Karl Jobst and SomeOrdinaryGamers (separate video linked here) have accused Jirard Khalil of lying to viewers about his charity.
Jirard is a YouTuber who runs a channel known as the Completionist, where he plays games to 100% completion and reviews them based on how enjoyable the experience was.
The Open Hand Foundation, which was co-founded by Jirard in 2014, was set up to raise money for dementia charities after his dementia-stricken mother passed away. However, their yearly filings with the IRS suggest that none of this money has been donated to charity.
Jacque (Jirard’s brother) responded to Karl’s emails to the Open Hand Foundation claiming that they are still searching for the correct charity to partner with and disburse these funds, whereas Jirard claimed that he was only aware that none of the funds had gone out last year, yet is still openly promoting Open Hand on stream and claiming they support the UCSF, Alzheimer’s Association, the AFTD and many other charities.
I have only EVER heard nice and good things about Jirard, so I’m going to wait for some actual evidence before making any judgements.
Jirard’s Open Hands charity is a nonprofit so you can see their books through their tax filings.
The most likely explanation is that Jirard is incredibly busy running a successful YouTube channel and so he had no idea how the charity is being run.
When being made aware in 2022 he said he stepped in to make sure the money is being donated the way he believed it was. That wasn’t reflected in their 2022 tax filing but it still can be true for 2023, the public will find that out when those filings are made public.
Karl Jobst is a really good content creator but he has a bit of a dramatic flair and tends to call things “illegal” when they actually aren’t and he did in this video again. Still I think that it’s important to make call outs like this. And I think that Jirard will make it right, now that he has been made aware. It’s clear from the filings that they aren’t committing fraud or skimming off the top. They just were sitting on the money probably because the task of running a charity was beyond their capabilities
I feel like your comment is the most reasonable explanation. The charity sounds like it isn’t actively being run. It is probably a misunderstanding. I can see the charity paying for a group to run the charity, but because their income is very small, they want the charity ran frugally, and are paying the minimum required for management. The management is running the account, making sure taxes are filed, etc, but Jirard thought they were dispersing the funds too. They don’t talk much, other than a quick review at tax season, and the issue is never addressed, because both sides don’t interact enough to see the difference.
This video really frustrated me, because Jobst is claiming things “Fraud” when the evidence he provided looks nothing like that. It isn’t great PR, but nothing so far looks remotely illegal, or even unethical. The internet just loves ragging on a “bad guy,” and are eager to get mad at the bad guy of the day.
The one thing that does lean more towards malice is the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired long before the charity existed.
That said, I otherwise agree. If the IRS forms are right, the money is just sitting there. That’s not illegal in itself. It just looks bad.
Jobst also doesn’t always know US law, since he has a legal background in Australia (and I’m not sure what his specialty was, either).
He particularly mentioned in the video that the IRS isn’t an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, which is true. I’ve seen the bullshit US tax protesters sometimes get away with. Irwin Schiff, for example, once signed a blank 1040 form and sent it into the IRS. He almost made it to the statue of limitations until he went on The Tomorrow Show (a nationwide NBC talk show) and bragged about it. That said, people in the US do tend to think of the IRS as an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, and that’s why the response with the guy came back that way. Jobst doesn’t seem to be fully cognizant of how people in the US view the IRS.
Yes, their quoting of the guy who was fired before they filed as a non-profit was very deceptive. And soliciting with the list of other organizations that the money supposedly goes to is as well. It is probable that they donated funds to these places when it was just them raising money for their mom before they decided to organize as a non-profit in 2014 (when Jirard’s YouTube channel started to really gain popularity). The problem lies in that these donations can’t really be proven just based on public filings and so they create the appearance of impropriety if not proving actual impropriety.
Over half a million dollars isn’t “very small” for this type of charity in my opinion.
Not to mention, they seem to admit they’ve known about the issue for a while, but have continued to fund raise and present the charity as if it’s been running along doing good this whole time, but they’ve just been hoarding the money so far.
