One of YouTube’s top drama channels used to be shrouded in mystery. After years of hiding her identity, Spill Sesh is sharing herself with the world — and she wants to do even more, as told to Dexerto in an exclusive interview.
Spill Sesh, real name Kristi Cook, first started her YouTube channel back in 2018. She was always interested in the lives of influencers, but her peers didn’t really ‘get’ the world of online content at the time.
“I was watching a ton of YouTube all throughout middle school and high school, and I felt like nobody was really talking about these influencers,” she told us.
“I feel like that wasn’t even like a word when I was in middle school yet. It was just people making videos on the internet, and I was so invested in their lives. These things would happen and I would talk about it to my friends, who were like, ‘I have no idea who you’re talking about.’ There had to be a world where other people cared about this. Obviously, they have millions of subscribers.”
Spill Sesh ‘spills’ on her rise to YouTube stardom
It wasn’t long before Cook, in her words, “stumbled upon a tiny community of people talking about YouTubers” online — and there, she found her calling.
“I was like, I need to do this,” she explained. “I need to start talking about the internet’s gossip.”
It would only take a year for her videos to explode, becoming a staple for viewers to catch up on influencer tea. Cook recalls 2019 as being the year she really blew up, referencing the drama within YouTube’s beauty community that involved James Charles, Jeffree Star and Tati Westbrook.
“It really started from there, just talking about the beauty community at the time,” she recalled. “There was a lot of drama going on, and then it just evolved into covering celebrity drama. And once TikTok became a thing, talking about TikTokers.
“I just was posting and thinking, ‘I’m super interested in talking about influencers and things that are going on. Maybe other people will be interested in hearing about it.’”
2019 was full of big moments for Cook, who says her first viral hit happened during her coverage of the infamous spat between Trisha Paytas and David Dobrik.
“That was a really big time, because [Trisha] had deleted that video and I had downloaded it right before she took it down,” she said. “I was like, ‘I need to do something with this right now.’ That was one of the first times one of my videos got a lot of views and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to keep this up. I need to keep doing it.’”
After that, the global health crisis hit, and everyone was forced indoors. As a result, a slew of online drama took place — something that Cook feels completely changed the fabric of the internet and, surprisingly, launched influencers into the limelight.
“ It definitely changed so much of internet culture, in general. I think people had a lot of time to pay attention to things and maybe started to look at online creators a little more seriously. A lot of people that blew up and are big names now really did come from TikTok and that time period. I think TikTok and its popularity in 2020 really legitimized the entire influencer space.”
F*ck it, mask off
Spill Sesh has been making videos for over six years, and throughout the majority of her career as the internet’s resident tea-spiller, she kept her identity a secret. Then, on November 3, 2023, she showed her face to the world — a decision that sparked a wide variety of reactions from both her viewers and her critics.
Despite the nature of her occupation and the possibility of harassment, Cook actually breathed a sigh of relief when she made her grand reveal.
”I actually feel like I was more paranoid about these types of things before I did my face reveal, which is probably like, ‘What the heck?’ to people, because they’re like, ‘They know who you are and they’ll come find you,’ or whatever.
“But I felt that way more before people knew who I was, because I felt like if people didn’t like a video, they would try to do any digging that they possibly could to try and find out who I was. It almost built up a curiosity. So, revealing my identity was more of a relief than anything else.
“Luckily, there hasn’t been any crazy case where someone was so angry that they tried to find where I live after my reveal. I feel like all of my worries were honestly really before that.”
Getting blocked by Jeffree Star
While the reception to her grand reveal was mostly positive, Cook does get a few angry fans in her DMs from time to time. Thankfully, she’s never had to deal with unbearable amounts of criticism from an influencer’s fanbase — but she did get blocked by one famous figure who she was comfortable naming.
“ I’ve definitely had people come to my DMs to like defend themselves, but not really being nasty,” she admitted. “A lot of people think when you’re making videos talking about celebrities or influencers, then they must hate you. But I think that there is some sort of element to it all where they know that, whether it’s good or bad, press kind of keeps them relevant in a way.
“The only time anyone has ever blocked me was Jeffree Star. I don’t even think he would remember what was going on, I think he just loved the block button at the time.”
So, why the big reveal in the first place? After so many years staying undercover dishing on influencer drama, Kristi wanted to branch out and use her past experience at TMZ to reach bigger and better heights.
“ I figured like after all these years, I really wanted to expand the things that I was doing, not just making these YouTube videos,” she said. “And that was also just the reasoning behind it.
“ I definitely have things that I’m working on. I’m hoping that I can talk more about them soon. I’m trying to put out this show of sorts this year — just really expanding what I’m doing and not just doing my one YouTube channel and short-form content. I’m really wanting to do way more.”