Kaitlyn ‘Amouranth’ Siragusa had multiple blows to the head and a gun pointed at her face, but she had to put on a performance, and she knew it needed to be convincing. It was late at night on March 2. Three intruders had broken into her home in Houston, Texas — a two-building complex — and they were intent on leaving with a bounty. The trio didn’t know it, but Siragusa wasn’t exactly alone. Her husband, Nick Lee, was using the bathroom in the other building on the property. The two were on a call as the men shot her door open, she says. Lee says he listened silently as one of the men pistol whipped his wife. The intruders kept asking her the same question: Where’s the crypto?
Siragusa couldn’t simply hand it over; crypto is a digital currency that’s stored in an ecosystem that’s inherently traceable. The aggressors couldn’t just walk away, crypto in hand, in the same way that they could with physical valuables like cash or jewelry.
“I was just thinking, they’re going to keep beating me if I don’t just pretend I know where the crypto is,” Siragusa tells Rolling Stone. And so she told them she would take them to it, just like they asked.
Lee was still on the line, and figured he knew where she was taking them. Siragusa had experienced years of threats, harassment, and stalkers, and had built a panic room in case of just such an incident. Lee says he intercepted the group there, gun in hand, and signaled at Siragusa to get down. He fired multiple shots. The burglars ran away. Then, Lee hopped on Twitter. “I’m being too robbed at gunpoint,” he posted from Amouranth’s official account, to her nearly 4 million followers. “I believe I shot one of them. They wanted crypto is what they were yelling they pulled me out of bed.”
A Houston Police Department representative confirmed that shots were fired during the exchange, though at first, it was unclear if anyone was caught in the fire. What was known, however, is that Siragusa required a trip to the hospital, where she received treatment for lacerations on the top of her head.
As the news began to spread, social media onlookers couldn’t help but be skeptical. For years, Siragusa has pulled stunts, like selling jars full of her farts, bottles of her used bath water, and crafted beer made with her own vaginal yeast. She’s long claimed she wants to build an animal sanctuary with the money she makes online — only to visibly spend millions on other investments. This, they figured, was just another cry for attention.
They also thought the timing was suspicious — a week before the harrowing incident, Siragusa was facing criticism for comments she made about the LGBTQ+ community in Los Angeles. The break-in also coincided with a wave of accounts from high profile women on Twitch that detailed scary encounters with fans. Yet in the aftermath of the ordeal, as more facts of her story are confirmed, it seems that the doubt cast on her was just another example of the misogyny that’s regularly levied against women online.
SIRAGUSA, 31, IS CURRENTLY one of the top five most-followed women on Twitch. She’s also one of the most notorious personalities on the site, a badge she wears with pride. After joining in 2016, Siragusa acquired some fans through risqué cosplay, but her real infamy began in the advent of what’s known as the ‘hot tub meta,’ a cheeky if not reductive term used to refer to personalities getting on camera in swimsuits while hanging out in hot tubs, often just chatting casually with their fans. Since Twitch is primarily a website where people go to watch others play video games, the hot tub meta was seen as a ploy for women to show off their bodies, and rack up views. Siragusa was by far the most visible content creator who used the format, and the stigma has stuck with her years after the fact.
But her fanbase — and bank accounts — only grew. At one point, she launched an AI version of herself that viewers could chat with, which she claims made $34,000 in its first day. She started an OnlyFans account, and bought a Circle-K gas station as an investment. In late 2024, Siragusa shared a screenshot boasting Bitcoin holdings to the tune of $20 million.
The most prominent Twitch streamers rise to the top through a mixture of creativity, personality, and a tireless work ethic. Siragusa’s ascension and reliance on her sex appeal was therefore treated like a hack in an otherwise merit-based system, where the only honorable pathway is forged through video game expertise and a chaste personality. Siragusa’s success is the inevitable outcome, some would imply, of what happens when beauty is weaponized to a legion of hopeful young men with disposable income who, incidentally, aren’t aware that the object of their affection is already married.
Though Lee was cast as a hero in their recounting — first told to streamer Adin Ross — audiences were also unsure if they could consider him trustworthy. In 2022, Siragusa told her viewers in a now-deleted livestream that she was a victim of abuse, and that her husband purportedly had forced her into doing extended livestreams while wearing uncomfortable clothes. Siragusa shared audio that appeared to feature a man yelling at her, as well as threatening text messages that she claims were also sent by her husband. Lee, she claimed at the time, held the key to her social media accounts and finances. (Lee did not publicly respond to the allegations at the time, and Rolling Stone’s request for comment was not immediately returned.)
