Female Overwatch Contenders player Ellie confirmed she wasn’t actually the one playing [UPDATE]

Cloud9 streamer Becca ‘Aspen’ Rukavina claimed on stream that Ellie, the Overwatch player at the center of a huge controversy this week after she walked away from a spot on a Contenders team due to harassment, might not be a real person. 

Updated 1/6/2019

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To make a very long story short, Ellie came out of nowhere with a new Overwatch account and soon climbed through the competitive ranks enough to catch the attention of Contenders teams.

Shortly after joining the Contenders team Second Wind, the player stepped down after intense scrutiny on their true identity, something some said wouldn’t have happened if Ellie wasn’t a female.

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Esports insider Rod ‘Slasher’ Breslau wrote on Twitter that “Ellie has said in private messages to teammates in the last hour confirming she has not been the one playing.”

Slasher followed up his initial Tweet with another featuring more evidence in the form of screenshots between Top 500 player punisherow, who had previously stated on streams and on Reddit that they were Ellie’s boyfriend, and another female Overwatch player ‘Catsui,’ who was unaware of this incident. 

This was brought to light after the clip of Aspen revealing the true identity of Ellie.

On stream, Aspen told her viewers that “Ellie, is not Ellie.” Instead, she claimed the “whole situation was meant to be, in a way, like a social experiment.”

“Ellie is actually Punisher, and he told me yesterday,” the streamer told viewers.

• Read More: Female Overwatch Contenders player quits after debate about her gender

“Yeah, Ellie is Punisher,” Aspen repeated on stream. “He did this for like a social experiment thing, and did not expect it to get out of hand, so that’s kinda the juice around that.”

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There was plenty of speculation on Reddit about whether or not it was actually Punisher playing as Ellie, a fact they denied repeatedly.

Punisher still has to make any kind of statement on the situation, and whether or not it was indeed a ‘social experiment’ of some kind, with nothing coming from Ellie’s socials since she stepped down from Second Wind.

• Read More: Overwatch players are upset over the lack of in-game statistics

More information has been released involving the nature of Punisher’s plan, calling into question the motives he had for the alleged social experiment.

Female members of the community came forward in the aftermath to discuss Punisher’s behavior, labeling it as “creepy.”

The recent discoveries have led some to doubt the social experiment excuse as nothing more than a cover to save face after being caught.

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Regardless of Punisher’s original intentions, the community is reacting to the result of the Ellie controversy.

The saga of Ellie may be far from over, and whether or not it was a social experiment at conception – it is turning into one now and the Overwatch community is reacting.

Dafran, the Atlanta Reign player who originally doubted the legitimacy of the Ellie account, also had a response to the new information.