Alright. Thank you everyone for coming. We did not expect such a full room. So this session will be both an introduction and a deep dive into Thanos. So the first part we're going to do like an overview of Thanos, what it is, how you run it, and then in the second part we'll cover some of the improvements that have been done recently and then we'll talk about some more exciting stuff, some concrete use cases and so on. Maybe just a quick show of hands. How many people here run Thanos in production already? Okay, that's so for you, you might find the first part a bit boring, but maybe you'll also learn something new. Before we get started, just a quick round of introductions. My name is Philip. I'm a production engineer at Shopify. I work in the infrastructure team. Also part of the Thanos maintainers team and also in the past, they helped maintain Prometheus Operator and CubeState Metrics. And with me today is Saswata. Yes, my name is Shashat Mukherjee. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat where I work on an internet monitoring platform. I'm also a maintainer of Thanos and was previously a G-Soc mentee under the same project. I also helped maintain a couple of CNCF adjacent projects like M-Docs and Observatorium. You can find me at Saswata. I'm good on Twitter, GitHub or pretty much anywhere else. Alright. Okay, so now getting into the good stuff. It's kind of hard to talk about Thanos without mentioning Prometheus first. Prometheus, I expect most of you to have heard at least about it. It's a standalone monitoring server or system that you drop in your environment very close to your applications. Prometheus, they scrapes metrics from applications and then stores them locally. So Prometheus doesn't have any external dependencies, which means you can't actually offload metrics data into an external database. And as a result, it has to store those metrics on disk. It also has a very flexible query language, which we call PromQL. And using that query language, we can also write alerts, which means we can have alerts that are constantly executed and delay the snow when something goes wrong. When, for example, a threshold is violated, Prometheus can fire an alert. And so if we zoom into the Prometheus design and what it's composed of, we see four kind of key modules which are present in the Prometheus code base and functionality, which are very relevant for what Thanos is, for what we'll be speaking today. So we have the rule manager, which executes alerting rules. We have the query engine, which executes PromQL. Then we have the time series database, which Prometheus uses to store metrics on disk. And it also has something called a compactor, which optimizes the layout of metrics on disk over time. And so if we were to now use Prometheus to monitor various environments, we would have to deploy at least one Prometheus instance per environment. Prometheus cannot handle a large multi-environment setup. And so this can work. Like Prometheus will take care of each individual cluster, for example. But very quickly we see that we won't be able to get something that we call a global view of the data. So we won't be able to query metrics across environments or across Kubernetes clusters or maybe across namespaces. We also won't be able to retain data for a long period of time because of the local storage constraints. So disks can be hard to move around or they can be expensive. We want to retain data for a year, for example. And so also the resolution that Prometheus has, it's going to scrape every 30 seconds. And if we want to execute a query across, say, three months of data or six months of data, that resolution is going to be very dense and very high. So a query of that duration is going to be very challenging to execute. And so this is where Thanos comes in. These are the gaps that Thanos as a system tries to fill out. It has features such as a global view, a long-term retention. It has down sampling built in over time, so it can reduce the resolution of scrape samples. It has also some nice multi-tenancy features and so on. So starting kind of with a global view, how Thanos solves this global view problem. And maybe before we kind of explain how it does it, it's worth mentioning what we mean by a global view. So if we were to have a set of Prometheus instances and we were to execute a query, we really want that query to be executed across the entire fleet. So if you want to say, give me a sum over a given metric, we really want the sum across all Prometheus instances. And so the way that we do it is Thanos basically takes out this module called PromQL from Prometheus, bundles that into a standalone service that can be run and scaled independently. And then in addition to this, we also define something that we call the Store API. And as you can see here, the second RPC, that's the Serious RPC, which the queryer can use to request time series data from any component. And so since Prometheus doesn't actually understand this API, what we do is in the Thanos ecosystem, we have something called the Thanos sidecar, which we deploy next to each Prometheus instance. The queryer can then talk to the sidecar and the sidecar takes data out of Prometheus. And by doing this, now the queryer can connect to multiple Prometheus instances. So we would basically end up, if we were to get a global view, we'd end up with something like this where we have multiple Prometheus instances, a sidecar for each Prometheus instance, and a queryer that's connected to all of these sidecars. And so now the queryer is responsible for executing queries. And so by having this global view over the data, we can now also have global alerting and global rule recording. So for example, if we want something like the global error rate across multiple environments or we have an SLO for the P90 latency, we'd be able to do that with something that we call the Thanos ruler. So yet again, we pull out the component from Prometheus. We take out the rule engine, and we reuse a lot of the code from the rule engine. We package that into something that we call a Thanos ruler. The ruler is then connected to the queryer, and now through the queryer, it has access to the entire dataset. And so in our baby example from before, we can now, as mentioned, we can deploy a Thanos ruler. The ruler can talk, can be connected to the queryer. And because the queryer has a global view over the whole dataset, the ruler back extension can execute alerting rules across the entire dataset. All right. We also mentioned that it's kind of challenging to store data on disk for longer periods of time. It's also hard to move disks around. And so for this purpose, the Thanos sidecar can be configured to upload data from Prometheus into object storage. So Prometheus is going to create data on disk every two hours by default. The sidecar can then upload that data to object storage. And then the Thanos store gateway can query the data from object storage directly. And so both the store gateway and the sidecar now implement the same API so the queryer can talk to both of them. So again, if we extend our example from before, we would configure both of these sidecars to upload data to, for example, an S3 bucket, a GCS bucket. We would deploy the store gateway, which has the same store API like the sidecar. And so the queryer in this case would get the latest data from Prometheus to the sidecars and would get historical data from the store gateway and directly get into object storage. So there's two kind of important things to note here. The store gateway doesn't actually download data from object storage. It downloads a very small part of that particular data set. And then we call this an index header, and then it uses that index header to make further requests to object storage on demand as we query data. So we don't actually need all of these massive disks. Data can stay in object storage, and we just need to download very small parts. Also, both the store and what we call here the compactor, which optimizes this data over time, have a UI. So if you were to visualize, if you wanted to get a visual representation of what your data looks like, you can open the UI. And here we see we have these blocks, what we call blocks. They all have a time duration. Some are two-day blocks. Other are seven-day blocks and so on. So as data comes in, the compactor merges these blocks and creates bigger blocks out of smaller blocks. Also, this is the compactor. When it's doing its job, we get up to something like this, but then there are cases where the compactor would fall behind, and we might see a situation where we have a bunch of small blocks in object storage. This is just keeping in mind that it's worth keeping in mind that having a situation like this is going to increase costs against object storage because we have to make simply more API costs. So monitoring the compactor, making sure that it's doing a good job, is going to be important for both cost control but also making sure that the queries perform well. Okay, and finally, the last kind of component that's been added into the Thomas ecosystem is something that we call the Thomas receiver. The reason why it exists is because the sidecar model might be problematic in certain cases. So if we have, you know, hundreds of clusters, for example, we might not be able to open ports to all of these sidecars or to all of these permit uses that are running all over the place. And so we have certain situations where a global query or the route simply cannot connect to many, many different sidecars. And so for this reason, we've introduced something that we call the Thomas receiver, which is a kind of component to which metrics can be pushed to. So it's more of a push-based approach, essentially. And so what we have here on the right-hand side might be something like permit use agents, which are fairly lightweight. They can scrape metrics and remote write them to the receiver component. And then the quater, just like it can query the sidecar, can also query the receiver. And by doing this, we get to, instead of a pull-based approach to a push-based approach. Finally, these kind of approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can use them both at the same time. So you can be pulling metrics from certain places. And you can also be pushing metrics from other places. And this is kind of a fairly common scenario that people have. We also have a similar set of a Shopify, where we kind of utilize all of these components in a fairly complex setup. Okay, so that was the overview, the introduction to Thanos. And now we'll look into some of the recent improvements. Okay, so with that detailed introduction out of the way, let's talk a bit about the several new features, improvements, and optimizations that the awesome Thanos community has been cooking up behind the scenes. Starting with the distless store gateway. So as Philip mentioned in the introduction, the store API acts as a sort of glue to fetch data from the various Thanos back-ins. So the Thanos Store Gateway is one such backend that basically acts as a caching layer and exposes the GRPC Store API for fetching chunks from Prometheus, Format, TSTB blocks in any object storage. So we use three distinct caches to make this operation of fetching and querying data from a historical TSTB much more performant for us. Firstly, we cache the metadata.json file for each TSTB block on disk alongside a small portion of the TSTB index file, which we call as index header. And the index header is basically a truncated TSTB index file. We also, apart from that, we also maintain an index cache and a caching bucket to cache the postings, series and chunks from the TSTB blocks during the store API series RPC calls. But recently with larger and larger