They hung out in irl and even shared an air B&B.
Clearing up the lore here, but I don't think this is correct. Yaba wasn't at the gatherings hosted by Witty Widow. She was not a part of that particular clique that included Skeeter, Witty and Ron. AFAIK, Yaba has not met Ron IRL and neither has Sam.
Via OWL's stream today, it is clear that Belinda tried to turn off superchats and when she was unable to, she said she would tally all the superchats coming in for Yaba and send them to her. She was flustered when she said it. I don't know now if she indeed sent them any money and didn't send $35 that was specifically earmarked by donors for Belinda, or if she spaced and didn't send anything. Perhaps that will be cleared up later, but for now I am going with the idea that Belinda did indeed forget to send the superchats. That changes nothing as far as I am concerned.
Here's the thing: Belinda may have screwed up. But right now she has a lot of trust capital with me. She has shown consistently that her heart is in the right place, to the point of being a people pleaser, which can bring its own problems, but otherwise I've not seen her deliberately lie and I've not seen her hold others to standards she fails to maintain herself. Even if she screwed up, she did it in good faith. I do not believe for a moment that she deliberately stole money meant for Yaba.
Yaba and Sam used to have trust capital with me but they don't any longer because they have outright lied about what the Farms has said about Yaba and her ex's death. They know they are lying and Sam, queen of receipts, knows damn well that there was one troll who talked shit and was shut down immediately. I was the one who posted the screenshot of Yaba's tweet discussing what happened. Prior to that people were giving Yaba shit about taking two weeks off, but the moment people learned that her ex had died and that was why she was going to be away, the tone immediately shifted to one of sympathy and concern, especially for her children.
Beyond the lies about the Farms, her hypocrisy is too much to overlook any longer. I could list all the instances but why bother. I'd stopped listening to Yaba because Chantal in Kuwait is boring and Chantal back in Canada is almost as boring. I'd backed off of Sam after her first attempt to paint Farmers as being cruel to Yaba's children so it won't be hard to just toss her in the garbage too. I'd already replaced her with Owl, Belinda and some small channels that discuss new (to me) cows. So it's not like this was some sort of final straw. It was clear my respect for both was waning before this disingenuous bullshit.
And they can say they don't care if people like me just take off. Maybe they don't. But again, to curse genuine fans who leave because you are showing how much of an asshole you are is prime cow behavior.
In the end, reactors are always cow-adjacent. It is a rare reactor who is able to remain outside of the barn. Yaba might have been able to remain wild in the forest for longer without Sam but cows they are now and cows they will remain. If shit slows down a bit for me before Christmas I may construct their barn stalls in the prospering grounds.