Influencer Kai Cenat charged with rioting after New York City mayhem
Published
August 6, 2023 at 3:31 AM
NEW YORK – A popular online influencer in the United States was charged on Saturday with rioting, New York police said.
The influencer, Kai Cenat, had drawn a massive crowd to a square in Manhattan with the promise of game console giveaways.
Word of the event went viral and thousands of young people turned up at New York City’s Union Square. The gathering turned into a bottle-tossing melee, with some people dancing on cars.
An estimated 1,000 police officers responded to the unrest, which left some people injured. Sixty-five people were arrested, including 30 juveniles.
Cenat was also charged with inciting a riot and unlawful assembly, a New York Police Department spokesman told AFP.
Four other people were also charged.
Cenat is massively popular online, with 6.5 million followers on game streaming site Twitch and four million on YouTube.
The unrest on Friday started with an Instagram post. In a video, he called on fans to meet him in Union Square for a live-streamed event. The event was to include giveaways of computers and PlayStation 5 consoles.
Thousands of young people – as many as 5,000 according to US media – gathered very quickly at the square and in surrounding streets in the hope of seeing the influencer.
As the streets heaved, young men started throwing objects from a nearby construction site, targeting people in the crowd and the police, who were rapidly deployed in large numbers.
Television footage and news photographs showed rioters surrounding and blocking vehicles, with young men kicking and smashing some of the cars.
“People were bleeding from their heads, from their faces... people were suffering out here,” said New York City police chief Jeffrey Maddrey at a press briefing.
“There were a lot of people, it was uncontrolled... a lot of young people got hurt.”
Mr Maddrey said the crowd started to calm down when police officers removed Cenat from the park. REUTERS, AFP
