Doug Polk Apologises to Charlie Carrel Over Paedophile Row

08:27
04 May

Doug Polk has apologized to Charlie Carrel for “not showing compassion” over the English poker pro’s traumatic experiences as a sexually abused child.

Polk and Carrel had clashed several times in the aftermath of Carrel’s infamous and now deleted “paedophiles should be shown more empathy and love” tweet.

Polk tweeted:

“Child molesters are just right up there at the top of the scum of the earth, fuck those people, and no I will not have any love or empathy for committing such horrid crimes to peoples children (I mean FFS how is this even a debate).”

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Twitter Spaces Clash

That episode spawned a series of attacks by Polk and others on Carrel, a subject that arose yet again this week when the pair clashed in a Twitter Spaces conversation with Will Jaffe and Matt Berkey.

Carrel revealed that he was a victim of paedophilia as a child, and that Polk’s YouTube video on Carrel’s views back in 2019 had caused him immense harm.

Carrel described it as “one tweet that you blew up and sent into a video, a hit piece, that hundreds of thousands of people saw, that you spinned into the idea that I was supporting paedophilia.”

Carrel, clearly angry, added:

“It was intentional, it was disgusting, and it was such a fucking idiotic thing to actually bring up now in a conversation. How the fuck can you possibly defend that?”

Polk replied:

“I defend that by I don’t think you should be tweeting supportive content for paedophiles.”

Polk was unapologetic in the Twitter Spaces chat, but after poker Twitter lambasted him he produced the apology video above.

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The Apology

“I want to say sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t have compassion for what Charlie had gone through,” stated Polk.

Claiming he was “so locked in” on the wider harm that paedophilia causes, Polk admitted he “did not take a moment to realise he had gone through something so terrible.”

Polk promised to “go ahead and take down all the Charlie Carrel videos that have this subject in them,” adding: “I’m not going to be addressing this issue in future on my platform.”

Polk ended his apology:

“I want to just say sorry to Charlie personally because I should have had some compassion for where you’re coming from.”

Apology or not, the comments flooded in, with Chance Kornuth first up:

Polk responded by saying he didn’t know about Carrel’s personal history when he attacked his views on paedophiles and how to perhaps prevent them from doing what they do.

Polk added:

“Now that I have, all I can do is to apologize and remove the content. I recognize I can not change the past, but that is not going to stop me from doing my best to fix the future.”

HighStakes pro and streamer Rayan “Beriuzy” Chamas offered Polk a solution:

“Just make a longer apology video that explains the situation well. Post it on YouTube, easy solution. It is your biggest platform & where your previous work hurt him the most. I am not a big Charlie fan but this is the least he deserves.”

Some other takes on Polk’s apology: