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In the Martins' videos, a "prank" could mean trashing a room of the house and blaming the children until they seemed to break from confusion and shame. Or it could mean making the children flip water bottles and forcing the loser to be slapped across the face by her (yes her) brother. Or it could mean teasing and taking a tablet away from the youngest child until he was apparently overcome by emotion, then pushing him face-first into a bookshelf when he tried to escape. Or it could mean publicly punishing that child by leaving him behind from a family trip to Disneyland for "putting poop everywhere" and not acting "like a normal kid." Fun pranks. An Xbox that pays for itself. The good life. Parenting.
Much of the unwanted attention coming the Martins' way started with a wave of concerned viewers ("haters" as the Martins called them in a now-deleted family response) alerted to the channel by YouTuber Philip DeFranco, who has posted several videos compiling instances of alleged abuse from now-deleted "DaddyOFive" videos and documenting the saga as it's unfolded through an apology tour that leapt from YouTube to daytime television.
Their interview with T.J. Holmes of "Good Morning America" did not help their case, with Heather tearfully channeling Alex Jones ("We made poor parenting choices by portraying ourselves this way, but we are not bad people") and Mike explaining his real reasoning for making the videos: He just wanted to be a hero to his kids.
"You've got dads out there that are lawyers, I'm not no lawyer," he said, convincingly. "You've got dads out there that are doctors. I can't do that. I felt like I'm not being the dad that they deserve." Hard to argue with that.
Days later, authorities intervened, and a lawyer, together with the birth mother of the youngest two children, posted a video to YouTube announcing that she had been granted emergency custody of them.
Since then, the alleged abuse within the family has become fodder across YouTube for vloggers and podcasters to pick apart and debate. There are compilations clipped from the family's videos isolating the inevitable moments when one child collapses into sobs, shrieks at his adult tormentors, cowers in a closet or a corner, his skin crimson with apparent rage and fear, the camera hovering over him as he blocks his face. He looks desperate, lost, trapped. It's monstrous.
It only begins to make sense when you watch a now-deleted first pass at an apology from the Martins. Posted shortly after DeFranco's videos, it shows the couple exhausted and humble, but mostly torn up over the fate of their YouTube channel.
"I tiptoed around it because I was scared. I was scared, but now I don't care anymore," says Mike. "The videos are fake. They're fake." He says this as though pushing a child face-first into a bookcase and posting it for ad revenue could be fake. Still, his concern for the children outweighs all. Sort of. "That kind of thing kills a YouTube channel, and my kids love the YouTube channel."
From there he blames the kids for having the ideas for the videos (who is he to question a director?). He blames DeFranco for directing more people to his channel, despite it already having more than 750,000 watchers. He points out that he put "for entertainment purposes only" in the video descriptions. (Oh, and he dismisses the Disneyland fiasco, explaining they already had plans to take the youngest child to Vidcon -- a conference for viral celebrities.)
"To the ones that really stick with us after this," Heather adds later in the non-apology, "you guys are awesome and, I mean, you guys get it."
Like me, the hosts on "Good Morning America" did not "get it," and pointed to a convergence of conditions that made this debacle a "perfect storm": The family's sudden fame, the influx of ad cash, and, most concerningly, the demand for more videos from subscribers -- which increased by the hundreds even after news spread of the videos -- all came together to lead the Martin family down a path of horrible decisions and incomprehensible behavior.
That one remaining video on the channel, a replacement apology -- strangely edited, professionally shot, and completely different in tone and message from anything the family has ever posted to the Internet -- seems to demonstrate a tighter grasp on the part of the Martins as to where they went wrong. It's heartbreaking to think of this family getting torn apart for what seems like little more than cruel stupidity. It's tempting to believe there's been a lesson learned from all of this. Maybe, for the Martins, there was.
But what now of that scattered mob of 750,000? The ones who thumbed-up regular servings of awfulness, who hungered for the humiliation of a child, who repeatedly requested a "divorce prank"? (An idea that the Martins pat themselves on the back in their deleted apology for never attempting -- out of consideration for the kids' feelings, of course.)
It's equally tempting to believe that the elimination of these horrible videos did something to substantively improve the general health of the Internet, or that it might inspire us to be more compelled to report cruelty than consume it. But that's a tall order. We can hope others will stop indulging their worst instincts, or we can stop indulging our own.