BJ Investment Holdings, the parent company of Hit Network and BitBoy Crypto, removed crypto personality and YouTuber Ben Armstrong from the company this week, claiming Armstrong was suffering from substance abuse and alleged that he caused “emotional, physical, and financial damage.”
Tonight, Armstrong says the conflict is “far from over.”
This difficult decision is a culmination of a prolonged effort to help Ben during his relapse into substance abuse as well as reconcile the emotional, physical and financial damage he has done to the employees of Hit network & the Bitboy Crypto community.
— Bitboy Crypto (@Bitboy_Crypto) August 28, 2023
Responding to allegations published yesterday related to substance abuse, the @JoinBenCoin Twitter account posted a document that shows all “negative” test results for a five-panel drug test.
In a text message to Decrypt, Armstrong confirmed that it was indeed him who published the drug test result document.
“I’m withholding making any statements right now,” Armstrong added.
But in a group voice call in the BenCoin Discord server Tuesday, Armstrong shared his thoughts on the current situation, and vehemently denied the substance abuse allegations.
“I have not relapsed. I have not relapsed. That is a lie,” Armstrong said in the group call.
The content creator instead claimed that Justin Williams and Hit Network CEO TJ Shedd conjured the story out of whole cloth.
“Justin Williams and TJ have cooked up this plot because I take diet pills, I take phentermine,” Armstrong said. “Anybody can look this up. Everybody knows, my wife knows.” He added that he has a valid prescription for the weight-loss drug.
Armstrong said that he has also been accused of taking substances like cocaine but that such claims are “factually incorrect,” and no one at the company had ever asked him to take a drug test or confronted him with the topic before his removal.
Armstrong elaborated in the voice call, saying that he does take the steroids testosterone and dianabol, but alleged that Williams and Shedd have purchased them from him. Armstrong also alleged that his assistant took his Armidex pills from his home, photographed them at the Hit Network offices, and then returned them to Armstrong’s medicine cabinet.
“They’re using this to get me out of my own company,” Armstrong said, explaining that his name was previously removed from Hit Network’s office building because he said he has bad credit from his past.
Armstrong dubbed all of the alleged behavior “diabolical” and “insane.”
But a high-level Hit Network employee familiar with the matter told Decrypt that the company is not alleging hard drug abuse, but instead that Armstrong is consuming “a cocktail of substances” that the employee claimed is impairing Armstrong’s judgment.
In the Discord call, Armstrong said that he never enacted physical violence on coworkers, but did once threaten Shedd.
“I threatened to beat the crap out of TJ when I found out that he was trying to take everything from me,” Armstrong said. “He’s trying to strip every single thing from me.”
The Hit Network employee confirmed that Shedd was threatened, but added that “many people” were threatened, and alleged that physical confrontations did occur.
Conflict at Hit Network has been reportedly ongoing for many months. In the Tuesday call, Armstrong also alleged that bribery also occurred at the company.
“They’re literally bribing employees,” Armstrong alleged. “One of our employees came to me the other day and said, ‘Hey, you know, TJ talked to me and TJ told me everything that’s going on and said you were doing cocaine, and then he gave me 3.5 Ethereum.’”
But the Hit Network employee familiar with the matter denied the allegations. Shedd declined to comment. Williams did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
Overall, Armstrong asserted that the company would not be able to succeed without his return.
“Obviously, the company is going to make $0 without me,” Armstrong said. “All of our major sponsors have already pulled out. So they don’t really have a choice here,” he added.
“This is going to get extremely dirty before it gets better,” Armstrong warned.
In response to the lost sponsorship claims, the Hit Network employee told Decrypt that any claims that the company had lost all of its sponsors was “laughably false”—and hinted that a lawsuit may be on the horizon.