I’m certain he’s very busy. He’s busy with his channel, and he was also one of the cast of G4 for the short time it returned, and they were being overworked I think there, and he was still running his channel. This is why you hire people to handle these things though. It’s bad that it wasn’t handled properly, but not necessarily malicious. I’ll forgive a mistake, but if it turns out it was a scam that’s unforgivable.
Based on the reported expenses being around $10,000 a yea; I don’t think they were trying to run a scam or trying to be malicious. I think they wanted to honor their mom, but didn’t have the time to run the charity or donation volume to justify hiring someone to run it. Not an excuse for how they ran things of course, I think it wasn’t fair to the people who gave them money that they solicited donations on how they wanted things to be rather than how they actually ran it. Whether they knew or not that the money was just sitting there isn’t an excuse. If they were soliciting donations then they have a duty to inform themselves.
And on the other hand, Karl Jobst has always been very well researched in his videos, so I’m a big torn here. Definitely going to keep an eye on this and see where it goes before making my own conclusions.
He’s also someone who hangs around with nazis which is wild. He backed away from them when it all came out but then got chummy again so I got the fuck away from his content. Which is decidedly in the outrage bait genre these days.
https://imgur.com/a/X7qLRXa his friend who he promotes in his videos, nazis fuck off, fuck you if you support this
Are we talking about RWhiteGoose here?
I mean… Goose is still prominent in the Goldeneye speedrunning community, and was only banned from The Elite for about a year before he was welcomed back. Jobst made his name speedrunning the same game, even managing to get some uncontested world records.
edit wild how lemmy supports nazis now
Lemmy isn’t supporting Nazis, you’re being downvoted because making accusations without sources is just yelling into the wind. “Just Google it” and “do your own research” is synonymous in practice and adds nothing to the conversation and only is rumormill level gossip.
Provide links to some sources if you have some legit concerns, because that’s definitely news to me.
i guess supporting nazis is more important than typing two words into a search engine
https://imgur.com/a/X7qLRXa have fun, i hope you regret at least a little
I want to be clear, and you should too - RWhiteGoose is a legitimate nazi, and Karl Jobst is his friend and supporter.
edit, yes lemmy supports nazis. here’s your links and yet still.
Firstly, these screenshots are from The Elite’s and RWhiteGoose’s own Discord servers. He was part of the site’s council that effectively moderated Goldeneye speedrun records and set precedent for new rules, hence why they didn’t do anything until this all came out.
Secondly, Karl barely took part in discussions on these servers. Of the 150 screenshots, he appears in a grand total of one where he debates the taboo surrounding white people saying the n-word with Goose. He even addressed the interactions he had with Goose and all the allegations made against him by Tomatoanus and others in a video.
Which he’s already debunked?
https://imgur.com/a/X7qLRXa his friend who he promotes in his videos
https://youtu.be/3_jcpig-C2s?t=245 as I said before, debunked. Understandable you got swept up in the fray but he was just as disgusted as you are.
none of that is debunked, he’s just trying to worm his way out of it. the correct thing to do when you find out someone is a nazi is to cut them out. he doesn’t, then he tries to say i’m just trying to help him be a not nazi by promoting and featuring him in my videos.
you’re a fool to believe that for a moment, especially when it comes from him.
i want to be incredibly clear here, nothing is debunked. he said what he wants to say, you choose to believe him at face value.
You have been incredibly clear, and so has he. He is clear on his disgust and why he chose to help him rather the cut off all ties and whilst I would not do the same myself I do not condemn others who try to.
But so far there has been no evidence that he supports or sympathises with any Nazism ideals or ideas which to me is the breaking point.
If there is something I have missed then please show me but I have not seen anything to the contrary.
…did you watch the video? You can see their contributions have been $0 year after year with their tax filings, and Jirard admitted they haven’t donated anything.
