The Chris Chan Experiment

While we’ve talked about some dark matters before, this piece truly deserves a content warning.

So, this is it.

You may not have heard of Christine Chandler, aka Christian Weston Chandler, aka Chris Chan, until very recently perhaps, but he is one of the most documented people on the internet. There is one documentary series alone about him on YouTube, which consists of 58 videos, each one about 40 minutes long, which has had over 28 million views.

Interest in him is also said to have led to the growth of the website 4chan, and it even led to the creation of another website specifically to discuss him, CWCki Forums, which was later renamed ‘Kiwi Farms’.

The story of Chan, from Virgina, USA, is a disturbing one with shocking similarities to that of Jessica Yaniv. He found a fanbase as a creator of comics, most notably the Sonichu series in the early 2000s, and as a YouTuber. Chan has high-functioning autism and claims he was abused as a child. He was expelled from college for repeatedly advertising for a girlfriend using posters and later exhibited sex pest behaviour when he drew pictures of himself having sex with a woman he knew, allegedly in order to suppress his fantasies of raping her. He has also been removed from conventions for the inappropriate touching of female fans who had pictures taken with him.

Internet fame started in 2007 when his Sonichu comic started to be shared extensively online, mainly because people were laughing at how bad it was.

Despite the negative attention often being cruel, Chan appeared to be attracted to it, and the comic quickly degenerated and became increasingly violent, homophobic and sexual (despite this, issues of it are still available to buy on Amazon). This in turn led to more negative publicity.

Chans desire for a girlfriend, his addiction to attention and his propensity to reveal inappropriate information and / or enter into a rage, made him a prime target for catfishing. As with Yaniv, for example, several people have contacted him over the years, pretending to be young girls, and have recorded him making sexually inappropriate comments.

During this period Chan started publishing pictures of himself crossdressing, and then he referred to himself as a ‘tomgirl’, a ‘lesbian-identified male’ and finally as a ‘lesbian transwoman’, eventually changing his name to ‘Christine’, often going by ‘Chrissy’.

Needless to say, his understanding of women comes mostly from porn. He announced he had grown vaginal labia in 2016 after watching subliminal frequency hypnosis videos which claim it’s possible to transform a penis into a vagina in six months. Chan got impatient and sliced open his own perineum. Eventually, even he had to admit it was an (infected) wound and not female genitalia.

The last few hours have brought the most disturbing update regarding Chan yet. A piece of audio and images of text messages in which Chan boasts about having raped his mother were leaked online. Chan lives with his mother, Barbara, who apparently has dementia. In the messages, Chan seems to believe he is curing her ‘memory problems’ with his actions. The police were satisfied the messages and audio were legitimate and Chan has been removed from the house and served with an emergency protective order, which means he can’t contact his mother. Barbara has been assessed in hospital.

And perhaps even more disturbing than that is the public reaction. Which has repeatedly been this:

This is a deeply disturbed man who has been groomed by the internet to act out increasingly extreme sexual behaviours in return for attention, and now he is still being groomed to believe he is the same sex as the woman he assaulted, his mother.

The baiting and affirmation of Chan has been referred to as the ‘Chris Chan Experiment’, but he is merely one extreme example of it.

There are many others.