On Friday Aug. 13, Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa spent a whopping 14 hours on camera. However, this was not the unusual part of her day; as one of the most tireless streamers on Twitch, she racks up hours with workmanlike consistency. The curveball didn’t come until later, well into the evening, when a strange gleam outside Siragusa’s window signaled that something was amiss. Upon closer inspection, the cause quickly became clear: Garbage stacked against the outside wall of her Houston, Texas, home — and precariously close to both her and her assistant’s cars — had burst into flame.
Fortunately, firefighters arrived before the fire could spread enough to do serious damage, but the implications of the incident are worrying.
“The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but investigators strongly suspect arson,” Siragusa wrote on Twitter of the incident, of which The Post has viewed both a video and photos.
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Siragusa is, in terms of hours watched, the most popular female streamer on Twitch. In the second quarter of 2021 alone, viewers spent nearly 13 million hours watching her — roughly double that of Siragusa’s closest competition. But notoriety and controversy often go hand in hand, and this goes double for Siragusa, who is a female star on a male-dominated platform. She also specializes in content that emphasizes her appearance, sometimes testing the boundaries of Twitch’s rules against sexual content.
Earlier this year, she boosted her popularity (and infamy) by becoming one of the faces of Twitch’s “hot tub meta,” in which streamers broadcast from inflatable hot tubs so they could wear swimsuits without running afoul of Twitch’s attire rules. Due to this and other similar stream concepts over the years — as well as her presence on platforms that are more permissive of overtly sexual content like OnlyFans — Siragusa has long been perceived by some Twitch viewers as undeserving of her success. This has resulted in daily harassment, up to and including regular “swatting” attempts, in which viewers make spurious calls to the police to get SWAT teams or other emergency responders sent to her home.
“That’s been my reality for a while now,” she said of swatting attempts to video game news website Kotaku earlier this year. “Multiple times weekly.”
As a result of this dynamic, Siragusa, an avid animal lover who has to worry about her dogs’ lives in addition to her own, says local police are now aware of who she is and what it usually means when somebody tries to get a SWAT team deployed to her house.
“If you’re a streamer, I cannot stress this enough: Be proactive, talk to [the police],” she said on Twitter. “They won’t understand, but having your location ‘flagged’ can mean all the difference in a tense stand-off type situation. Literal life and death.”
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In 2017, one swatting incident led police to shoot and kill a 28-year-old man in Wichita, Kansas. However, despite its potentially lethal consequences, swatting is still largely regarded by those who do it as a sort of prank. The intention is to scare people, not necessarily to harm them. Suspected arson, on the other hand, has no such gray area.
“She’s been swatted a bunch and stuff, but this is pretty extreme,” Siragusa’s assistant, Morgan McCree, said in an interview. “It’s pretty rattling, to say the least.”
The streamer has faced similar incidents in the past, Siragusa said.
“In 2020, someone tried to shoot fireworks at my house under the guise of July Fourth festivities,” Siragusa said. “Said person was intercepted before he could actually do the act — caught red-handed — and arrested.”
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At this point, Siragusa and her team are cooperating with local law enforcement and considering pursuing further action. But when it comes to situations like these, streamers’ options are limited.
“You can move, try to get restraining orders if you know the person (usually doesn’t work), [or] try and live around it,” Devin Nash, chief marketing officer of Novo, the agency that represents Siragusa, wrote in a message to The Post. “It’s a real awful situation. … If she needs anything, we’ll do it.”
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