They managed to attract the attention of several groups, including KF, that were willing to go "now hol' up a minute" and try to smell the bullshit.
Kiwifarms noticed shit was going down very early on, before Nick got involved. This popped up in the Anime/Manga thread.
Interestingly, most or a good chunk of us were thinking where there was smoke, there's fire - so initially thought that Vic was guilty.
But when things started getting spergy, the accusers started getting super defensive, and there was no evidence, and when KickVic was blowing things out of proportion (ie hugging a minor makes Vic a pedo), people like me started to question the narrative.
Also, didn't hurt that, out of all the players, Vic was the only one not acting like a tard on social media.
More importantly, to me, because they insisted he was a sexual predator/rapist, the lack of an actual rape allegation was conspicuous. And when the I09 article dropped - aside from the video-kiss-Monica story, Vic stopped when they put the breaks on. Same for Michelle on Twitter.
Given what we know now, I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of those encounters were greatly embellished, too.
Edit: also, apparently from the same few sources. Holy shit Beth, did you have to use aliases to hide the numbers of women? How many stories did you opt out of sharing because they contradicted your little narrative.