H3H3 was originally a commentary channel where Ethan and Hila would make jokes about and roast weirdos they found on the internet.
They got sued by one of the weirdos they made fun of, named Matt Hoss, who claimed that their usage of his cringeworthy pick up artist videos was in violation of fair use.
Ethan and Hila begged for money from the internet, which lead to the creation of the FUPA fund to pay for their lawyer fees, as well as supposedly pay for anyone in the future that got fucked over by copyright.
Ethan and Hila eventually won their lawsuit, which basically made them heroes to the Youtube community and gave them major standing in the community.
The money from the FUPA fund, however, would soon disappear, and coincidentally, a year later, Ethan and Hila would buy a 9 million dollar mansion in Los Angeles, and the fund would never be heard of or used to help another Youtube creator ever again.
However, Ethan is a fucking dumbass, and a real piece of shit under his guise of "wholesomeness".
Here's where Ethan's manipulative nature started to show:
In 2016 he tried to game LeafyisHere and Pyrocynical, two Youtube commentators with large followings who made very similar content to Ethan's, against each other, by having them make videos against each other to take the other down. H3 backstabbed Leafy by posting the "LeafyisHere rant" where he accuses Leafy of being a bully and abuser on the platform after Leafy made fun of an autistic man named TommyNC2010.
Ethan, being a dumb motherfucker, didn't expect Leafy to fire back, and fire back Leafy did with receipts, exposing Ethan's duplicity in first befriending Leafy and exposing Ethan's "conspiracy" to have Leafy and him both make videos on Pyrocynical to take him down and remove him as competition.
Leafy soon became a pariah in the commentary community, and all of Ethan's friends in the community making videos to dunk on him, including Idubbbz, who made a "Content Cop" expose video that sent Leafy packing off the platform.
Ethan would try to play the centrist, by unlisting his Leafy rant and making an "apology", but the damage was already done to Leafy. Which was his goal.
Later on, roughly in 2017, Ethan and Hila would tire of making commentary videos that involved a modicum of effort, so instead, they turned their focus to making podcasts, like the H3H3 podcast, which would show Ethan's manipulativeness in spades. Trisha is not Ethan's only real victim in regards to being manipulated. Ethan has used several people on the podcast, including Pewdiepie, Jontron, Shoenice, and several other small-time guests.
Ethan threw Pewdiepie under the bus after he called a player the n-word in a game of pubg for camping and immediately apologized afterwards, saying that he might be a racist since he sounded so "comfortable" saying the word and that he probably have said the word repeatedly elsewhere. After their fans pushed back and disliked the podcast video where Ethan threw him under the bus, Ethan and Hila doubled down and called him "awful" and "indefensible".
Keep in mind, Ethan has been on camera saying the n-word himself, repeatedly "niggerfaggot" on another podcast.
With Jontron, Ethan brought him onto the podcast after his controversial debate with Destiny where Jon recited racist /pol/tard statistics and beliefs which earned him the ridicule and ire of the entirety of the internet. Ethan worsened that by confronting him live on what he believed and said in that debate, which made Jon squirm uncomfortably for the entire 2 hours he was there. That podcast shot to millions of views instantly.
Jon, Ethan and Pewdiepie were all friends before these situations happened. Ethan and Hila were never invited to either Jon or Pewdiepie's weddings afterwards.
Before Trisha, Ethan's most brutal manipulation was of a man named Shoenice, who was a Youtuber famous for eating literally anything, from actual dogshit to caulking gel, as well as slamming shitloads of liquor and drugs and having an abrasive personality due to his mental illnesses. This man is by all means a walking trashfire. In recent years, Shoenice's popularity has fallen greatly, and he desperately looks for any way to get it back.
Ethan and Shoenice's interaction began when Shoe made a video ranting and insulting Ethan and Hila while drunk. In this video, Shoe called Hila "whore from Israel", and Ethan took that gravely. For about a year or two, Ethan would bully the living shit out of this often homeless mentally ill man, riling him to anger, several times stringing him along into thinking he'll get to work with Ethan and Hila on the podcast or show, exploiting his psychotic reactions for money. Ethan even held a quiz show putting Shoe's mental illness on full blast, making light of things like him hosting a hunger strike where he shat himself in a diaper before being removed by security and other psychotic public incidents.
This ended up with Shoenice in tears after Ethan rug pulled him yet again, extending an invitation to him to be part of Ethan's "goof gang", which was going to be full of people Ethan wanted to exploit.
Ethan first interacted with Trisha by making a video called "Instagram vs. Reality" where he made fun of her appearance comparing her clearly photoshopped instagram pictures with candids. Trisha, being mentally ill, made a video crying about it. They had a back and forth on social media and the podcast itself with Ethan continually trying to provoke her into sperging out in new and inventive ways. Ethan saw dollar signs fucking immediately from the moment Trisha made her first response video and invited her onto the podcast to keep her as his new permanent sideshow attraction.
And that brings us to today.
There are a lot of shitshow scuffles Ethan's gotten into that were skipped over here. The H3H3 thread's OP probably documents them better than I have.