Thanos installations which have hundreds of historical TSTB blocks and object storage and also need higher availability via multiple replicas, we have observed that caching the index header files on disk becomes problematic and just simply unsustainable. Storing it with startup time starts to slow down as the gateway needs to cache all the index header files during startup and the disk fills up very quickly. Now you could throw money at the problem and increase the size of the disk but it is expensive and not very practical when you need to run multiple different replicas. Fortunately, there is now a solution for this which is to just disable caching the index headers on the disk completely. That is, the store gateway will now be stateless and not cache the index headers on disk nor will it load from it. This still doesn't change the store gateway's internal memory representation. It will just create that on the fly during a particular query instead of referring back to the disk. So that's where this new feature enabled the store gateway becomes fully stateless and this makes it possible to run the store gateway over hundreds of TSTB blocks and object storage without having to pay for ultra expensive SSDs. And we still cache posting series and chunks as we usually do. The next improvement that we'd like to talk about is the quality of service improvements for Thanos especially for monitoring as a service use cases where you would be serving multiple different talents. So the meaning of quality of service in SAS terms is simply the ability to provide different priorities to different users or data flows and to guarantee a certain level of performance. And we want to make sure that a single tenant or user does not ruin and deteriorate services for other tenants. So in the context of Thanos, there are basically two data flows for end users that we want to protect from disruptions which are the read and the write parts. So let's delve into them individually. So now consider a scenario where in which the receive component is maybe deployed in a hashing configuration with multiple different tenants remote writing metrics to it. Now maybe you have scaled the receive nodes to only be able to tolerate around 100k series from each tenant. Now if a certain tenant starts to misbehave and send way more metrics than that, maybe a million series you would start to face disruptions in the form of ooms and receive hashering will start to lose stability. You then have a couple of different options for mitigating that. So you could use an HP or a VPS setup that can scale your Thanos hashering up to a certain point. But if a tenant writes even more metrics than that, you would like to home and crash loop again. You might want to scale infinitely, but again that is not very practical or economical. So the way we want to tackle this problem is via granular per tenant remote write limits that allow us to keep our write path completely disruption free by ensuring that we only ingest what we allow it to ingest. So with this with these limits every time Protobuf encoded remote write request comes in, we'll check if it is under our request size, under request samples and under request series limits. And we also ensure that the tenant, the remote write request is coming from is still below a certain number of head or active series, after which we allow it to be ingested into the particular tenants TSTP. The configuration for this limit ensure that you can set global defaults for the limiting configs and override those values per tenant on every single receive node. For the active series limit, we directly query any Prometheus compatible meta monitoring endpoint to query the total number of head series for each tenant. Now coming to the query path, the way it works is that a user can fire off a promo kill query to a carrier, which can then call several store APIs and fetch data using the series RPC call. Now if the store API happens to be a store gateway then it also downloads data from object storage to fulfill that series RPC call. But in the case of two excessive queries that end up may be selecting too much data or too many samples, we end up with a couple of different bottlenecks. The query can start to oom and crash if it ends up fetching too many samples and having to run promo kill functions on top of them to fulfill multiple different queries. The store gateway might also start to oom if it ends up having to download a lot of TSDB data from object storage to fulfill a single series RPC call. And as with everything, you can probably throw money at the problem again and scale up vertically and horizontally, but that is not really economical or practical. So we ended up introducing limits at the store API level and the store gateway level that allow for more stability in these spots. So with these we can set limits on every store API implementation like receive, rule or store gateway to limit the number of series and samples returned in a single series RPC call. This ensures that you have an upper limit on the total data that can be requested by a single promo kill query. And with the already present query concurrency limit you can even size your Thanos queries accordingly. We also limit the downloaded bytes on the store gateway to ensure that fetching historical data from the TSDB from the object storage TSDB does not end up ooming in. So with these limits in place we end up having a pretty comfortable way of operating a multi-tenant monitoring as a service platform with Thanos and ensuring some level of quality of service. Now let's also talk about another feature which makes the right path on Thanos substantially stabbler than before which is consistent hashing on receives. So this was a feature which adds a new hashing mode to the Thanos receive component called Ketama which enables very stable scale up and scale down scenarios and it is now our recommended way of running Thanos receive hashering. So let us take a look into how this works. Ketama hashering is configured the same way as our old hash mark based hashering using hashering.json files on every single receive node to specify the topology and we add a flag on each received to switch to Ketama mode. So in this mode every receive node is assigned a section to manage within the hashering and these sections are composed of a range of hashes. So when a new remote write request is received by the receive node we iterate through the time series present in that request and hash the labels with the name of the tendon that the request came from. We then batch and forward these time series to the sections that is to the receive nodes that should ingest them. So with this we ensure a stable ingest path that actually has consistent hashering and hence an even distribution of data and tenants across your receive nodes. Internally at Red Hat we also use a Kubernetes controller which is open sourced under the observatory mark which monitors stateful set configuration for your receives and the pod status and simultaneously ensures that the receive nodes have the correct updated hashering.json configs so that their internal representation of the receive topology is as close to the real world as possible and this makes operating and scaling set up so much more automated. Let's now segue into one of the greatest highlights for the past few months which is the new multi threaded promqueal query engine. So to provide you with a little bit of context the Prometheus engine currently is a single threaded function that passes and traverses the query abstract syntax tree recursively and evaluates the query result alongside it all at once before returning result. This is the promqueal engine that we all know and love but due to the way distributed systems like Thanos are set up it becomes difficult to query large sets of data that are distributed across different networks. Not to mention being limited to a single thread causes issues. So with that in mind the Thanos promqueal engine project was started by Philip based on the Volcano query engine paper which specifies the architecture for an extensible and parallel query engine that can utilize concurrency and multiple cores to its fullest and allow space for several different optimization techniques. Now the current Volcano based promqueal engine works somewhat like this it passes the query into an abstract syntax tree using the same upstream parser of Prometheus it then tries to optimize the query expression by applying several logical plan optimizers for it and once such logical plan optimizers have been applied the query expression is somewhat simpler than it used to be it traverses the AST again and constructs a tree of executable operators that is the physical query plan the root of this operator tree can now be executed to fetch the final result of the promqueal query and the operators themselves can use multiple threads or even run parallel to each other. So what do these operators look like? Well essentially they implement an interface like this and it has two important methods the first of which is series which returns all that an operator will ever return in its lifetime and this is useful for parent or upstream operators to allocate the offers they would need beforehand. The second is the next call which returns the vectors of samples of all series for a particular execution step so every operator calls next and series on its child operators until there is no more data to be written that is until the query has reached leaves. Now we mentioned operators it's a good idea to also mention how the data flows between these operators so as mentioned operators are arranged in a tree like fashion where every operator calls next and this sort of model allows for samples of an individual time series to flow from each execution step from the left most to the right in this diagram. Since most promqueal expressions are aggregations the samples are reduced as they are put in by the operators from the right and because of this the samples can be decoded and kept in memory in patches Aside from this the operators are aside from the operators that are one to one mapping with regular promqueal constructs we also have some exchange operators that allow for flow control and concurrency. So let's see how that works so we have enabled two types of parallelism operators the first one is inter operator parallelism so as the operators are independent and rely on a common interface they can be run in parallel so as soon as one operator has processed a bunch of samples they can be pulled in by the next and then the next thing is intra operator parallelism so where parallelism can be added within the individual operator using certain coalesce special operators and they would be indistinguishable from regular ones as they pass on data using the same next call so now that we know how it works to some extent on a much higher level let's talk about benchmarking so we have quite a lot of go benchmarks for this project for benchmarking several different forms of queries both instant and range queries against the original engine and we run these on every commit domain on a CNCF sponsored equinex GitHub actions run and we published the results on a central web page for everyone to track and finally as this is an alternative downstream implementation of promcal let's talk a bit about how we maintain compatibility with the original engine so we use a special compatibility engine flow which while evaluating query checks if the new promcal engine supports it and if not we fall back to the regular promethe essential so while most functions have already been ported over such an approach ensures that even if the upstream spec changes we would still end up being able to support it and nearly all of our tests in this project