Who killed Jean Pormanove?

The death of a livestreamer

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s edition, the death of the French livestreamer Raphaël Graven.

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On August 5th, the French streamer Jean Pormanove, born Raphaël Graven, began a marathon livestream with his three regular companions, the 20somethings “Naruto” (the nom du stream of Owen Cenazandotti) and “Safine” (Safine Hamadi), and a bespectacled, apparently handicapped man who streamed under the name “Coudoux.” The template for the foursome’s streams has been fairly consistent since Coudoux joined the trio in early 2024: Broadcasting from a bare room in Nice, Cenazandotti and Hamadi would slap, wrestle, surprise and otherwise humiliate, hurt, and frustrate JP and Coudoux, either as part of a semi-structured game or challenge, or, often, just for the hell of it. This August stream more or less followed the protocol, as the French investigative-journalism nonprofit Mediapart reported this week (translation via Claude):

Less than three minutes after the broadcast began, a man threw a paper ball at Raphaël Graven's face, saying: "I hope you're ready." Seconds later, Safine snatched his glasses and threw them across the room, causing him to become angry.

Twenty minutes later, Naruto presented various challenges to viewers that would be performed during the marathon if they made sufficiently large donations. Most involved various humiliations for Raphaël Graven and Coudoux, who had to hit each other if one made a mistake during a video game. If the €4,000 goal was reached, Raphaël Graven had to "clean the toilets after each of Coudoux's bowel movements until the end" of the stream.

Over the following 12 days, on the largest Kick channel in France, Graven would be slapped, suffocated, drenched in water, and forced to perform various humiliations, all as part of the game. He spoke frequently about calling the police, leaving, and going to the hospital, complaints about which Cenazandotti and Hamadi routinely laughed. At one point, they read out texts Graven had sent to his mother: “I’m stuck in this game. It’s going too far. I feel like I’m being held hostage with their shitty concept. I’m fed up, I want to get out, the other guy doesn’t want to, he’s holding me hostage.” Nevertheless, he stayed, and even defended the premise of the “challenge” against “haters” like Mediapart:

Naruto asked Raphaël Graven to tell viewers that the slap he was about to receive was "for the game" and there was "nothing wrong." "The more convincing you are, the gentler I'll go," he added. Raphaël Graven complied, addressing "shitty Mediapart, the haters": "When we fall [when we make the team lose in the video game], we get slapped, it's the challenge." Naruto hit him.

On August 17, after a weekend in which he’d been led to parade outside with a placard reading “JP you’re ugly” and had a homophobic slur painted on his forehead, he and the other streamers went to sleep. The next morning, as viewers looked on and chatted in the Discord, his fellow streamers were unable to rouse him. The feed was cut. Graven would never wake up again.

The exact cause of Graven’s death is unclear, and the preliminary autopsy report found that it “does not have a traumatic origin and is not linked to third-party intervention.” But it has captured attention in France. Mediapart first reported on Graven in November 2024, in a video that gives a small taste of the boyish, bullying violence that was the streamers’ hallmark:

At the time, Nice’s public prosecutor opened an investigation into the channel, but filed no charges. All four men were interviewed but “denied the commission of any offenses.” The channel continued its streams effectively without interruption, and its fans swarmed Twitter to accuse Mediapart of “clout chasing” and “taking things out of context,” putting a “woke” spin on “entertainment.”

This kind of hands-off-my-torture-slop reaction should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the petulant, reactionary culture of young male livestreamers and their fans, and especially of those on Kick, the platform on which Graven and company streamed. Founded as a Twitch competitor in 2022 by the Australian owners of the Curaçao-based gambling company Stake, Kick has drawn some of the most annoying and sociopathic streamers from its rivals by offering creators extremely generous terms--it skims 5 percent of their earnings instead of Twitch’s 50--and what might be gently termed a lower threshold for moderation. The result is a resolutely appalling, money-losing platform whose chief purpose appears to be marketing for its owners’ main business, a predatory online casino best known for attaching its logo to viral videos distributed by slop accounts on Twitter and Instagram:

Slot machine livestreams and gambling advertisements for Stake are commonplace on Kick, and the 54.8 million hours of gambling content that viewers watched in the third quarter of this year made up nearly 20 percent of total Kick content, according to the data firm Streams Charts.

Unsurprisingly, the “allow unmoderated sociopaths to do what they want on camera provided they also sometimes gamble” strategy has proven to be extremely popular among young men around the world. Also unsurprisingly, Drake has become an important unofficial representative for the site, and he and Adin Ross--the flagship piece-of-shit Kick streamer, who has effectively become the face of the platform and has claimed to own equity in the company--have apparently offered to cover Graven’s funeral costs. “Whoever was apart of this deserves to face severe consequences,” Ross tweeted. (Ross once famously goaded one of his fans to drive a car into an inlet in British Columbia.) Kick has banned all the streamers involved in Graven’s death.

One imagines that Kick and associates like Ross and Drake are feeling some kind of heat, given the attention devoted in France to Graven’s death. On Thursday the former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, general secretary of Emanuel Macron’s technocratic centrist Renaissance party, published a dramatic tweet blaming “platforms that remain far too lawless zones,” and calling for annual “screenings for screen addiction” in students and a “strict ban on social media before the age of 15.” If Attal was making what passes for a “structural” account of platform toxicity (it’s dopamine addiction!), the far-right former M.P. and Le Pen family member Marion Maréchal staked out, in turn, an attempt at a “cultural” explanation: “Let us not be mistaken,” she tweeted, also on Thursday, “social networks are not the central problem. But the savagery, the thuggery, the culture of humiliating the weakest… and ultimately a society that no longer knows how to distinguish right from wrong. And punish those who do wrong!”