I don’t know who this guy is or anything about the situation other than what’s written here, but if he’s naming specific charities supposedly receiving these donations, it makes zero sense that they’d be “looking for a good charity to donate to.” If that were the case there’d be zero reason to name the ones they did.
you should watch the content in the post before engaging in discussion about it. What you’re saying is kinda the whole crux of the issue. Jirard has been caught lying, saying his fund has donated to specific charities when in reality the fund has donated nothing. You’re right - it doesn’t make sense to lie about something so easily verified, but here we are.
Easy to check the filings yourself. The research presented in the video is legit. There is no reason to have zero donations to charities since 2014. Zero
What “actual evidence” are you waiting for? The filings are public (you can confirm literally right now) and Jirard admitted to the accusations himself? What else do you need?
Welcome to the cult of personality. You could show them the guy’s fingerprints on the bloody knife at a murder scene and they would still ask for more conclusive evidence. 🙄
Speaking of the cult of personality, you see a one-sided YouTube video and automatically assume this has been through trial.
What about 2023? Was the money then donated? Where the tax forms filed incorrectly? Almost a year has passed since this supposedly just came to light for this guy. What has been done to fix it?
I’m not sticking up for him, seems like this was a huge fuckup either way, but I’m not ready to burn someone at the stake for “being a personality”.
The accusation is not that the money has not been donated now, however. It is that the money has been sitting around since 2014, while happily paying themselves “expenses” from it.
It’s just a mix of an externally paid expenses account + a tax writeoff for the years 2014-2022, so even iff the money has now been donated, that doesn’t excuse the previous 8 years and in fact, you can’t shirk legal responsibility that way.
There wouldn’t necessarily be legal responsibility. Things have been reported to the IRS with the money sitting there. If they’re paying themselves “expenses”, that would need to be reported on their personal income taxes. If that’s all there is to it, nothing illegal is happening. As of now, that’s all the evidence tells us.
Bad way to run a charity, but not illegal. That may change with more evidence, like if the money was paid out more than is actually reported.
At the same time, Mutahar and Karl are very well respected content creators who do their research. They wouldn’t drop a bombshell like this if they didn’t have good sources.
I too will wait to see how Jirard responds.
Muta is…not very well respected. His reputation is more of an SEO opportunist.
Karl Jobst hangs out with nazis tho https://imgur.com/a/X7qLRXa how much respect do you get from that
He’s already caught in a lie. Even if his unbelievable story that he, the director of the charity, was unaware the charity never did anything charitable for as long as it has existed (this already makes him guilty of failing the donators by incompetence), he still lied about knowing where the money went for all those years to the donators and CONTINUED TO DO SO AFTER HE ADMITTED HE KNEW ABOUT IT.
Now he claims that he has been looking for worthy charities for over a year while he could easily just donate the money to the charities he has been talking about for years already.
The fact that he kept naming specific organizations where the money was being donated after he was made aware that the money was just sitting there is quite the red flag. This whole situation is very weird and I must say, I’m really curious to understand what is happening.
Also worth mentioning that the Charity organization tried to take the video down, another red flag
The literal IRS tax filing isn’t enough evidence for you?
It points to something hinky, but it’s not complete proof. If it’s correct, then the money is just sitting in an account. It’s not going into anybody’s pockets (although the interest might?). The open question is if the IRS form is accurate to the amount of money just sitting there. If not, then this starts to look like criminal tax fraud.
This could still come down to incompetence rather than malice. That said, the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired years before the charity existed does lean more towards malice.
One other thing to note is that while Karl Jobst does have a legal background, it’s in Australia. The US is also a common law system, but there are enough differences that Karl might not realize what is and isn’t illegal.
Considering the last time Jobst had a big report about someone’s “misdoings” we may be waiting for quite a while.
Dislike the comment all you want, it doesn’t make his wata games heritage auctions insider trader exposé any less of a speculation piece.
I kinda figure he’ll show the receipts, donate the cash and this will end up being nothing in the end.
