A family famous for their YouTube ‘pranks’ have lost custody of two children after repeated complaints the parents were abusing their children.
DaddyOFive is a YouTube account dedicated to Mike Martin playing ‘pranks’ on his children with his wife Heather. One child, Cody, appeared to be at the brunt of the most pranks, where the couple would accuse him of a range of bad behaviour and then punish him physically and emotionally for it.
Rose Hall, the biological mother of nine-year-old Cody and 12-year-old Emma, has gained emergency custody of her children.
Appearing in a somewhat bizarre video with her lawyer Tim Conlon, Hall thanks people on YouTube who insisted the children be taken from the Martins.
“They’re doing good,” Hall says on the video. “They’re getting back to their playful selves.”
“The kids are in a deprogramming sort of mode in the moment,” said Conlon.
‘Very heartbreaking and disturbing to see my kids abused,’ said Hall.
The most recent video which attracted furore from the online community was entitled “Invisible Ink Prank (Epic Freakout)”. It involved the parents screaming at Code for making a mess, even though it was actually them, and his breakdown is incredibly hard to watch and he tries to defend himself.
Other videos posted by the channel, which has 800,000 subscribers, involve the children being shoved into a bookcase and resulting in a bloody nose, abandoned in a mall, physical abuse and a fake burglary in which the father pulls out a real gun.
The DaddyOFive parents recently released a video where they publically apologised for the videos and said “We’ve made some terrible parenting decisions.”
Terrible parenting decisions seems like a bit of an understatement…
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