The two reportedly split, and Siragusa claimed she was in control of her image and platforms. Later, when Siragusa kept producing the same type of risque content, she claimed that she couldn’t just adopt an entirely new business model without inconveniencing the team she had built to support her media empire.
Seeing Lee suddenly in the picture again, and prominently, confused audiences. Was this not the same man she had decried three years ago?
AS THE QUESTIONS SWIRLED online, Siragusa and Lee began the hard work of proving their story. Compounding the controversy was the way people found out about the robbery at all: two tweet threads. It came across as if Siragusa was live tweeting the entire thing, which, critics countered, didn’t seem like something someone would do if they were in serious trouble. Siragusa’s account of bleeding after being repeatedly hit by the robbers seemed especially dubious when Siragusa live streamed the day after the robbery and appeared to have no visible injuries or stitches. “Show us a picture,” a commenter demanded in the top reply.
Siragusa didn’t post a picture, but she did share security footage. In it, she can be seen running toward the camera with a few men in tow. There’s a dog running after them, and the group goes off frame. Two shots ring out, and the men go running back in the same direction they came in.
The video was tiny, which made discerning details difficult. “This seems staged,” reads one top reply on Twitter. Similarly, viewers nitpicked an image Siragusa shared of her door frame, which was purportedly shot open. For some, the bullet holes seemed too neat to be real, which led to theories that Siragusa had drilled the holes herself.
During our call, Lee clarified that Siragusa wasn’t tweeting in between pistol whips. In actuality, he says, he was the one who posted for her. He also says that he called the police before saving Siragusa. Doing so was a gamble, though: their household is a common target for “swatting.” Siragusa claims that trolls have tricked Houston police into thinking she is undergoing an emergency enough times that the station will apparently now check her livestreams before responding to a call.
“I was telling the dispatch, like, you have to send someone right now,” Lee says. “This is an armed situation, she’s being held hostage. And then even as I said that, I was like, ‘Oh no, they’re not going to believe me.’”
They did, and by the time help arrived, the adrenaline was subsiding. Lee says that he looked at Siragusa and noticed the blood right away. “Me and the first responders [were] like, ‘Wait, are you hit?’ Because it looked like it for a moment,” Lee says.
The couple says they’ve considered releasing hospital records for the people who believed it was all a hoax. However, both claimed that the police had cautioned them about what information they could release and its potential impact on the investigation. Rather than defending her husband’s reputation outright on social media, Siragusa stuck to posting celebratory photos, like a note he apparently wrote her after the two had dinner out.
The duo also say that they’re repairing some of the damage from the robbery and upgrading their security systems, which they estimate will cost up to six figures. Though they came out of the debacle mostly intact, they feel that their safety measures came up short when it mattered most. At this point, they’re considering hiring staff to monitor their security cameras at all times, as well as guard dogs.
For Siragusa, everything that’s transpired since the robbery has felt surreal. On March 14, four teen boys between the ages of 16 and 19 were arrested and charged with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. She says that the police found the teens through the “Find My” feature on a MacBook that they stole from Siragusa. On social media, Siragusa claimed that she initially saw that the laptop was taken to the same hospital that treated her after the attack.
Houston Police would later say that they tracked down the suspects due to a report of a stolen vehicle, which led to the discovery of school paperwork with one of their names. When the alleged getaway driver was pulled over for failing to use a turn signal, police found a bloodstain in his backseat. According to police, he confessed to being the getaway driver, and told them that he’d taken one of the suspects to the hospital to be treated for a gunshot wound. The four suspects have not yet entered pleas but are set to be arraigned in April.
On March 21, Siragusa shared a 14-minute cut of security footage that appears to show, from multiple cameras, three masked assailants breaking into her house, finding her, and her leading them to the other building. They can be heard shouting for her to hand over the crypto. “I wish I didn’t have to prove that the worst night of my life was real,” she wrote in the tweet. “Too many people still think I made it up — I really wish it had been fake, or a prank. It wasn’t.”
With the dust settling, what of the skeptics? Some have gone on to wish Siragusa well, but it doesn’t take much scrolling to find the unrepentant and unconvinced, holding onto the idea that Siragusa staged the whole thing for clicks.
“I just think they’re kind of crazy to think that someone would willingly sign up to act in a crime scene and then let themselves get shot and have the police after them,” Siragusa says of the conspiracy theories that abounded in the wake of the robbery. “People who are saying it’s fake want to think it’s fake because they don’t want to believe, for whatever reason, that popular people can be victims. I don’t know what their problem is. It’s a weird mentality that I haven’t quite understood.”