test the new engine by comparing results between the upstream and the downstream engines and asserting on my matches alright that's that was a lot of information right the something that we're really excited to be working on and that's going to end up in the next maybe several months is what we call distributed execution to explain why it's so important in Thanos we can visualize this like small example where we have so Thanos allows us to stack queries on top of each other so we can have a block cluster A cluster B they run prometheous with sidecars and each cluster can have its own quaterer and then we can have a quaterer at the root that's doing basically the federation and the global view and so today if you execute something like sum or an average or account expression what's going to happen is the root quaterer is going to pull data through the quaterers on the second level is going to use them and it's going to pull all of the relevant time series in memory and execute a query in memory so this is fairly wasteful because the second level quaterers are going to be doing very little work even though they are capable of executing prompt calls so this has obviously scalability issues as we extend the environment as we add more clusters the root query becomes a bottleneck so what we are aiming to do with distributed execution is the root quaterer is going to decompose a query into what we call subqueries and it's going to push them down as low as possible in the query path so in this case the sum will become a sum over these two partitions and then at the root we'll do the sum of those sums and so by doing this every query in the query path is going to be utilized to its fullest and queries will be able to run much faster and will be much more scalable essentially also the good thing is that any prompt call expression can be kind of decomposed this way so for example a count can be a sum over count, a group can be a group over groups top care or top case and so on so there are maybe one or two aggregations in prompt call which cannot be done this way so this is again super exciting but still under development we are still figuring out some edge cases and finally there is something called native histograms a very powerful feature that's landing in prompt QL and in upstream Prometheus, if you're interested in what native histograms are, how they work Ganesh and Bjorn from the Prometheus maintenance team they have excellent talks so make sure to check those out but this is also a feature that we are pulling into Thanos because Thanos heavily bores from Prometheus, we have an issue that kind of tracks the development of that feature so we expect it to land again in the next maybe several months alright so then people also very often have questions such as can Thanos scale to X, Y, Z and always it's like a different metric some different constraints or ideas in mind what scalability means so in order to kind of set some sort of a bound at least a low round of where we know Thanos can perform adequately I've basically taken a screenshot of one of our internal dashboards that we have a Shopify for in our internal monitoring which shows the basically what we call the head series or the cardinality of the entire data set across the entire monitoring infrastructure so this is how many time series we have globally within the last two hours that's in the Prometheus parlance that's what head series means so we see that here obviously cardinality varies, the top panel shows the global one but we are basically capable of getting anywhere between 3 billion and 6 billion time series within a two hour window which is fairly high also if we break that down per region we run Thanos in different regions the two biggest regions, US is in US central they also spiked to about 1.5 billion and also finally like Thanos is not like a done project we are still making constant improvements to it there's still ongoing work and there will be more work in the future just to kind of illustrate that we had an environment where the couriers were simply not updated for any reason and by simply updating them from like a 6 month old version to the latest version we saw approximately a 50% reduction in like both CPU and memory usage and in addition to this we also saw like latency like P90 latency drop down by 50% just by doing an update and we basically just picked up all of the changes like the small incremental changes that have happened over a 6 month period also the reason why we have such a stable research usage here is because these couriers are used to execute recording and alerting rules so they are constantly executing queries and the load on them is about 16,000 queries per second so now maybe just final words about the Thanos community so with the intro and all the exciting new features and the work we've been doing to constantly improve the Thanos project I also want to quickly share how you can get involved with the Thanos community and how you can get involved with these efforts so our major project communication communications happen over the CNCF Thanos and Thanos Dev Slack channels for code or bugs issues feature requests we usually use GitHub we discuss on the issues and PIs on the relevant repos and you can also raise GitHub discussions as well we also have bi-weekly community office hours on Thursdays at around 2pm UTC over Zoom we maintain a public agenda talks so that you can reference previous discussions and add in your own agenda items and we usually try to be present at KubeCon via talks project meetings, booths and this time we even had a country press session to help on board newer open source contributors we also mentor pretty extensively in the CNCF we try to submit projects for the LFX mentorships which happen nearly every quarter as well as for GSOC which happens like once a year so please feel free to apply if you are a student or even if you are a full-time engineer who is looking to explore observability, monitoring or the CNCF we try to not only do some technical projects but also try to provide some sort of holistic guidance to help them become greater open source engineers who are awesome to work with and finally Thanos' website now has a dedicated space for technical blogs on the topic so we love to hear your stories on how you are using or adopting Thanos and if you have some nice use case for it or even if you are using it as a dependency to build something cool so feel free to share this is a nice way to garner feedback from the community thank you I know if we have any time for questions left yeah there's one over there maybe just the mic thank you for the presentation I've got two questions so the first one is if every Prometheus are down can we still use the Thanos with storage only and the second one is what is the order for a request are we requesting first of all the storage or are we requesting directly the Thanos sidecars yes so if all Prometheus are down you can still query data from object storage and we usually request data from the sidecars which then talk to the Prometheus instances so both the sidecar and the Prometheus are on the same query path and the data is requested in parallel from the sidecar and from object storage and it's kind of joined together at query time welcome there's a question there on the new functionalities you mentioned in which versions are they available or will they be available with the exception of the distributed execution in native histograms they are available in 0.31 so the latest release can you reference the change log for any specific feature thank you hi I have one question about the RAM usage for Prometheus if I'm converting to Thanos because currently we have a multi cluster setup where we have two Prometheus instances and they have very high RAM usage because they monitor our Github runners and sometimes Prometheus run out of memory and then we have holds in our queries because the data got lost because nobody could save it and do you know how this would change if we convert to Thanos sidecars and then to the Thanos query how do you think the performance of Prometheus would change there so if you start uploading data to object storage which is the easiest way to do it with the sidecars you need to have good retention in Prometheus so that should help reduce memory you also won't be executing queries inside Prometheus which also increases memory and I think with those two changes you should be able to at least bring the memory usage down to a bit thank you and the distributed execution would help I think as well


Remote sensing has been found to be effective for monitoring the status and changes of mangrove areas in Iskandar, Malaysia. Two widely used classification techniques were tested, and the maximum likelihood classification, MLC, technique proved to provide better results than the support vector machine, SVM. Overall, the area of mangroves decreased by 33% from 1989 to 2014, with a rate of 241 hectares per year due to urban expansion. To prevent further loss of mangroves, gazetted protected areas should be established and tourism activities should be introduced in these areas. This article was authored by Custody Devi Kanaya, Afsane Shiki, Arthur P. Craignell, and others.


Hi everyone. I'm sorry, but what mother takes their children to a park leaves them unattended to go walk in a forest all alone. All alone. She is dangerous. Her main points was I'm staying on the internet.  Imagine with someone with huge followings making off-of-the-platforms. You made it so that if you don't support her, if you say a word against her, you don't support domestic violence victims. She's blind and she's manipulating. I can't imagine that having three kids is something that she was ever that built for. Social media rots some people's brains. Did you guys see that influencer who left her three kids in a park to go take selfies in the woods? And while she was gone, her toddler climbed on top of her van and her daughter with disabilities was left on a blanket by the road. Acacia Cursey walked off to the woods and left her three children completely alone and apart. One of Acacia Cursey's children is disabled and shouldn't even be left alone for extended periods of time. In the video, the children looked uncared for. After being alone for a period of time, the youngest child began climbing on the roof of her car, which was filmed by the parents of the park and the police were promptly called. Acacia Cursey was once seen as a victim who was mistreated by the internet, the men she dated, even her own family. But now Acacia has become the villain, mistreating and neglecting her own children. This video is the story of how Acacia has become the villain and why Acacia should not be able to continue to get away with it. Hello friends and internet acquaintances. Welcome or welcome back to another video on my channel covering controversial internet figures. If you like those types of videos, then don't forget to subscribe and if you like this video, don't forget to give it a like. And also thank you so much to Brittany Christine and Irene Kaya for speaking with me in this video.  