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Jirard never seemed like the type of guy to pull something like this and I really want to see his response but having the money just sit there (and hopefully still there) for years is a really bad look for him. At the very least he was just clueless but that’s still damaging taking into account all the lies on the charity streams
I really want to see his response
Muta talks to him during his video, I think. Response is basically “I had no clue” mixed with some vague excuses, including some that clearly contradict what was said before.
And then does the “But I don’t know how to fix this, so if you have any idea…”, as if, you know, donating the fucking money is such a difficult thing to do. And like Muta says, they don’t even detail their operating expenses, so any accountant could have a field day with that.
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but after listening to the call, basically he pass the blame on both because they found the issue, to the point of saying that they did it for the views…
After that I knew that something is off, then he replied with something like “what do you want me to do, give all the money away, that will only make me look bad if I do it right now”, but that was the goal of the donation.
I mean, I wouldn’t see an issue if he was giving money but he didn’t and he was claiming to donated to several associations, which didn’t get a single dime
Edit: big fingers small cellphone.
bamlame
Woooah, Black Betty
Sorry, big fingers and small cellphone is a bad combination
All good man, just poking fun
Laughing hard at this and singing it in my head lololol
claiming that they are still searching for the correct charity to partner
Isn’t that something you should do before you start a donation drive? Wtf?
No, you don’t understand, this is decades long process for most NPOs and charities. Some will wait for a century or more to find the right organization. Doctors without Borders, for instance, has a notoriously difficult time performing their duties as the borders keep changing over time as they wait for the right fit–many of their doctors are, in fact, within borders.
My charity has a pile of gold that a dragon sits on until the dragon has found a CEO and board of trustees who can withstand 20k° of dragonfire. Until then, I’d be a fool not to collect interest, for charity of course.
And if you happen to use this interest and money to fund your company while you search for the right charities to support it’s OK. It’s all for charity sake after all!
It is standard practise to use part of the donations for expenses and administration after all
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Yeah, unless it’s a specific fundraiser (as in, “We match all external donations up to X”), there’s no reason not to donate directly, in particular for cases where it’s easy enough to find a charity to directly support that isn’t someone’s personal tax deduction scheme.
Usually because it’s part of a fundraiser like this one.
Because sometimes it’s nice to feel like you’re a part of a community. I get it.
Funny enough, I think the most blatant and consequential example of this not being able to be taken in good faith is the use of the quote from the UCSF person on the charity website. A person who was fired for money problems 7 years before the charity existed.
No matter what explanation they can give for why they have a quote from him thanking them for donating to UCSF, I see no way for the explanation to be good.
Well, since they did not donate anything they couldn’t get a quote from anybody they donated to, that would be legitimate.
I don’t know what was their endgame? It’s been going on since 2014, how could they not think this would have come out eventually.
Yeah, that was the part that got me. That makes it seem really scummy even of there is some kind of genuine explanation for this.
Wonder what happened to all the interest it had built up
Youtube/twitch is chock full of these people.
If you want to give your money away do it to an established charity where you know where the money is going.
People who give tons of money to twitch or YouTube streamers are goobers/suckers.
I upvoted you because I share the sentiment, but if you spend 2 hours everyday entertained by a single person, then what’s bad in giving them money?
If you want to give money to them, nothing. If you are giving them money to give to a charity and they don’t, that’s fraud. It’s the fraud that’s bad.
I see he’s going for the career downfall completion
In all honesty I’m shocked. Jirard is one of the few YouTubers I have (well, had) a tonne of respect for.
Part of me wants to hope there’s a rational explanation for why he and his foundation sat on viewer donations for a whole decade whilst knowingly misleading donors that their funds were going to a charitable cause, but I really think this is going to end his career. Just wait until every other YouTuber picks this story up, or when it goes viral on Reddit…
Hint: there is no excuse thats legitimate. Ive busted local charities the same way.
I think some explanations are worse than others.
Either the OHF have been incompetent with filing their annual returns, have been incompetent with actually ensuring the money goes to the right people, or there’s some embezzlement going on.
