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It didn’t take long for influencer Haliey Welch, who rose to fame as the “Hawk Tuah” girl from a viral TikTok video last year, to amass hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers for her cleverly named “Talk Tuah” podcast.
Episodes got millions of views on the platform and millions of downloads on Spotify. At one point, as Bloomberg reports, “Talk Tuah” overtook reigning podcasts including NPR‘s “This American Life” and Jason and Travis Kelce’s “New Heights,” according to Edison Research’s Top 50 podcasts for late 2024.
“It permeated a lot of levels of society,” David Tishelman, head of Betr Media, the production company that produced “Talk Tuah,” told Bloomberg.
But following Welch’s disastrous launch of a dubious cryptocurrency meme coin called $HAWK, the roof came crashing down. The coin hit a market cap of almost half a billion dollars in less than a day — only to plummet back down within hours, bearing all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump scheme.
There hasn’t been a proper new episode of “Talk Tuah” since then, as Welch and her legal team contend with legal challenges from investors. The mess highlights a colossal and largely self-inflicted fall from grace, which could’ve easily been prevented if Welch hadn’t gotten involved with the cash grab in the first place.
In light of countless legal threats, Welch took to X-formerly-Twitter in mid-December to promise that “I take this situation extremely seriously and want to address my fans.”
“I am fully cooperating with and am committed to assisting the legal team representing the individuals impacted, as well as to help uncover the truth, hold the responsible parties accountable, and resolve this matter,” the statement reads.
Somehow, it only got worse from there. After weeks of radio silence, a new episode allegedly “leaked” showing a teary-eyed Welch talking to crypto bull Richard “FaZe Banks” Bengston, who was willing to hear her “side of the crypto scam story.”
In the video — which was briefly posted online before being pulled down, but not before it was ripped and reposted elsewhere — Welch tried to paint herself as the victim, arguing that she was roped into the scam without her knowledge. She even claimed that her boyfriend, Kelby “Pookie” Blackwell, “lost money too.”
“He said, ‘How you going to take my money?’ He still gives me shit all the time,” Welch recalled. “He says, ‘I wish I had my $300 back.'”
“Oh my God,” she said, becoming emotionally agitated, “I’m going to cry.”
“No, don’t cry,” a clearly uncomfortable Bengston offered. “Don’t cry.”
Despite his seemingly empathetic appearance on her show, Bengston was seemingly furious after the taping. In a lengthy tweet, he alleged that the episode was released without his permission. He accused Welch of duping him into “pumping” $HAWK yet again, but failed to rip off her followers after her meme coin team “fumbled the bag, yet again.”
Famed blockchain skeptic Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen — who has garnered enough of a reputation for rooting out crypto scams for Welch to call him a “scary guy” in the latest podcast episode — revealed in a video last week that he had been invited to join FaZe Banks and Welch. Findeisen had previously issued a takedown of Welch’s dubious scheme on his YouTube account.
According to the YouTuber, Welch was crying crocodile tears, and was trying to “rehab her image, basically, in the crypto space.”
Other onlookers tend to agree with that assessment.
“That whole podcast was full of notorious crypto scammers,” one Reddit user wrote. “She was warned many many times when she said she’d launch it and laughed at people trying to help her. I do believe she knew what she was doing, and is now doing a whole PR stunt to save face for her crimes.”
Welch and the organizers of $HAWK are now contending with a class action lawsuit filed by investors following the meme coin disaster in December.
Whether they will face any consequences for the cash grab remains to be seen.
More on the saga: The Hawk Tuah Girl Hasn’t Posted a New Podcast Since Her Crypto Project Imploded
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