Overwatch League Sexual Harassment Case Leads To Player Dismissal

With the rising trend of women’s empowerment movements such as #MeToo sweeping the country, the last thing that any company would want to be involved in is a sexual harassment case. Yet this is exactly what happened with the Overwatch League when one of its players was accused of making sexually inappropriate advancements on a minor.

The whole kerfuffle started when screenshots of a conversation that the player Jonathan “DreamKazper” Sanchez, 21, was having with a fan was posted on Twitter. While the messages didn’t contain explicit remarks that could be construed as undeniably lewd, the implications of the unfortunate usage of even innocent words were clear for everyone to see.

Once the snapshots have been made public, the other party in the conversation who is just 14 years old also posted a statement, which was also published on Twitter. The statement provides more details with regards to the situation, though.

After learning of the incident, Blizzard was swift to take action, taking to its own account to post a Tweet announcing the suspension of Sanchez. Following an investigation into the matter, the team that the player belonged to, Bostin Uprising released a statement indicating that the player had been fired.

“The Boston Uprising has terminated the contract of Jonathan “DreamKazper” Sanchez,” the team announced.

As Polygon notes, this is only the latest development in a string of scandals involving Overwatch League players, some of whom have already been fired for inappropriate behavior. With eSports being a rising industry, it was only to be expected that there would be some issues with some of the participants, and with this being the internet age, some of these issues could be related to online activities.

In the case of Sanchez, it would seem that the decision to terminate his contract with Boston Uprising was fueled by the fact that he knew he was conversing with a minor and yet proceeded to maintain inappropriate contact on social media. No specifics following the investigations have been released, however.