld added, holding back tears.
The group revealed that they first became aware of Fulmer’s conduct when fans reached out to them over Labour Day weekend saying they had seen the YouTuber “engaged with an employee in public romantic behavior.” Subsequently, Fulmer confirmed to Habersberger, Kornfeld and Yang that he was carrying on an affair with a Try Guys employee and that the affair “had been going on for some time.”
Habersberger said that the revelation was “very shocking for us” and “we had no idea this was going on.” In the wake of Fulmer’s confirmation, Yang explained that the group began a three-week process engaging with “employment lawyers, corporate lawyers, HR, PR and more in order to make sure we were taking all necessary steps.”
“From the jump, we were acutely aware of just how contrary this was to the values of the company we built,” he added.
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The group cited legal reasons for not being able to discuss more details of their review. However, they made it clear that the review did find Fulmer to have engaged in conduct “unbecoming of our team.” Fulmer was officially removed from the company on September 16. Since then, the remaining Try Guys said they scrapped content featuring Fulmer, costing the group significant sums of money they won’t be able to recoup. Some content was unable to be scrubbed or halted from being released, however.
“It’s weird, we’re sorry it ever happened, and we don’t know what more to say,” Kornfeld said.
As for the future of the Try Guys, the group explained that they are “just sort of figuring it all out one day at a time.”