The person behind one of YouTube’s most popular drama channels finally revealed their face after five years of anonymity. Spill Sesh, who breaks down the biggest controversies and scandals engulfing the internet’s biggest stars on the channel, revealed her identity in a video posted on Friday. Spill Sesh is a woman named Kristi Cook, nicknamed Spilli. In the video the beauty guru Manny Gutierrez (known as Manny MUA) does Cook’s makeup as she explains how he served as the subject of her first-ever video in 2018. Having him be a part of her face reveal felt like a “full-circle moment,” she said.
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Cook runs the YouTube channel, which has over 700,000 subscribers, and has worked on more than 1,300 videos. Her thoroughly researched almost-daily videos on the scandals unfolding online have included topics like Colleen Ballinger, David Dobrik’s Vlog Squad, and the Try Guys, and gained over 350 million views. Over the five years of operating Spill Sesh, Cook, a former TMZ employee, never revealed her face—prompting fans and followers to theorize about who ran the YouTube channel. Some users speculated that it was Shane Dawson or his sister-in-law, Morgan Adams. Cook says she wanted to reveal her face now to set the record straight.
In the video, Cook and Gutierrez chat while he does her makeup about why she is choosing this moment to reveal her identity. Cook called it her “Hannah Montana wig-off moment,” adding that it felt like the right time, five years into running the channel. “I also really want to expand and make new content,” she says in the video. Going forward, she adds, Cook won’t be showing her face in the videos, but she will be using her real voice from now on.
In an interview with the New York Times, Cook said that she was “fascinated by the fact that people were interested in news about YouTubers because, at the time, I didn’t think mainstream media was covering it.” She says in her video that she’s had a few different YouTube channels that she had tried to get off the ground, but none of them ever took off until she started the drama channel. Her first big video (which she has seemingly deleted) was about Trisha Paytas’ video denouncing the Vlog Squad after her breakup with Jason Nash. Then, she made a video about the college admissions scandal involving Olivia Jade Giannulli and Lori Laughlin. That video didn’t perform well, but another video highlighting all the times Giannulli flaunted her wealth for six minutes became the most-viewed video on her page. Spill Sesh quickly became a go-to channel for an analysis or breakdown of the biggest online dramas. The videos began gaining a steady audience, bringing in an average of $20,000 a month through ads, Cook told the Times.
Staying anonymous for so long was not easy, Cook said, noting one scary moment when a stranger sent her a message saying they figured out her identity, leading her to scrub her personal information from the internet. She ends the video on Friday thanking her fans and saying they “changed [her] life.”