Logan Paul won't be pursuing legal action against YouTube journalist Coffeezilla after apologising for threatening a defamation lawsuit over a documentary that accused him of running a cryptocurrency "scam".
Coffeezilla, whose real name is Stephen Findeisen, had dedicated over a year to putting together a three-part series about Paul's ill-fated project CryptoZoo, which was supposed to be a game in which users make money by earning NFTs. Paul, who has boxed three times including against Floyd Mayweather, posted a seven-minute video disputing a number of the claims, but has since deleted it.
Paul had threatened defamation proceedings with Findeisen, who he accused of forcing a narrative in the series that has now been viewed almost 18million times. But he is now backtracking on that idea, and has publicly and privately apologised to the reporter for his response video.
After teasing a response to Paul's video, Coffeezilla tweeted yesterday: "Logan called me. He said he’s deleting the two responses, and is dropping the lawsuit threats. I believe he’s making a third response, which I’ll be delaying my video to include. Hopefully this time he takes accountability and refunds the victims of CryptoZoo. That’s what matters."
Paul then posted a message to the CryptoZoo Discord server, in which he insisted that he would be "coming forward with a plan" for the project. "Hey all, just wanted to update you," he wrote. "I deleted my initial response to Coffee's series. It was rash and misaligned with the trust issue at hand, so I called him today and apologised.
"The war is not with Coffee. In fact, I'm grateful he brought this to light. I will be taking accountability, apologising, and coming forward with a plan in the near future. Thank you all for believing in this project and sticking with me. I know it's been bumpy but your support is everything to me and I will make this right."
During his research Findeisen interviewed over a dozen alleged victims of the crypto game, which was never fully released and left many investors allegedly down hundreds of thousands of dollars. And despite there being a number of seemingly bad actors involved in the project, the brunt of the public backlash landed on Paul, who never sold his tokens during the alleged "scam".
Paul had ended his initial video on the topic by claiming that his legal team had stopped him from talking about a number of the allegations directly, seemingly threatening legal action against Findeisen, telling him "We're going to handle this ourselves while we continue to build CryptoZoo and I'll see you in court." His podcast episode discussing the issue is still live with over 1.6m views.