My name is Irene Kaya. My mom was not allowed to know about it. For him to have you sign a contract where you're not allowed to have a boyfriend is so controlling and weird. So currently you're in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit with Richard Clark. What has this lawsuit experience been like for you? This lawsuit experience has been really long. I also want to say in this video, I'm very much aware that I do not say J-Rus correctly at all. I know how to say this man's name. I just cannot say it. I'm aware of how you're supposed to say his name but for some reason I cannot say his name. So I'm sorry for that. I'm really trying in this video. Now the last video I posted was about how Acacia hid the dark secrets of her family and how Acacia's traumatic past may have influenced who she became today. But in today's video, we're talking about the villain inside the victim and asking the question when do you draw the line of excusing people's actions and when do people's past stop becoming an excuse of who they are today? When is it that someone is the villain of their own story? And in my opinion, I think Acacia has reached that point with her recent actions and I felt a responsibility to make this video and clarify that point because when you put your own children in harm's way there are no more excuses. You're done. And you should not be able to continue to profit and create this perfect branded image off of something that's a complete lie. So that's what this video is about today. I also want to give a mental health update before we get into this video for those that are concerned. I've mentioned it in Instagram posts and in the pinned comment of my last video but for those that have been concerned and have missed those comments and have just seen the effects of grief and what it's kind of done to me because it's a hard thing to hide, I think. On October 3rd, I lost my younger brother who I loved really dearly and was so close with and a lot of this grieving process has been really hard for those who have lost someone close to them and have been through this process I'm sure you guys understand it's a whirlwind it's a fever dream it still doesn't feel real what my younger brother and I went through in our childhood is such a big reason as to why I make the video content that I make and why I do for living what I do and he was really the only person who understood the childhood that we had and what we went through and he was just such a special person I've been trying to not let grief completely consume me and I've been trying my hardest to still be there for my family and my child and for everyone here because I don't want to just disappear into my grief but I know that a lot of you guys are concerned for me and so I just wanted to say that I'm doing my best that I possibly can to heal and I just want to thank everybody right now for all the love and support that you've shown me in the last few weeks now, if you've seen my last video you'd know that I avoided diving too deep into the topic of whether or not Acacia protects her children and I tried to give Acacia the benefit of the doubt the reason being because I would hate to accuse the mother of neglecting her child if it wasn't true because there's already so much stigma around mothers of disabled children that being said after recent events and everything that's transpired Acacia does not get that benefit of the doubt for me anymore so we're diving deep into all of the allegations of child neglect no holding back and how from what's been posted publicly it seems that Acacia has favored her abled body children over her disabled child and has refused proper care of her disabled child or the proper support for Rosie's needs Acacia as a mother warning care for child abuse and neglect I obviously do have so much empathy for her especially having lived with her and seen everything that I saw but it's like knowing her villain origin story just doesn't excuse recent actions in any way, shape, or form but it's just it is really hard to connect those two thoughts in my brain I'll be upset with her after something she did that was awful and then I'll kind of go through it like how did we get here and then I'll start to feel bad again even though she put herself in these situations it's hard, it's really tough you're kind of rooting for her and then it's like no I was rooting for you that pirate banks meme we were all rooting for you when Acacia had her first child, Brinley and rebranded to her family vlogger image people all seemed to believe she was a great mom Acacia presented a perfectly curated image of a great mother posting to Instagram the best photo ops of her looking after her daughter Brinley it seemed like Acacia was really stepping into the role of a mother and truly identifying with it then one year after Brinley was born Acacia gave birth to her daughter Rosemary and once Rosemary was born fans began to see issues with Acacia's parenting so we call this baby the forgotten baby Rosemary, who people call Rosie was born with Algeel's syndrome Algeel's syndrome can cause heart problems as well which Rosie has had pretty early on into Rosie's life it became apparent that Acacia had a favoritism towards Brinley over Rosie Jerus, Brinley, and Adol Acacia also said that Rosie, an infant preferred to keep her nails long which is why she never cut Rosie's nails which if you know anything about a baby often times, especially at a very young age they'll scratch their face Acacia has been accused quite often of not dressing Rosie appropriately for the weather even when Brinley's dressed appropriately like in this photo where Brinley has a long coat and warm boots but Rosie is just wearing socks or this photo where it's a cold day in October and even though Rosie's wearing a beanie she doesn't have a coat on and even though I will probably be blurring out Rosie's face in this photo you can see that her nose is red which is often a sign of a child being cold of course I can understand one or two times making a mistake and forgetting a jacket it happens we're all human and make mistakes but to consistently make that mistake with just one child is certainly suspicious when fans noticed that Rosie never had any socks Acacia commented that there was no point in putting socks on Rosie because she just rips them off anyways in a video, Acacia even said that she just shaves Rosie's hair when it gets too crazy to maintain Rosie's hair is getting a little crazy so he shaved it off there it is Rosie had cradle cap for a long time and instead of trying to really do anything about it or trying to get rid of it Acacia decided to try to shave her head have one child whose hair is always brushed and well kept and another child whose hair you just shave off instead of having to bother with it that is definitely questionable and it brings up the question of Acacia's view on disabilities just because Acacia's daughter is disabled doesn't mean she no longer gets to have a cute hairstyle or the life that her abled body sister has Acacia and Peyton have always been so lazy like just my personal experience with them they are very lazy people so I can't imagine that Acacia was motivated to keep up with these small issues like maintaining hair, frequent baths, cutting nails on time I can't imagine that having three kids is something that she was ever that built for especially a child with special needs and that's just my opinion I'm a mother to a disabled child and there is a learning curve with becoming a parent and then there is a major learning curve with becoming the mother to a disabled child I never expected Acacia to immediately jump in and know exactly what to do with a child that has a one in a billion condition especially with a heart condition that's so tough I have so much empathy for her there in 2020, Acacia announced that Rosie would be receiving open heart surgery before her hospital stay Rosie was only 11 pounds at one and a half years old warning that this image may be shocking this was Rosie pre-hospital stay and after being in the hospital Rosie went up to a healthy weight for a girl her age because Rosie was going in for surgery there is a possibility that Rosie being severely underweight pre-surgery was due to the condition she was going in for surgery for because I'm not a doctor or expert on Rosie's condition it makes it much harder to speak towards in any confident manner especially because there's different levels of severity to Algeel's syndrome as well as corpus callosum egenesis which Rosie allegedly has as well this, to be honest, can also work in Acacia's favor because any delays in development that Rosie has that could be attributed to severe neglect could also be something attributed to Rosie's conditions and anyone that doesn't have specific access to Rosie's medical records or knows the ins and outs of Rosie's condition cannot say one way or the other it's truly impossible to say what's causing these delays this is just, in my opinion, it's just speculation it's just me having experience with her and knowing her and her personality I personally think that Rosie's condition became an excuse for Acacia to be lazy had this kind of perpetual baby allowed her to not have to do all these things that come with motherhood like being proactive about her special needs if she can just let Rosie sit there and lie there and exist and that's all Rosie really needs to survive then I think that's probably something that she was happy to do there's no denying that 11 pounds at one and a half years old is severely underweight and after Rosie's surgery while she was staying at the hospital under the care of doctors and not Acacia and J. Russo's care Rosie was able to rapidly gain the weight she needed to a healthy weight and then after the open heart surgery Acacia decides to bring the family camping daughter just gets out of the hospital for open heart surgery and they go camping her incisions aren't even healed yet and they're going camping shortly after the surgery the family went on a trip to the mountains this trip was during COVID too so you have an infant who just had open heart surgery who's immune compromised traveling again without a coat check out this photo so the last time I covered this I included a TikTok where Acacia talked about how they took Rosie and their family to the mountains after she had open heart surgery because she was fully cleared by her doctors and able to do this and they wanted her to be in nature because they were all cooped up but this photo does it for me because what? what are you actually thinking? again Acacia gets no more benefit of the doubt for me when it comes to motherhood and also just good judgment because I look at this photo and I see an infant with a feeding tube yes that is an infant with a feeding tube which is a serious medical device which Acacia and Jerus are newly accustomed to using and then I see their other daughter in a very heavy duty coat not Rosie again so she's underdressed which indicates that this is very cold weather that they are in which further indicates that this is not conditions that a one and a half year old who just had open heart surgery should be in not a doctor but that's just my opinion but still this photo changes the context of everything it wasn't a fun little camping trip after open heart surgery your daughter is in a heavy duty coat and Rosie has a feeding tube again Rosie is the forgotten child so what do you expect? take them home but clearly Rosie has been through a lot worse because Acacia has left Rosie laying in the sand alone before or left Rosie laying by herself many many times the forgotten baby who it seems time and time again is all too easily forgotten about in your household I'm getting matching stuffed animals for Rosie and Brynn but I'm not wrapping hers or anything so basically I'm just getting stuff for Brynn there's also multiple photos of Rosie and just a basic stroller when for her disability it seems like she's supposed to have a supported stroller there was a Reddit post from a special needs mom talking about how long and difficult it can be to obtain a medical stroller which can be even more difficult if you don't have medical insurance according to this poster a one stroller with insurance can cost over $5,000 but there are also a lot of supportive special needs Facebook groups with innovative ideas on how to work around this