Grabbing the internet by the horns in the early 2000s was “SevenSuperGirls”, a collaborative YouTube channel shared by a group of adolescent girls.
The premise of the channel was quite easily followed: seven girls, seven days in a week, one video a day, with each week following a set theme that members aligned their videos and skits with.
In an era of short-clip comedy domination on YouTube, a website mostly populated by gaming content and brief entertaining skits, SevenSuperGirls provided a fresh outlook on what a channel could be and who its audience could consist of.
Expanding the concept of a YouTube channel past singular ownership, the channel’s adult founder Ian Rylett found unique success in assembling an entire franchise of teen/tween-based channels, keeping content fresh and increasing viewership at a rapid pace.
Rylett produced ten channels following the same genre of content, referring to the group as the “SAKs” channels, all racking up hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers. Apart from SevenSuperGirls were SevenPerfectAngels and SevenAwesomeKids, just two of the many viral runner-ups.
SevenSuperGirls struck gold in its tweenage viewers, appealing mostly to young female children and teenagers. For years, the channel maintained its facade as a perfectly niche sanctuary for young women to share and consume each other’s creativity, accumulating about nine million subscribers during its run.
If you search for the SevenSuperGirls channel or any of the SAKs channels on YouTube today, you will not find anything more than old reuploaded content from other accounts; the authentic channels themselves went dark in March of 2019, and the reason behind the disappearance shocked any and everybody who was familiar with the channels’ concept.
Roughly halfway through 2018, the man behind SevenSuperGirls as well as the various other popular channels, Ian Rylett, was charged with “lewd and lascivious molestation” in the state of Florida.
After the news of Rylett’s crimes initially broke, the channels were demonetized and thus ceased to earn royalties on YouTube and were eventually removed from the platform months later.
Though there were roughly hundreds of children and parents involved with performing and producing content for the channels, only a handful have since spoken up about their experiences working for Rylett.
Perhaps the most notable figurehead to speak up is Kaelyn Wilkins, a former member and the face of SevenSuperGirls.
On February 2, Wilkins aired her expository entitled: “SevenSuperGirls- Kaelyn’s Experience”, a two part video series finally detailing the abuse and mistreatment in which the young girls were subjected to by their middle-aged manager.
In the series, Wilkins goes on to describe the various questionable rules that the girls were made to follow during their time performing on the SAKs channels, some more innocent than others.
The rules spanned from strange, insignificant critiques such as no peace signs and no wearing the color red, to more alarming rules such as disallowing shoes and socks at all times to no shaving or trimming any body or face hair without permission.
In her expose, Wilkins recounts a moment in which she and another underage friend discovered a camera filming the lower halves of their body through a window while on a trip with Rylett and the rest of the young performers.
Wilkins disclosed that they would take trips often, whether it be to satisfy fans or to film location-style content, and on these trips it was often advised that parents stay home.
The naive innocence of the young female performers and the abuse of trust on Rylett’s behalf is overall sickening to imagine. The ease in which he was able to operate so many of these channels directed toward and composed of young girls poses the age-old issue of media safety for children and teenagers.