Video appears to show YouTubers Logan Paul, Sam Pepper lassoing women

An old video showing YouTube personality Logan Paul lassoing unsuspecting women in Los Angeles has resurfaced a day before the social media influencer is scheduled to take on former world champion boxer Floyd Mayweather in the ring.

The video, first posted in 2014 and since made private, appears to show Paul and former YouTuber Sam Pepper using a rope to lasso women in Santa Monica. It was shared on Saturday via Twitter by an account called MeTube, which describes itself as the “untold #MeToo stories of YouTube.”

“We’re doing a thing where we pick up women with lassos,” Paul tells a woman, who appears to be smiling and laughing.

Later, Paul tells a blond woman that he won’t let her go until she kisses him. She obliges and the two lock lips for several seconds.

Other people in the video appeared to be less amused by Paul and Pepper’s advances. One woman hits and kicks Paul while Pepper is attacked by several men attempting to protect a woman in their group.

Neither Paul nor Pepper immediately responded to requests for comment.

Pepper, a former “Big Brother” contestant from England, was later accused of rape by multiple women the same year the lasso video was posted, Buzzfeed reported in 2014. Pepper denied the allegations and was never charged. He stopped posting to YouTube in 2017 and has since made a professional comeback on TikTok.

Paul, a YouTube star with nearly 23 million subscribers, began his career on the now-defunct six-second video app Vine, and after Vine shuttered moved to YouTube, where he continued to grow his following. Recently, Paul has begun focusing on a boxing career.

Last year, Paul was sued by a production company that claimed a 2017 video he posted of a dead body in a Japanese “suicide forest” caused it to lose a multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with Google.

The now-infamous video shows Paul and a group of friends visiting Aokigahara, at the base of Mount Fuji, nicknamed the “suicide forest” because of the large number of people who go there to end their lives. The video had 6 million views in one day and shows the body of a man who appeared to have died by suicide. Paul later apologized in a video posted to social media and said he would work to “do better.”

Suzanne Ciechalski contributed.

source: nbcnews.com