Genshin Impactvoice actor Elliot Isaac Gindi apologized over nearly 20 pages' worth of sexual harassment accusations detailing suicide threats and other alarming behavior. What’s turning out to be anothermajorGenshin Impactcontroversystarted when several people accused Gindi of taking advantage of his popularity among the game’s player base to engage in sexual harassment of fans, some of whom were underage at the time the alleged abuse took place.
While sexual harassment and related forms of abuse are unfortunately far from limited to the gaming industry, the post-Gamergate world has at least made strides in encouraging victims of such transgressions to step forward. As a result of these years-longawareness efforts reaching all the way to the U.S. Congress, the public discourse is nowadays much more accepting of individuals seeking to highlight malicious actors engaging in misogynistic, transphobic, or otherwise abusive or hateful behavior.
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In another episode illustrating this issue,Genshin Impactvoice actor Elliot Gindi was accused of grooming and sexually harassing fans via social media. The controversy started when one of his former Discord and Twitch moderators published a 19-page document containing chat logs from three accusers that allege Gindi engaged in emotional abuse, sexual harassment, and blackmail, on top of occasionally making transphobic remarks, all over the course of late 2022. After being faced with the possibility of his behavior coming out, he threatened to commit suicide, according to one accuser, who also claims they were underage at the time.
In a subsequent response posted on Twitter, theGenshin Impactvoice actor admitted to some of the accusations, including “all of the cringy sex talk” and suicide threats. “I understand what I did was wrong and inappropriate,” Gindi wrote, while simultaneously denying allegations of grooming and coercion, claiming all the uncovered interactions were consensual and that he “flatly rejected” anyone he knew was underage. He also denied exhibiting transphobic behavior by supposedly rejecting to use one of the victims' preferred pronouns.
Outside the sphere of fantasy podcasts, Gindi’s acting credits are limited to a single episode from the 25th season of thePokemonanime—wherein he played a character named Billy—andGenshin Impact. Voicingthe English version of Dendro wielder Tighnariin HoYoverse’s planetary popular RPG was by far his biggest role to date. As things stand right now, his involvement inGenshin Impactis likely to end up being his biggest role ever. Between these accusations and Gindi’s selective admittance thereof, many fans are now unsurprisingly calling for a boycott of his work, while also asking HoYoverse to recast Tighnari.
Genshin Impactvoice acting director Chris Faiella publicly vowed to “rectify this situation,” leveraging what “limited” influence he has at the Chinese studio. The first step in his attempt to do so will be to inform the higher-ups at HoYoverse about the accusations, Faiella wrote on Twitter, all the while thanking the fans for their “concern, support, and vigilance.” Brianna Knickerbocker—the voice actress forGenshin Impactcharacter Hu Tao—also took to social media to call for “consequences” for her colleague and plead for anyone else who faced harassment from Gindi to step forward.