problem for example this mom stuffed towels and blankets in a baby trendwagon for her son to make it more supportive until they were able to obtain a medical stroller another redditor even claimed that Acacia and Jerus did have medical insurance and even showed their medical cards once and with all the sponsorships and ad revenue from her family vlogging rolling in that Acacia had all the money on her disposal to be able to get Rosie a medical stroller and that Rosie has never been seen in any special needs equipment besides the one feeding tube from the hospital on top of that early childhood intervention is usually free with state insurance but if you don't have state insurance it goes off of income so the lower the income the lower the cost so she could have had physical therapy speech therapy and occupational therapy for a fairly low cost but I have an acquaintance so this is second hand information and I want to get very clear that this was not my experience I don't know but I have a second hand account from someone who was very close to her during the period where she was in her family vlogging and she only had Rosie and Brinley someone with a disabled child my child has high support needs on spectrum he was in 20 hours a week of different types of therapy of speech and occupational therapy and behavioral therapy was acting as does now it was tough it was draining but it was also necessary because early intervention is so necessary and from this second hand account that I have that was not happening there was no assistance for Rosie in those ways and I do think that that is neglectful I think that is a type of neglect again there's been very little medical equipment for Rosie and it seems that there's been very little therapy for Rosie to me feels neglectful it's devastating that Rosie didn't get that yeah we have no idea where she would be if she had and that's just the unfortunate thing she's almost recreating the upbringing and trauma that her parents caused her Akesha grew up unattended ill-mannered, irresponsible and had no idea of what consequences are any parent is entitled to their me time but when you sign up to be a parent a parent of three nonetheless you are both responsible for taking care of that child providing for them teaching them right from wrong and ensuring they feel loved and safe are the basics for a solid foundation the trauma that's been inflicted onto Akesha from her family Akesha has continued to inflict onto her own children and guess what according to the child welfare information gateway there's an intergenerational cycle of child abuse and neglect though of course not all children who are abused and neglected go on to abuse and neglect their kids so what are the contributing factors that lead to abuse and neglect according to Children's Wisconsin the following are characteristics of some of the people who abuse children low self-esteem poor control over their emotions a history of being abused themselves stress, financial problems social isolation relationship problems with a partner lack of parenting skills drugs or alcohol inability to cope with life stressors focused on own troubles or things other than their children possible child contributing factors some children have certain characteristics or behaviors that make it likely that they will be at risk for abuse or neglect however it's important to remember that no matter what characteristics a child has or how they act a child is never responsible for being abused or neglected chronic illness, disability crying for extended periods of time feeding problems physical appearance for example resembling someone who is viewed negatively by the caregiver and according to this study titled intergenerational effects of childhood maltreatment a systemic review of the parenting practices of adult survivors of child abuse neglect and violence parents who experienced a neglectful or abusive childhood are unfortunately at an increased risk for neglecting their own children though of course that does not mean that everyone who experienced abuse in their childhood is going to continue the pattern in 2021 acacia left the internet after being exposed for running a preset scam and stealing from a small business and other creator and acacia returned to the internet in 2022 announcing her divorce with j-ruse and that she was dealing with the aftermath of j-ruse's substance abuse problems i want to be very respectful of somebody that is a big part of my life and i want to be respectful to what they're going through but what i can say and what i can share is that me and the kids are okay and take care of ourselves or myself the best that i can so that i can be the best mom i can be and a lot of changes happening a lot of new things are happening quite scary but i will let everybody know when i'm ready to talk about it she also announced that she was not going to be posting her children on the internet anymore which at first i believed was a sign of growth an attempt from acacia to start her healing journey through no longer profiting from exploiting her children on the internet especially through a sensitive time like going through a divorce i thought that not posting her children online meant that acacia was going to try to heal but it turns out that acacia's version of healing is flying off to california hundreds of miles away from where her children are frequently dating young boys and not only not posting her children but acting like her children no longer exist like she wanted her children to completely go away as if her divorce meant she no longer was a mother anymore either if you don't see anything about my kids that means i'm doing a terrific job i love hearing that i love it that means you don't get an ounce you don't get a sliver you don't even get to see the tiniest littlest part because i don't want you to so that means i'm winning we all just think it's kind of wild how you don't see car seats in her car there's not like a toy in the background there's just no evidence of her children oftentimes and it honestly we all kind of wonder if she has custody how much she's actually seeing them we have no idea i can't erase the evidence that i'm a mother even though my child is also not my content now don't get me wrong i don't post my child on the internet and lots of parents have chosen not to post their children on the internet it's one thing not to post your child and it's something completely different to pretend online like you're no longer a mother when literally everyone knows you are one now this in itself wouldn't even necessarily be that big of a deal it did raise a lot of red flags for a lot of people it was one of those weird but okay kind of moments it had fell as if acacia was trying to completely be rid herself of the motherhood identity she had once clung to so heavily online she had gone from this family vlogger image where her children were in every single photo every post every sponsorship where her profits and brand was tied together with her children and it was a respectable move for her to untie herself from that to now she was acting online as if she was not a mother whatsoever as if she had disassociated from this idea that she ever was one for the people that had been following her for years and years the cognitive dissonance was alarming the only thing she posted about online was dating and wanting to date and young boys acacia's posting instagram stories like these hey look a poison sandwich i'ma eat it i want this so bad i'm gonna scream she's just living in complete denial that she's a divorced mother of three i think she wants to relive this someone grooming her days because that's the only way she knows how to fall in love and there was this sort of heavy resentment seeping through her content about the fact that she even had children acacia posted a tick-tock video stitching someone who said say it with me life is hard but at least i don't have a baby with my ex and acacia said but i can't say that life is hard but at least i don't have a baby with my ex i can't i can't say that with you i i can't say that with you seemingly complaining about the fact that she had children with her ex wow tell us you hate your kids even more please dig the hole deeper your kids are gonna see this all when they grow up don't forget that we get it you wish you didn't have kids god i hope someone else is taking care of them and actually showing them they're loved and wanted and while acacia was going through a period of trying to find herself post-divorce jruse was dealing with shen quit music and began selling couches on facebook marketplace and jruse somehow sold a lot of couches um how did jruse find this many couches to be able to sell on facebook marketplace couch surfing more like couch commerce surfing the marketplace swells of course there's nothing wrong with selling couches on facebook marketplace jruse has just done some problematic things so i felt the need to clown on him a little bit acacia's chaotic story has been summed up eloquently by snoopy stories in a post on medium and on reddit that inspired part of this video title titled acacia brinley villain or victim the downfall of the original tumblr girl in which snoopy story says acacia brinley is a hard figure for me to understand considering her family dynamic especially her father and the fact that she had unrestricted internet access at a young age could not have been good for her time and time again acacia's shown to have no sense of personal identity rather changing her identity with what's popular or what her boyfriends want she was pregnant and married to a grown man by the time she was 18 her history of self and her inability to take criticism shows her to be a fragile person however this does not excuse her of any of her behavior in conclusion she's both a villain and a victim the internet as a whole was willing to look past some of these red flags the pattern of neglect and cycles of abuse that acacia received from our own family and then inflicted downwards the never ending cycles of neglect we often see in our own families that cause us so much pain and suffering until the video in the park surfaced there was no more hiding no more excuses and no more denying the villainous role acacia played in perpetuating these cycles of abuse and neglect people have been saying for years that acacia neglected her children to be honest it was hard for me to believe that a mother doesn't care about her children but I was wrong it goes to show that if a lot of people are saying something you need to at least look into it heavily and listen to them I'm still in shock to be honest this is bad bad you've got a two year old on the roof a disabled girl by the road and there are other people there too confused like what the f acacia I don't understand why she couldn't have taken them on a hike instead of to the park if she wanted to be in nature so bad I'm going to make a confident assumption and say this is not the first time this has happened the fact that she's confident to leave her toddlers one who has a disability alone in a public park without fear of them running off being taken tells me that she's trained them to stay put or has conditioned the older one to watch over her younger siblings so that she can gallivant around without them well would you look at that acacia brinley being a terrible person once again leaving this baby next to the street and this is acacia coming out of the forest by herself where she went to go take pictures of herself while leaving her children out and alone what mother takes their children to a park leaves them unattended to go walk in a forest that is yards away from where her children are she has rosie in the sun alone having heart issues and being on meds can cause issues