Today the Apex Smash tournament announced that long time tournament organizer Johnathan “Alex Strife” Lugo will no longer be the head of their tournament organization this year, following several allegations of sexual harassment spanning the six year history of the Apex tournament. Numerous people have spoken out against Strife in the past few days, releasing detailed accounts of the harassment and unwanted attention they received from Lugo while he worked for the company. Apex released the following statement after these allegations were revealed:
“At this time, Alex Strife will be stepping down from his duties at Apex. We will be moving forward with Apex 2015. As it stands Apex 2015 is the largest Smash Brothers tournament ever and the Apex staff hopes to bring you the best experience we can.”
The allegations of sexual harassment have been ongoing for years and while nothing was done about them, most recently a tweet from a Smash Bros. player named Kay seems to have sparked the investigation into Lugo’s interactions with numerous female players over the years as the tournament’s organizer. The tweet simply read:
I’m glad that as a community we’ve just decided to ignore that our biggest tournament is run by a repeated sexual harasser.”
From that single tweet, numerous other women began speaking about their experiences with Lugo while competing in the tournament, with one woman stating that she knew it was wrong several years ago when it happened to her, but she chose to remain silent because at the time she was only 14 and wasn’t sure how to deal with such a serious subject.
The Super Smash Bros. subreddit is currently full of posts from women who are detailing their history with Lugo, with fans supporting everyone who comes forward to detail their interactions with him over the past few years.