Attal is correct to say that platforms like Kick are “far too lawless zones” where “everything is permitted,” “nothing is moderated,” and “everything is accessible to everyone, regardless of age.” And Maréchal, no doubt noting that the name of one of Graven’s torturers is “Safine Hamadi,” is dogwhistling by referring to “thuggery” and “savagery.” But I’m also wary of drawing too direct a causal line between “the constant stream of short-form content” and what Attal describes as an addiction to “shocking speeches, and increasingly violent acts,” and I think Maréchal isn’t wrong to identify a “culture of humiliating the weakest” as lurking behind the lurid appeal of Graven’s ongoing torture. It’s just hard to take her seriously when reactionary parties like hers and racist demagogues like her aunt and her grandfather have cultivated precisely the “culture of the humiliating the weakest” that makes such humiliation a spectator sport.

The truth is that the grim display on the Jean Pormanove streams has ample precedent in pre-internet media, at least in the U.S., where exploiting eccentrics and other vulnerable people was for decades common practice on daytime T.V., drive-time radio, and the reality television boom at the turn of the millennium. Audiences of the 1990s and 2000s didn’t need a “constant stream of short-form content” to find themselves compelled by transgression and cruelty; they seemed happy to consider it appointment viewing. After decades of obsessive right-wing agitation about violence, immigration, crime, sexual deviancy, and disorder, designed to identify vulnerable groups for abuse, it seems only natural that ritualistic humiliation would be fully entrenched and naturalized as a genre of entertainment.

To be fair, outside of rare sensations like “Bumfights,” this kind of callous exploitation for fun and diversion was rarely so physically violent. But it seems worth clarifying here that the violence and abuse on display in Graven’s streams is not exactly Hostel-style “pure” sadism. (Even if the apartment they shoot from looks like a serial-killer cell.) Instead, it’s the kind of sadism that anyone who has been or has known an adolescent boy is familiar with--an aggressive, almost playful cruelty that’s defended as an expression of affection or friendship but that mostly acts as a tool for the constant reestablishment of social hierarchies. One suspects that the appeal of watching two effectively defenseless guys get routinely abused by their “friends” is not so much the titillation of “increasingly violent acts” but the parasocial way lonely and self-hating viewers can imagine their own, not-bottom place in the friendship group-slash-social hierarchy on display. Cenazandotti and Hamadi lavish Graven and Coudoux with attention, converse with them normally, treat them as regular members of the crew--only to turn on a dime and violently check them, for no reason other than to re-establish dominance. In other words: They bully him.¹

Bullying, needless to say, considerably precedes “the impact of social media on our youth,” and is absolutely not downstream of “screen addiction.” The appeal of this kind of content is deeper and more complex than nudge-y tweaks like removing color from 15-18 year olds’ phone screens (as Attal proposes) can really address.

But to identify the deep grammar of adolescent cruelty in Cenazandotti and Graven’s behavior, or to trace their streams’ lineage through reality T.V. and shock-jock radio--to acknowledge their position within a chronically, perpetually debased culture now addicted to reactionary violence--shouldn’t mean (as Maréchal would have it) ignoring the role played here by the platform, both in the abstract and the specific. It’s one thing for damaged people to feel compelled by watching or participating in violent bullying; it’s another to build a business around it, to financially incentivize it, to commoditize it and tacitly encourage an endlessly amplifying spiral of pain and sadism.

And yet another thing to explicitly encourage it. In this case Kick did more than simply build a structure that tends toward brutality and look the other way: JeanPormanove was the biggest Kick channel in France, and the company’s French promotional account used clips and images of Graven constantly (“sucked his buzz to the bone,” to borrow the charming phrase of one French Twitter user), and apparently offered the group a $2,000-an-hour contract. We can see the ways in which Graven’s death emerges almost inevitably from a tradition of sadistic media. But we can also see the ways in which Kick specifically and intentionally cultivated the conditions in which he died.

A shocking and conspicuous death like Graven’s might be, at best, an occasion for a culture to reflect on itself: Is “gambling-advertisement torture porn” who “we” are, or want to be? In France, as in every industrialized liberal democracy, neither the establishment’s behavioralist authoritarianism nor the populist right’s hypocritical demagoguery seem particularly up to the task. Both leave in place the entire rotten structure: The addictive business models, the attention economy, the international gambling industry, the culture of “revealed preference” and passive streaming slop, the fetish for violence and masculinity--all feeding off of, and feeding into, a politics of scarcity and exploitation. Kick needs to be destroyed, no question. But so too does the rest of it.

1. Graven’s seemingly willing participation in the stream’s various abuse rituals has been invoked often in defenses of Cenazandotti and Hamadi since Mediapart’s first investigation. There is a relatively straightforward financial explanation: Many have pointed out this kind of streaming was a source of income for Graven, who seemed to have few other career prospects. (Mediapart calculated that the group made €13,000 in donations alone for the month of November, not including subscription revenue.) But if you’re familiar with the basic social dynamic of bullying, it shouldn’t be surprising that Graven stuck it out, and even defended the streams against Mediapart. On Kick, as in middle school, tolerating and absorbing this violence--rather than complaining about it--is a test of belonging, and one suspects Graven would rather see himself as willing or even enthusiastic autonomous participant than as weak and passive victims.