in the sun for an extended period of time and you can see rosie still has a bald spot on the back of her head from just being left lying there at four years old that's absolutely unacceptable disability or not this video was initially filmed by a mother at the park where acacia left her children and was posted by a friend of the mother on the gene subreddit this is what the post said is this the new norm for gen z moms my friend was at a park playing with her kids and she sent me a snap of some kid climbing on top of a van while his mom had walked off into the woods and left her three kids alone she felt so bad for the kids since I guess the mama just laid on a blanket the whole time taking selfies and ignoring her kids calling her to come play is this what our society is coming to I'm just appalled she said the kids looked dirty and the little boy had a full diaper with no pants on I guess when the mom left and walked off into the woods she didn't say a word to any of the kids and left her baby on the blanket which was close to the road rosie is still so underdeveloped that this poster my friend thought that rosie was a baby that's when the little boy climbed on top of the van and the oldest little girl ran into the woods to get her mom after the mom ripped the little boy off of the roof roughly she went straight back to being on her phone ignoring the kids has anyone else witnessed like this makes me think gen alpha is screwed according to the poster the person filming never originally intended to film the children the little girl parent at the park filming their own children playing on the merry-go-round when they noticed a mother now known to be acacia walked off into the woods and didn't come back for 5 to 10 minutes rosie was alone on a blanket by the road the entire time and the 2 year old kali began to open the van and climb inside making his way to the roof of the car parents in the park began to panic fearing that acacia was not coming back and fearing for the safety of the children that's when the parent began to film the children to document the incident online sleuths noticed that acacia had posted a photo onto her instagram story of her playing on her nintendo switch in a forest that looked identical to the one at the park at the same time that the park incident allegedly took place which if that was the case would mean that acacia walked into the forest to play on her nintendo switch and take photos of it for her instagram story the video that her child was climbing on top of the car and her disabled child was unattended on a blanket next to the road is july 9th and on july 9th acacia posted this photo of her in the woods on her switch july 9th fully understand mothers needing to step away for a moment to regulate themselves and process emotions when that needs to happen children are in a safe environment and not left unattended in a public space the original poster also noted that at the park has been noticed that acacia had the brand new nintendo switch in her hand at the time that she was walking to get her son off the top of the car someone filmed a walkthrough of this park to show just how far away forest is from the playground and in this walkthrough how similar the forest looks to the nintendo instagram story post screenshot of a video my friend took of her and her friends kids playing and that women's kids were in it only sharing to show how dirty they were no shoes, dirty clothes and their poor hair looked matted they came like that so not like they rolled around in dirt at the park it's so sad now that we know the backstory she was taking selfies when the little boy fell off the merry-go-round my friend remembers this clearly because when the little boy fell both she and the little girl went to check on him she asked where his mom was and both of them pointed at her she said something like maybe your mom can come over and bring you a bandaid the boy's knee was scraped but not bleeding the little girl said something like it's okay she won't now looking back it sounds like she often neglects her kids needs completely appalled by this situation this felt like something completely inexcusable the backlash against acacia was mounting people leaving hate on acacia's tiktok selfie videos I don't think you quite understand how badly you effed up this time multiple people have called cps as they should stop taking narcissistic videos of yourself and watch your gd kids cps horrible mother instincts to leave your kids alone like that there was no possible way that acacia could ignore the backlash anymore she had to address it first acacia posted onto her instagram story a post that read trigger warning da I'm not really here to explain or convince anyone where I've been mentally for the past six or so months but I know that staying completely quiet doesn't work either I've been dealing with ongoing da due to addiction for years now I thought that after my separation it would have died down or go away completely but has since only gotten worse and as for content creation I will be slowing down for a little bit while I get back on my feet but I will never stop creating and trying to spread joy I'm here to stay I absolutely believe in cps I believe that she's been going through this do I think that it could possibly excuse what happened that day at the park no I don't think so there's no excuse for what happened that day there's no excuse for cali having the time to get on top of a car where the door was open and it again is right next to a street there's no excuse for brinley having to run and try to find her mom to get help there's no excuse for leaving a child with disabilities that has mobility issues on a blanket by themselves I'm sorry I as much as I do have empathy for whatever is happening behind the scenes I just don't think that there is any excuse for what happened now I want to say of course no one needs to be open about DA or incredibly hard personal aspects of their personal life especially when children are involved now and only now acacia is suddenly opening up about her struggles when it is convenient for her to open up about being a victim of DA which to me feels like an outlet and a way to deflect any accountability for a thing that was filmed and documented in which she walked away from her children and put them in the line of danger and I believe two things can be true at once your husband can be not the greatest of dudes going through addiction but that also does not mean that you did not neglect your children at a park which people are understandably outraged and very upset about but most importantly extremely concerned for your children about and you just gave them an extra reason to be concerned for your children acacia also posted a tiktok series explaining her side and at first to be as honest as possible I felt a lot of empathy listening to acacia explain her side of things I saw acacia crying in a video and explaining that she was dealing with a domestic violent situation and I just couldn't imagine as a mother going through a situation like that but then I had to pause and analyze the videos because things were not adding up. I want to clarify that I believe acacia's story but simultaneously I feel like these videos are only attempts at covering up the situation and manipulating her audience to feel bad for her just like I initially did so that acacia can remain on the internet and continue to profit off of her following waiting for people to forget about this most recent controversy so let me break down why I think these videos are BS starting with this first frame of her explanation video that face at the beginning says enough while explaining that I mean I get making a video and feeling nervous and kind of making faces I'm an overly expressive person so who am I to say but vibes are off acacia claimed in the video that during that week when the park incident happened she was going through domestic abuse and had been continuing to ask for help but that nobody was giving it to her and that she was in an unsafe environment and that nobody was listening and I had been continuing to ask for help from people close to me I had asked for help from people in my life over and over nobody was helping I was doing it all alone and I had said so many times that I was in an unsafe environment and nobody was listening so with what you were saying is true knowing you're in a particularly unsafe environment experiencing one of the worst weeks of d.a. you took your children to a park and you walked off into the forest leaving your children alone in that park while claiming that your ex-partner the father of those children is unsafe not the environment in your family life is unsafe if anything to me that makes this neglect even worse violence and abuse against kids kidnapping against kids is even more likely to be committed by another parent children who witness abuse that is also a case of child abuse as well so it puts this in a very sensitive situation especially if they're being abandoned or neglected in public places as someone who was a child who was in a domestically abated household my mother was absolutely a victim and it's been hard for me to come to terms with my head because obviously I empathize with her and I love her but ultimately she made her children victims too and like that just really sucks and it sucks to see that potentially now happening in a case of situation I don't think that she is handling this very well so quickly to dealing with your own trauma but you do have to figure it out a little bit faster when there are children involved and children who witness domestic abuse are at risk of both short and long term physical and mental health problems so you are not the only one experiencing this Akeisha your children are as well and it will have long lasting impacts on them especially if you abandon them when they need you the most Akeisha then claimed in her tiktok video that she went to the forest to cry about her da situation again with no awareness that this is affecting her kids too and that she started walking back when she saw Kali on top of the car in her part 2 on her tiktok explanation series Akeisha claimed that she needed to step away to the forest because she had cried so much in front of her children recently I knew that I needed to step away because I have cried in front of my children so often recently that I have started to pull back from doing that so I stepped away because I could not hold it together anymore and I was not going to cry in front of the whole park nor in front of my kids even just Akeisha claiming that she had cried so much in front of her children is a major red flag to me because of course seeing your mother cry is traumatic though I would say it's better than your mother completely walking off and abandoning you don't get me wrong of course it's all hard divorcing at a young age is hard going through a possible da situation is extremely hard but do you think these young children ever asked for any of this as much as I can empathize with being a mother and not having the support that you need in tough times and as much as I want to give her the benefit out in the situation I just don't think that I can I just don't think that there is any excuse for leaving three children under the age of six one which has mobility issues right next to a street in a park when you are not within walking distance of them if you cannot get to your child in 5 seconds you're too far and 5 seconds might be even too much of a stretch I think that when in her response video she said that she was in the tree line so in that video I had stepped away had a little cry at the edge of the tree line where I could see all three of my children I don't think that's true because we see in that video women