YouTuber Onision Accused Of Grooming & Abusing Young Women — Hear Exclusively From Victim Shiloh Hoganson
The allegations against YouTuber Onision have flown under the radar — until now.
YouTube As more and more people feel comfortable about sharing their stories of sexual assault in the entertainment industry, it seems like a certain YouTuber’s day of reckoning may have finally arrived.
And though the YouTube community may not be as mainstream as Hollywood is, the stories of those who have been hurt by some of the platform’s biggest names still deserve to be heard.
Right now, a content creator who goes by Onision is at the center of some pretty serious accusations. And what’s worse? These accusations have actually been going on for years, but they haven’t received the attention they deserve until now.
But who is Onision — and what is he being accused of?
That’s a question that a new Discovery+ documentary, Onision: In Real Life, seeks to answer.
Now, it’s time to take a deep dive into what the situation involving Onision (real name: Greg Jackson) is all about, and to shed light on his victims’ stories.
Onision is a popular YouTuber who has been huge since the site’s launch.
When we think of popular YouTubers today, our minds immediately go to people like James Charles and Shane Dawson, but Onision’s history on the site goes back much farther than either of theirs.
His channel goes all the way back to 2006, and over the past 15 years, he’s managed to amass more than two million followers as he’s posted countless videos that have received millions of views. Today, Onision is 35 years old.
A feature on Tosh.0 helped him skyrocket to YouTube fame.
Onision’s channel first blew up when one of his earliest viral videos, "The Banana Song," caught comedian Daniel Tosh’s attention and was featured on Tosh.0 — and then, a video of him kissing Shane Dawson got him even more intrigue and followers.
Many of his subscribers also happened to have crushes on him, even though he was married to his high school sweetheart, Skye Tantaga, at the time.
In 2010, Onision and Tantaga got divorced, and things certainly seemed to spiral out of control from there.
In 2019, allegations against Onision began to go public.
On his YouTube channel, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen investigated Onision after hearing claims that he had been allegedly grooming and abusing young women he met online.
At the time, a woman named Sarah told Hansen about moving in with Onision and his partner, Kai Avaroe, who had to take on legal guardianship of her because of how young she was at the time.
She later took her story public, claiming that she had received explicit photos and had sex with the couple while she was still underage.
Though Hansen has himself reached out to Onision for an interview, the YouTuber has said that he asked for a $350,000 interview fee.
As it turns out, Sarah wasn’t the only person who Onision had allegedly victimized.
At least six women have accused Onision of similar behavior.
A girl named Billie had similar allegations about Onision, and so did a singer named Shiloh Hoganson, who is featured in the Discovery+ documentary and is pictured above.
Hoganson and Onision met when she discovered his YouTube videos, and she said in the documentary that she felt like he was talking to her while she watched him, and she felt like he understood everything she was going through as a 16 year old at the time.
She reached out to him via email, and the relationship between them quickly escalated.
In early 2020, a video of Hoganson that was taken while she was in a relationship with Onision shortly after his first marriage ended resurfaced.
In the background of the video, he can be heard saying to her, “You know this video is never going to be online, right? No one will ever know how much I abuse you.”
Another video of Hoganson resurfaced as well, where she seemed to be having a stress-related episode of memory loss that she later discovered was a trauma-related seizure. She also sat down to talk with Hansen about her experience with Onision on his YouTube channel.
In the documentary, Hoganson admitted that there were red flags — like the fact that he looked up the laws on having sex with minors to find out if they'd be able to sleep together legally or not.
And according to her, a lot of her perception of the relationship (and why she was in it) was due to the fact that she was so young when she and Onision got involved.
"Looking back on it all now, I was a baby, I was a kid, I was naive, I had no idea what I was getting into," she said. "But I'll do everything in my power to make sure this doesn't happen to somebody else."
Hoganson got out of their relationship when she was 17 years old.
While speaking in an exclusive interview with YourTango, Hoganson — who moved in with Onision after his marriage to Tantaga ended — shared that she was only 17 years old when she realized she needed to get out of the abusive relationship.
“He found his ways to convince me that everything he was doing was normal. I unfortunately followed him blindly,” she says.
“If it wasn’t for my mother hiding my passport [so I wouldn't physically be able to travel] I probably would have been pulled back in when I was 18. It took a long time for me to shake the feeling of co-dependency that he instilled in me,” she adds.
Though she has spoken publicly about what she went through with Onision, she tells us she hasn’t spoken to Onision herself since she left.
About a year after Hoganson moved to Washington to be with Onision, she left the relationship, going back home to Toronto.
In the documentary, Hoganson said that it took a few attempts to leave, but Onision "convinced me I was crazy."
Finally, after her mental health continued to deteriorate — and after Onision shaved her head when he told her she looked like an "Indian warrior" — Hoganson left their relationship and Washington.
"I haven’t spoken with him personally since about a month after I left when I was 18," Hoganson tells us.
Today, Hoganson says that she hopes her story will lead to the end of Onision’s grooming and abuse for any future victims.
“I hope this story having a mainstream platform will be a means to an end of a lot of pain for a lot of people, the ultimate goal is to make sure he can’t continue to do this to anyone else,” she says.
Though there have been many calls to deplatform him because of the accusations (as well as a Change.org petition), so far, Onision is still freely creating content — though he will no longer be paid for them.
After In Real Life aired, YouTube demonitized his channel indefinitely. His original YouTube channel is still live, but he uploads his newer videos to a channel called Onision Speaks.
As far as his feelings on the documentary goes, it seems that Onision is continuing to maintain his innocence.
"The Onision Documentary is a total sh*t-show — not just because @discoveryplus f*cked over all the 'victims' but also the 'victims' make no god damn sense/their stories don't add up — It is a certified train-wreck," he tweeted on January 18.
Onision: In Real Life is now streaming on Discovery+.
Editor's Note: Sexual abuse of children and minors is incredibly common.
According to the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 have experienced sexual abuse from an adult, and those who do suffer from assault and abuse are more likely to also develop mental health issues like depression, PTSD, and drug abuse.
Want to get involved to bring an end to child sexual abuse? Organizations like Prevent Child Abuse America are looking for people to donate time and money. They also suggest writing to local elected officials to support policies that bring an end to sexual abuse.
Of course, the simplest thing to do is to keep eyes and ears open and to report abuse when you see it — and to always take children seriously when they say they're being abused.
Nicole Pomarico is an entertainment and lifestyle writer whose work has appeared in Cosmo, Us Weekly, Refinery29, and more.