Well, Jirard admitted on the call in the video that he knew almost two years ago that the charity had never donated to anything. So strike those options off your list.
Same with feeling shocked. He always seemed so wholesome and I like his videos. If this is a bad at it seems, then yeah. His channel is going to start hemorrhaging subscribers.
Big “I pledged it” energy here.
I watched the video. It’s definitely not looking good for Jirard but I’ll reserve judgement until he responds. These allegations are really bad.
I haven’t watched this video, but watched the one by No Ordinary Gamer, and he included responses he got from Jirard. It didn’t look great.
I’d say watch both videos, Muta’s video is a little more in depth, but it is just odd to hold onto the money for so long. At least they aren’t spending it on nonsensical things, but if they get audited, that will be a big problem with how they filled out their taxes. I’m hoping for the best though, I do like Jirard and I can’t imagine how it is with your parent/family going through that
It’s more than odd, it’s deception. He has been talking to his donators as if the money has been going to charities for years. He has named specific charities that haven’t received a single dime from them.
At least they aren’t spending it on nonsensical things
They pulled out like 30k two years 10-12k other years. No idea what that was spent on.
Just report him to the IRS and move on. Let them sort it out. If he’s legit the IRS won’t have issue.
Watched it too, fan of both channels so this is strange.
There is a possibility that Jirard just wasn’t in the loop and didn’t know, but someone was (brother?) But regardless this is very suspect.
As a board member of his own charity, he has to be aware of it at some point. Heck, he even acknowledged to know this since 2021 and still nothing happened.
He quickly corrected himself and said 2022.
It’s still a year later by now.
At best, he didn’t know, which means he really didn’t care enough to even check to make sure the money was going to where it was supposed to be going? Like, the ONE thing a charity does? Even so, in 10 years, he wasn’t suspicious at all about not hearing back from these organizations (like a “Thank You for your donation letter”)? He didn’t give a shit about the charity, and used it to flaunt his own brand and ego. And that’s the BEST case scenario.
Worst case scenario he is knowingly committing charity fraud…by using his own Mother as bait. Fucking deplorable if you ask me.
He admitted to taking money out for reimbursement, how the hell did he not know?
Yeah he had no qualms with 12k-30k annually being taken out for “expenses”.
I don’t know about anyone else but I usually check my account before taking out anything over a certain amount. Especially if it was in the thousands as he says.
Not sure, he told that he was aware on 2022, but in 2023 he said that they donated to several associations.
Everything is really weird.
How in the fuck could he not be aware? It’s his channel isn’t it?
It seems like his brother was running things at the charity. Its plausible he just asked his brother where the money was going and trusted him.
That’s a huge stretch. You must be in denial.
No reason to defend him he’s just a stranger on the internet. He owes you nothing.
They are both in on it. Fucking bros for crying out loud.
I think I’ve watched maybe 2 The Completionist videos ever. I’m not in denial about anything here. I am waiting for the other side to respond, and possibly for the IRS to get involved before any final judgement. I just know his brothers statement sounded incredibly sketchy. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if he was embezzling money from the charity sketchy, while Jirard seemed genuine. Maybe Jirard is just a better actor/more charismatic, it is his job after all. Time will tell.
How is that a huge stretch??
He’s listed as a director in the legal documents.
I don’t see how there’s any good explanation though for having a website quote thanking them for donating from someone who was fired for money issues 7 years prior.
Even after he found out it didn’t go anywhere he was still shilling it as it was ALL going to charity. Using his dead mother too. As someone who’s Father died with Alzheimer’s, fuck this guy.
Since 2014 huh?
If it’s true. Fuck him
My grandfather is in the earliest stages of dementia and his side of the family dies of alzheimers a lot…
Well, this is incredibly disappointing. I wasn’t aware the Completionist had a charity dedicated to dementia, but I’ve respected his commitment to preserving gaming media and history. Still none of this looks good and I’m struggling to find a good reason as to why you would just sit on donations for nearly a decade without dispersing them.
