Ninja denies drug addiction rumors that were sparked by “horrible” viral photo

Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins has moved to deny claims he has a raging drug addiction, months after an on-stream image of the Twitch star looking “severely underweight” spread online like wildfire and sparked the rumors.

On January 26, this publication ran an article on Ninja talking about parenting. While the story was as interesting as ever, the gaming world locked onto something else ⁠— the article’s top image, revealing the Twitch star’s most recent look.

The internet immediately pointed in one direction: drug addiction.

At the time, Ninja’s cheeks looked relatively gaunt, his iconic blue hair looks a silvery grey in videos uploaded during that month, and it was a far cry from how the Fortnite icon looked in years past, but a reasonable explanation likely lay behind the star’s shock on-stream transformation. 

Sure enough, it did: Ninja has come out shooting against those addiction rumors, revealing he was battling a “nasty” health condition that led to his gaunt look.

Ninja addressed the addiction claims during a recent Twitch stream, making it very clear to his loyal fandom that he had never been involved in substance abuse during his long and fruitful streaming career.

“That was a crazy, negative thing in my life,” he said.

“People thought that I was addicted to crack. There were all these crazy rumors going around, ‘Ninja’s on meth!’ and that kind of thing, people were saying,” the star continued. “It made going on [social media] really pretty horrible.”

Now Ninja has moved to quash the rumors completely. The streamer revealed it wasn’t actually anything drug-related, but instead was related to a bad bout of canker-sores that he was dealing with at the time.

The mouth ulcers made anything food-related “awful” for the Twitch superstar, he explained, to the extent that he was barely eating.

“For three weeks straight I had these cankers in my mouth, and they were bad. I couldn’t eat it hurt so much,” he said.

“So I was just eating to not be hungry. That led to me severely undereating ‘cause it just hurt too much.”

• Read More: Ninja opens up on “huge pressures” of Twitch stardom

The Twitch star couldn’t help but add a joke too: “It’s the canker-sore diet! Easy to not eat when you’re just in searing pain whenever it happens.”

This isn’t the first time this week that Ninja has stepped up to the plate to defend himself either. On October 19, the star hit back at claims he used his Mixer defection to “cash out” of the streaming life.

The claims suggested he was phoning it in on Mixer.

According to Ninja, that is the furthest thing from the truth: “I was streaming double the hours I was supposed to. It was like a 150-hour requirement, I think, for a month and I was doing 300, easy. I wanted to win. It wasn’t like I signed this big deal and cashed out, I was streaming double my requirements.

• Read More: Ninja is considering esports return for Halo Infinite

“For six months straight I stuck to that,” the former king of Twitch continued, “and yet [Mixer] still didn’t work out. But don’t say it wasn’t for a lack of want.”