The ACE family has recently broken up, and not many people are shocked to see this moment finally come. We just didn’t know when the last straw would be.
Publicly addressing their separation, both Catherine Paiz and Austin McBroom seem to be trying to maintain an image, which is clear to see in each’s PR statement. But for Austin specifically, it’s hard to “maintain an image” when it has already been soiled by years of controversy and scandals, with 2021 and 2022 being particularly bad ones.
It’s not like Catherine doesn’t get her own share of hate. But Austin, to netizens, is on another level. When, some months ago, a Redditor OP who’d just found out about Austin McBroom and quickly came across the cheating rumors, asked the rest of the community whether they had heard of him, the most upvoted comment read:
Indeed, the YouTube coverage of the ACE family’s ups and downs – mostly the downs – is endless. So are the media articles, and forum posts. Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the reasons netizens can’t seem to stand Austin McBroom.
Scams, cash grabs, lies, cheating, manipulation (allegedly)
As the post below discusses, although Catherine is not seen as blameless, Austin is certainly the one who gets the most scrutiny.
One response read:
To exemplify what netizens mean, days before the divorce announcement, Austin, as online receipts show, spammed OnlyFans models with a private message on social media asking whether they were signed with an agency. The one who was the first to blow the whistle on Austin’s creeping around models’ DMs was Laura Lux:
To which, Jamie Lyn, another model, replied with her own screenshot of the exact same message. Long before this, multiple people had called out Austin for cheating on his wife, one having been none other than Jake Paul, and another was Tana Mongeau. As for the scams Austin has been accused of, the H3 Podcast did a deep dive into some of the allegations. They even made a comparison between McBroom and “the Fyre Festival guy.”
One could also argue that the very picture Austin used to share his own polished take on the divorce was a manipulation strategy. The picture he used was none other than one taken on the day he proposed to his now ex-partner, hence associated with a deeply emotional memory that would be sure to poke most women where they are still sore so soon after a separation. His statement also made it seem as if he was the one who made the decision, while Catherine portrays it as a mutual agreement. From the comments alone, one can see how netizens’ dislike for Austin runs much deeper than for Catherine.
Another present reason people are taking hits at Austin is due to his “cringe” Snapchat stories. That, frankly, takes on the appearance of implicit damage control gone wrong. Some of the snaps documented how, on the day he was supposed to move out of the house, Austin fell sick, and ended up not leaving just yet.
No matter how serious and a man of God Austin tries to present himself as, it appears people aren’t taking him as such, choosing instead to satirize him with their own TikTok posts.
In one video, Austin also announced that he intended to move out. But his moving out meant living in a house in the same neighborhood, which, I needn’t say why that’s probably not the best idea. And we didn’t even need to get into what Shyla Walker, Austin’s ex-sister-in-law, had to say about the McBrooms. She denominated family vlogging to Business Insider as “performative,” and that’s exactly what it is. A few parts that should’ve been edited out of the ACE family vlogs but weren’t by mistake are further proof of this.
If the Internet dislikes Austin, they dislike Landon McBroom just as much, if not more. But that’s another can of worms for another time. Nonetheless, this is but a rough sketch of what Austin has done, to include it all in the same written piece, would take the length of a Doctorate’s thesis, at the very least.