A transgender TikTok star says a creepy cyberstalker subjected her to an unrelenting campaign of doxxing, swatting, and horrifying death threats—including a vow to skin her alive and wear her face like a mask.
Jae Gottlieb, whose viral livestreams regularly garner millions of views, is now suing her alleged tormentor after tracking him down a continent away. Gottlieb, 27, is best known on TikTok, where she broadcasts her entire life as she lives it, all day, every day. Her fans tune in to watch her hanging around her swanky apartment, lunching at hot Manhattan eateries, and otherwise living fabulously.
“People think it's interesting seeing a trans person literally do anything,” Gottlieb told Paper magazine for an in-depth feature story this past November.
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The anonymous “reign of terror” began last April, according to a suit filed Wednesday by Gottlieb’s attorney. That’s when someone using the pseudonym “Miss Flop” started posting comments underneath Gottlieb’s TikToks, saying, “I will find Jae,” and, “She can’t hide from me.” “[B]abe I’ve been surveilling u 24/7,” the suit says.
In May 2023, Flop took to Instagram, posting videos targeting Gottlieb with virulent transphobia, states the lawsuit, which was filed March 6. Flop, who appeared male, said he paid a hitman $20,000 to assassinate Gottlieb at her home in New York City.
“[I] will never let this go,” said Flop, who also used a variety of other online monikers. “…I really want to make her life suffer. She’s pretty, but I want to make her life suffer.”
From there, Flop quickly ramped up the menace, the suit states. He continued posting to social media about Gottlieb, according to the suit, saying that he was going to “fly to New York and… fucking kill” her, that he would “slit her fucking eyeballs,” and that he wanted to go “to [her] apartment, in her fucking stinking marble palace, and… beat her ass.”
“I’m going to choke that bitch,” Flop told viewers, adding additional details about stabbing and sexually assaulting Gottlieb.
When he eventually located Gottlieb, Flop promised he’d “fucking put a bullet in her fucking wig,” the lawsuit goes on. “…I’m going to chop her into pieces. I’m going to hide in her apartment and I’m going to kill her slowly while she bleeds to death, screaming.”
“Don’t you guys just want to be [Jae],” Flop said in one video. “I want to fucking skin [Jae] and rip his [sic] fucking face off and put it on mine. Like, I want that fucking Botox.”
On Friday, Gottlieb told The Daily Beast that the attacks continue to this day.
“I’m still going through it,” she said. “It’s not even close to the end. I’ve been dealing with this for a year. It’s an absolute nightmare.”
Sick and tired of living in fear, Gottlieb said, “I’m trying to take this fucker down, seriously.”
As spring 2023 turned to summer, Miss Flop’s threats continued to escalate, asking his followers to help pin down the location of Gottlieb’s nail salon, according to the lawsuit.
“I really can’t, like, wait to throw, like, acid in [Jae’s] face,” Flop allegedly said in another Insta livestream. “I am going to throw acid in her face. I’m going to do an acid attack.”
Miss Flop posted new threats just about every day, the lawsuit continues. It says Gottlieb reported Flop multiple times to the FBI—one time showing up in person to have agents wipe her phone of child porn Flop allegedly sent her—but nothing happened. And Gottlieb’s complaints to the myriad social media platforms used to stalk her have been similarly ineffective, the suit says.
By June 2023, the lawsuit states, Flop had somehow figured out Gottlieb’s home address and apartment number. He posted both across various social media platforms, while leaving new clues about his own identity, according to the suit. In one post to both Instagram and TikTok, Miss Flop said he was “flying from Amsterdam” to Gottlieb’s condo in Manhattan’s Financial District, the suit says.
In the fall, things got even hairier for Gottlieb. Flop was now sending “revenge porn” to Gottlieb’s parents, according to the suit. Gottlieb told The Daily Beast that Flop got his hands on her OnlyFans nudes, which he allegedly sent to other relatives of hers. She said Flop’s pinned post on TikTok contains her address and apartment number, and his bio is a Zillow link showing her apartment, which The Daily Beast confirmed on Friday.
“There is so much, I don’t even know where to begin,” Gottlieb said.
When November rolled around, following yet another doxxing in a Reddit forum called “r/jaegottliebSNARK,” Gottlieb started getting swatted nonstop, according to the lawsuit.
The swatting went on for a week straight, with as many as 15 calls a day to police, fire, emergency medical, and child protective services, Gottlieb told The Daily Beast.
“I had stretchers coming to my door, he was telling the police I chased him down the street with a knife, he pretended to be me and said he had been drinking bleach, trying to commit suicide,” Gottlieb recalled. “It’s scary, because you don’t know what he’s telling the NYPD, and they could be showing up to my door with guns… My parents live in the building next door, and they would cringe every time they heard fire trucks or police sirens.”
When Flop called the city’s child welfare agency on Gottlieb, claiming she had abused a 6-year-old child in her apartment, officials inspected her residence even though she has no kids and is rarely around them, according to the lawsuit. Still, the city was compelled to open a 60-day investigation into the accusation, which was later determined to be unfounded, Gottlieb said.
At a crossroads, Gottlieb turned to her deep bench of online followers for help, the lawsuit states. As Miss Flop allegedly got more and more brazen, he also got sloppy. Gottlieb said Flop livestreamed himself leaving his building, using the ATM, and generally going about his everyday life, which her subscribers tracked closely.
“I go live to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people every day,” she said. “He started getting really brave, and my viewers were watching, trying to figure out who he was. All of them were Google mapping, recognizing backgrounds, he showed the street he lives on.”
When Miss Flop one day “showed the outside from his window,” the lawsuit explains, Gottlieb and her fans were able to determine his exact address. The building was a college dorm in Amsterdam’s Buitenveldert-Oost-Midden neighborhood, according to the suit. And when Flop went live on Instagram, at one point inadvertently revealing the sign-in screen on his laptop, which showed his full name, Gottlieb says she knew she had him.
Miss Flop, according to Gottlieb’s lawsuit, is in fact a Turkish fashion design student named Mirac Bayram. Finally, Gottlieb told The Daily Beast, “I knew their name, I knew their address, I knew their school. I had every single bit of information about this person.”
Bayram told Gottlieb that he became upset after gifting her a TikTok “Universe” costing roughly $500, but didn’t get a thank you, she said on Friday. This, however, is not true, according to Gottlieb, who said Bayram never sent her anything of the sort.
She said she has noticed that as time goes on, and Bayram continues to get away scot-free, he seems to exude a strange sort of self-satisfaction about what he’s doing.
“Literally showing his face online proudly,” Gottlieb said. “It’s almost like he’s hiding in plain sight.”
In a message to The Daily Beast some three weeks after this article was published, Bayram denied Gottlieb’s claims and said the two had been “good friends” until a falling out in May 2023.
Now that Gottlieb’s attorney has filed the suit, Bayram will be served with a summons, after which he will have 21 days to respond. He was unable to be reached for comment on Friday.
Gottlieb said being a professional livestreamer is hard, and that broadcasting her precise location at all times “can be dangerous.”
“I just have to try my best to be careful,” she said. “Something like this would probably make someone hide, but this is my job. It’s how I pay my bills, and I can’t just stop.”
Over time, Gottlieb’s perspective on the situation has evolved, she admitted.
“For a long time, I said I didn’t want him arrested,” she explained. “I just wanted him to leave me alone. But now I want him held responsible by the law, to the highest degree.”