looking for her and if she was right there in the tree line like wouldn't they have seen her she's very tall the girl is 5'10 she's hard to miss I understand that if she really truly was so overwhelmed and so upset that day if she was just literally having a bad day like that that sucks that's terrible don't take your three kids to the park stay home the positive is Akasha claimed that after this incident she got connected with a social worker who also connected her with a navigator and she relocated to a better living situation that removed her from an unsafe environment since that video which is about 4 weeks old I knew I could no longer rely on the people close to me and so I have reached out for help through other avenues I am working closely with a social worker Department of Human Services if you don't know what DHS is it's basically like CPS but I've been working very closely with her to get help and she has been the most supportive person of my life recently and has changed my life with help with support groups and getting set up with a navigator which if you don't know what a navigator is basically that or a patient navigator you can google that and figure out more about them but they basically just help you figure shit out I have removed myself and I'm now more in a safe environment because of her and I'm doing so much better even though it's so much harder and I am going to keep going and then Akasha posted TikTok that really pisses me off to be honest in the third part of Akasha's video series Akasha not only continues to talk about herself instead of giving any clarification on whether or not her children are okay and how they are doing but Akasha also clarifies that she is not going anywhere and will continue to post on the internet which to me again in my opinion solidifies Akasha's intentions entire explanation series Akasha wanted to put something out that could at least went over enough of her audience's sympathy that she could continue posting and wouldn't have to leave the internet I have a lot going on right now like I mentioned I have a lot of things I want to cross off my list before I keep creating but creating is something that brings me joy and has always brought me joy and so I have no plans on letting anybody tell me what I can and can't be and the internet is a place for everybody and it's a place for me and so I will continue to be here and I feel good about that decision so all I'm hearing is me, me, me I don't think that you can deny her pattern of not taking accountability in my own experience with her you call her out for something and she just will immediately deflect your accusation to you instead of focusing on the topic at hand it's a deflection I think that we saw an example of that in her sit down explanation video about why her children were alone in a park she did not take accountability one time when those were her actions and if they were motivated by behind the scenes that doesn't make it a tougher conversation to have but at the end of the day those were still her actions it was her decision to take the kids to the park it was her decision to walk away it was on her so it's just like it's disappointing to me to see another example of her not taking accountability Brittany also posted about this situation on Tiktok and had what I think is an extremely valid take I woke up to several different people sending me a twitter thread that regards the parenting of someone that I used to know in the case of this mother maybe she felt overwhelmed I don't know what the situation was maybe she was feeling overwhelmed and felt the need to walk away absolutely times that the right thing to do when you're overwhelmed is to walk away but it is the right thing to do when your children are safe when they are in their room or their crib somewhere that you know that they are that they cannot hurt themselves or hurt you and you can take a moment to yourself it is not safe or appropriate to walk away when this can fucking happen at a public park if you're feeling overwhelmed in slightly better environments where you can bring your children to where if you step away less dangerous things are likely to happen going to a park and walking to the edge of the forest is not the way to do that in the comment section of Brittany's video Brogan Burnside Acacia's old best friend someone whose friends with Acacia for years and even at Acacia's wedding commented on Brittany's Tiktok saying you left out the part to be taking selfies in a forest long enough for the two-year-old child to climb on top of a minivan Brogan also confirmed that she does not talk to Acacia anymore in an Instagram Q&A Do you talk to Blank?  I made 300 bucks on TikTok last month I have probably a fraction of her OF followers and I make like easily like a grand a month off that It was definitely not a coincidence that like one of her main points was I'm staying on the internet you can't run me off here because she cannot afford to be run off the internet If that's what I make off of those platforms imagine with someone with a huge following is making off of those platforms I made it so that like don't support her if you say a word against her you don't support domestic violence victims I'm a victim of domestic violence my two best friends are victims of domestic violence I know so many women because it's so fucking unfortunately common and like that's none of them would use that as an excuse for neglect Akesha is a victim because just like we say there is no perfect victim there is also no perfect villain which makes it hard for empathetic people and people pleasers because often times manipulative people will play on your heart strings and make you want to see the good in them or all the ways in which they have been victimized we all have been victimized in some way but what matters at the end of the day is that we don't continue this cycle and victimize the most vulnerable members of our population or else that also makes us the villain that is also what makes Akesha the villain even if she was also once the victim even though Akesha is claiming that she's experiencing domestic abuse and that social workers are involved in her family situation Akesha continues to post online like everything is normal completely unfazed which is the strangest thing of all it seems to be a completely self-absorbed reality if there is ever a time to believe the internet and take care of your family now would be the time but Akesha has seemed completely unfazed by everything going on like she could not be bothered apart from her explanation video why do you think that Akesha continues to post onto social media even when she claims that such serious and dire problems are going on in her life and why is it that Akesha cannot seemingly exist without social media and internet fame I think that there are two reasons that Akesha is still online even though she generally speaking has a very negative audience and I don't think that it's just her claim that she wants to spread joy with her car selfie content I think that she is absolutely addicted to the feedback loop I don't think that she knows how also I think that she does not know how to make money off the internet it seems that Akesha has acted unfazed trying to move on from the leaked video of the park incident as quickly as possible so that Akesha doesn't have to stop making money online from social media recently Akesha deleted all of her explanation videos in the park the exact reason why she did this is unknown I believe it's probably so she can try to erase what happened in hopes that people will eventually completely forget about it besides vague posts from Akesha about the status of her children it's unknown where her children are what their health is like what the social worker involvement mcps status is and yet right after Akesha's TikTok explanation videos a redditor spotted Akesha at a concert in a midday parade in California hundreds of miles away from her children after she claimed domestic abuse was taking place spotted I went to a concert tonight and saw our girl getting kicked out of the photo pit for not being a photographer so why has Akesha been so insistent on staying on the internet even though everyday commenters remind her of how neglectful she's so obviously being towards her children she's clearly making money off of social media as Brittany mentioned through OF and TikTok people ask a lot how she's able to afford these frequent flights to LA she's in LA like two weeks out of the month sometimes just from what I've witnessed and our circles I'm in LA too they overlap a little bit so I know like a little bit behind the scenes and she's here all the time people are like how does she afford this like I don't think you understand how much money this girl is potentially making from either the TikTok creator fund or the creativity beta program so I absolutely do think that it's money and it's attention and I think those are her two primary focuses Linked on Akesha's Instagram in a linked tree is only one link where you can pay for Akesha's extra special photos and videos and in my opinion that is why she is so very insistent on staying on social media it would be one thing if I genuinely believed that Akesha was using her OF to support her family and I don't know like buy medical equipment for her disabled child and put her children's needs first but I personally do not believe this is the case and to think months ago I ended the video that I made with this hope that Akesha not posting her children online was going to mean she was actually changing as a person really her coming back online was a strategy to see how she could make more money and now she does not want to leave because she doesn't want to sacrifice any more money making opportunities growth is really the theme here Akesha's online aesthetic has constantly evolved over time but that evolution has never seen to reflect much inner growth as a person instead all its shown is a need to deflect from accountability and change in this near decade of me being quiet about my experiences with Akesha that was because I did not want to make her beholden to my view of her as a 16 year old because children change you grow I witnessed her being a selfish entitled teen and now I'm watching her be a selfish entitled adult and I don't think that that change happened unfortunately also just recently Akesha has started dating a new grunge boy who lives in LA and is in a band which is believed to be also another reason why she changed her aesthetic this person posted an Instagram story with Akesha dancing and looking happy at one of his concerts and just when she found a man she also began to publicly take up an interest in appearing to care for her children and look I understand going through a messy divorce messing up as a parent and making mistakes maybe even being a sh** parent and trying to make up for it and coming back and trying again stuff happens when you truly care about your children you do deserve to be a presence in their lives but you know what you don't deserve you don't deserve to use your children as props in your life to fulfill your selfish desires whether that's to get a man to make money off of social media to have the perfect brand and image you don't get to use your children to make yourself look better for months Akesha acted like her children didn't exist there was virtually no sign of them until the park video surfaced where they were clearly not being treated well then all of a sudden Akesha started posting Instagram stories talking about taking her children to school and picking them up she's so calculated she spent months not showing a trace of her children no toys in the background no car seats, neglect allegations come out and boom we see toys in the background and she's talking about them Akesha also posted a performative video to hear her pressing the record button and telling her children alright we're going on an adventure what do we say? alright everybody we're going on an adventure what do we say? I would maybe think this was cute if I didn't know everything we know now Akesha also posted a video explanation about why she's going to be posting her kids more now also the reason that I just shared something non intimate about my life with my kiddos is because I wanted for so long to keep any information about them and motherhood for me off the internet especially during the sensitive time for me where when I am in like mom mode with my kiddos I'm doing it all on my own without a support system without family, without a babysitter without any help at all it's just me and them and so I'm like very defensive and very like sensitive when it comes to that stuff I don't want anyone to have any room to talk about me as a mother and like what's going on right now but clearly people already do that so might as well share some non intimate, non personal non like secretive things that are happy and positive that are going on Akesha I call bullsh** people were not speculating about your treatment of your children for no reason even with the accusations of your treatment of Rosie time and time again of the doubt and I respected that you wanted to keep your children off line then out of the blue people who don't even know you and didn't even know that you had an online platform posted about you neglecting your children and putting them in a harms way now in my opinion you aren't posting your children for any other reason than your own selfish needs to try and use them as a way to clean up your image so you can continue to manipulate people on social media change your brand aesthetic and image and victimize yourself now by saying you're a single mother doing it all thereby using your children to victimize yourself using them as props to build a social media brand that will build up a new revenue stream for yourself and new defenders who are proud of you for doing it all I see what you're doing after seeing the pattern and how you've been doing it for years we would all kind of hope that after this park incident with her three children that maybe that was a wake up call for her and that maybe she would take a break online and start to like look inward and start to really analyze why that happened, how that happened how she let that happen it's just very upsetting and disappointing to me because like the one point of credit that I did and could give Acacia was that she kept her children offline and away from parents hmm that's that too more and more there have been parents online who audiences have been able to spot as red flags and yet they continue to exist and make profit as influencers while their children are suffering from poor treatment this needs to stop when we see bad behavior from parents online we should stop interacting with them or putting up with this behavior they don't deserve a platform period because their children are suffering off of them profiting of course I wish for Acacia to grow and to heal but unfortunately through Acacia's actions I no longer have the patience to give her the benefit of the doubt or to hope for any growth from her at least over wanting the well-being of her children what do you hope for Acacia, Acacia's family and her children's future I think whether you love or hate Acacia I think that you have to agree that it isn't both her and her family's best interest to be offline I don't think that Acacia will ever be able to heal in this just perpetual feedback loop that she's created of her being on the internet I don't think she'll ever be able to focus inward on herself and on her family as long as she's this focused outward I think that the best thing that you can do is stop engaging I think that the only way to move forward from this is for her to be platformed and I think the only way to do that is to stop engaging with her so whether or not you're commenting to like criticize her or you in her videos for like the gossip of it all this is not gossip anymore this is serious this is a just an influencer who's like being crazy online this is children in danger the information is there that it's accessible stop engaging I think it's the best thing that any of us can do the information need to be spread to be shared I understand people being outraged and wanting to comment and wanting to let her know on her page on her tiktoks like hey we're mad we're angry we're outraged at this point she is posted so much continually on her tiktoks that it is clear she does not care she sees those comments and she does not care it's clear those comments don't work to get her offline to get her to stop posting to get her to see the light the clarity that method that isn't working and the only one that does is not engaging with her anymore I don't know the inner personal lives of acacia and her family but I am concerned for acacia's children and feel there are serious red flags about the family situation that should not be shared online and acacia should not be profiting from if you saw my first part about the story of acacia and the horrific truth about Richard Clark acacia's father then you know about Irene Kaya my name is Irene Kaya my instagram is Irene Kaya pretty straight forward and her heroine story about her interactions with Richard Clark I met him around 2015 when I was 16 15 16 I booked him for a headshot photo shoot for my acting agency oh have you ever been a model and I'm like no it was just like oh take off your clothes and I kept taking off more and more and it resorted to me being fully and then I found out he was selling my photos online as a minor and he just wouldn't take them down and I wasn't allowed to have a boyfriend he didn't really want me to have any friends either so he kind of separated me from everyone else and my mom was not allowed to know about it for him to have you sign a contract where you're not allowed to have a boyfriend is so controlling and weird that in itself just puts this like whole dynamic in place of him just like wanting to control who you're dating wanting to control your life oh yeah he was trying to isolate me for sure and hindsight I do see it now in the moment I was like he's trying to protect me he told me he's my circuit father he's trying to be a dad but no he just wanted to isolate me from everyone what do you think his end goal was um I feel like it's an ego thing some men they just want to feel and control and dominate someone especially people younger than them and people that are vulnerable like me they're just losing a father he saw I was the perfect opportunity for him but then I recently spoke to a human working worker and she told me that his behavior was similar to a lot of human shakers they would them and then the same things he would do to me isolate and they would just end up in my interview with Brittany Brittany even provided brief information that Irene was undergoing a lawsuit with Richard Clark because he had grabbed her when she was underage well I reached out to Irene Kaia to get confirmation of this and was able to do an interview with her to speak about this lawsuit and this is what Irene had to say in your video you mentioned going to the police to try and get justice for what happened to you Brittany mentioned that there's been other government agencies that you've been in contact with in general what have your experiences been like going to government agencies to try and get justice with the police it's been really bad I went to the cops of Simi Valley I'm saying that so all the girls know to never go there the same detective that worked on my case with Richard Clark worked on my case and with the Richard Clark case ended up with him saying you weren't using a viper in your picture same thing had to happen with the race he just you know dropped it based off of dumb shit even though the race admitted it that's been my experience going to authorities with government agencies they kind of came to me and they instructed me not to really speak on it but with them it's been good I don't know what they're exactly doing right now they don't really tell me much but I know they're trying to look for him so many victims often feel like the odds are stacked against them what's been able to keep you going and what advice would you give to other victims who are looking to pursue justice to be honest I've always loved to push myself to do things that make me uncomfortable and this story was something even my mom doesn't know like I never wanted to tell anyone I don't want to be known as a girl who got groomed that's the last thing I really want to be known as so it was definitely really hard but I don't regret it at all I knew it was the right thing to do and I knew if I didn't say something he would be doing it to other women and other young girls just thinking about it in that sense I wouldn't want my daughter to go through that you know so that made me speak out to people who are deciding whether they want to go for it or not I would say do what's comfortable for you because some people speaking up just gives them too much anxiety like they would rather let it go and I support that too because it's your own story your own experience you do what you want if you want to speak out I encourage you to because your dread tells you what's right and what you should do as a person and for me that was just to speak out so currently you're in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit with Richard Clark what has this lawsuit experience been like for you this lawsuit experience has been really long to be honest it's a lot of times of me repeating the story over and over again and every time I repeat it I get traumatized and PTSD so it's emotionally intense but I know at the end it'll be worth it and even if it doesn't go my way at least it sends a message to him hey there's people that are willing to speak out so maybe stop what you're doing I guess at the end of the day I feel better with myself knowing I did the right thing not just for me but for other people as well so that keeps me going and also having some friends around you that you can tell and go to for me it's brand new when everything is over what does justice look like for you just as long as he's not doing whatever he did to me to other women other girls then I'll be happy I just want him to stop what he's doing and to pay for what he's done whether that's time in jail whatever he needs to learn his lesson mentally and physically that's not okay to do to someone so thank you so much to Irene for speaking with me about such a vulnerable topic I can't imagine how hard it is to relive such a traumatic experience over and over again but I think it's so important to talk about these types of things for victims who have gone through very similar experiences to know what possibly their options could be thank you so much to everyone who made it this far into this journey of acacia and how she became the villain that she is today at the end all I'm feeling is that acacia should not be allowed to have the platform that she has she's shown time and time again that she doesn't deserve it anymore especially when she puts her children in danger if you made it this far please comment your support to Irene and to Brittany who are just such incredible people and I appreciate them so much for being a part of this series if you have any video suggestions that you'd like to see in the next upload please comment them down below and also thank you to my team for all their work that they put into this video I hope you all are doing well and I'll see you in the next video bye