Like everyone else, I've been confused and dismayed by Nijisanji's bizarre, self-destructive approach to first breaking the news of Selen's termination and then responding to Dokibird's statements. Fans have thrown about a
lot of theories to explain Niji's approach, ranging from plausible-sounding accounts of the facts to feverish rrats straight from the belly of /vt/. I can't claim any special inside knowledge about the specific set of facts of this situation, but I do work in comms for a living and can speak to the general dynamics at play in public disputes between highly visible actors in which one or both parties are subject to NDAs. Based on my professional experience and my knowledge of the statements from Nijisanji and Dokibird, the explanation here seems fairly obvious: Nijisanji misinterpreted the personal account of workplace bullying that Selen sent them shortly before her firing, and they misinterpreted this document
hard.
I don't know if Nijisanji missed the mark here because Selen's accompanying documentation for this account was ambiguous, because there was a mistake in translation from one or both law firms, or because EN management adopted a wholly cynical interpretation of the document to try this defense in the court of public opinion, but I'm pretty confident that everything that's happened so far can be explained by this fundamental failure to communicate. If I'm right, the timeline goes something like this:
Selen posts her Last Cup of Coffee MV for perms approval. Management leaves her on read for 37 hours and then fails to get back to her for another 15 hours, so Selen goes ahead and posts the video without final perms check. There's a lot that we don't know about the background and context here. For instance, had management already seen the video prior to this final check? If yes, why hadn't they raised the issue with graduated livers proactively? If no, why hadn't they seen this video during the months-long process of its creation? Did anyone in management give Selen a deadline for perms check that she then blew by? I tend to think that the answers to these questions are not favorable to Nijisanji, since they would have shown evidence that Selen was at fault for the missed Christmas release date during Elira's response stream if such evidence existed. Regardless, the answers to these questions actually
do not matter for a breakdown of Niji's thought process throughout the subsequent PR nightmare.
Both management and talent reach out to Selen about her decision to post the MV without full perms, and shortly after this she attempts suicide. Management reaches out to Selen's emergency contact and removes Selen's access to socials, posting a skinwalked explanation for her absence on December 28th. Again, there's a lot that we don't know here. Were other talent/management mocking, cruel or abusive in their communication, or were their words just interpreted as such by Selen? If talent/management were abusive, was this a one-time thing or part of a larger pattern of behavior? Once again, the following version of events makes sense no matter how you answer these questions. The thing that matters here is that in any version of these events, a comms team involved in the decision-making process realizes at this exact moment that they're dealing with a potential PR nightmare. It would be disastrous if the public learned that beloved liver Selen Tatsuki attempted suicide because of harassment or mismanagement in the NijiEN workplace. It's not actually comm's job to manage the frayed relationship with talent, but at this point there are probably discussions about potential responses depending which way the situation develops.
Selen hires legal representation to help mediate her business relationship with Nijisanji, and both parties discuss potential next steps and remedies. Talks between Selen and management about a return to Nijisanji break down, and both sides realize that some sort of split is inevitable by late January. Nijisanji wants Selen to explain that the MV was taken down because of negligence on her part; Selen believes that management is responsible for the failure, and additionally has other grievances about how she's been treated in Nijisanji before, during, and after this inciting event. Per
Dokibird's first statement
on the matter, she asked to leave Nijisanji on more neutral terms on January 26th; per her
second statement
on the matter, Nijisanji's legal team was unresponsive after this request.
Frustrated by Nijisanji's unresponsiveness, Selen's lawyer suggests that she send a personal account of her experiences in Nijisanji to Niji's legal team in order to help them understand her grievances. If my understanding of the situation is accurate, this is the exact moment that everything goes to shit. Per
Nijisanji's termination notice
, we know that Selen has told Nijisanji (through her legal representation) that she intends to speak up about her experiences at Nijisanji if she's terminated: "Moreover, Selen Tatsuki insisted that if the negotiations did not progress, she would proceed to release a statement regarding her claims to the public." Now they're received a document written in a personal tone, alleging all sorts of abusive practices from management and/or talent and filled with potentially sensitive information about other Livers. Per Selen's
second statement
, she wrote this account to "document my thoughts and history with evidence... during my darkest time mentally" and included in it "privacy information that should not be public." Someone in Nijisanji's legal team comes to the conclusion (cynically
or naively, based on ambigious instructions from Selen
or based on bad translations from staff-- it does not matter) that this account of Selen's
is in fact the statement that she intends to release if she's terminated, and this scrambles all the jets.
Immediately, the comms team goes into full crisis mode and scrambles to get a termination out the door so they can get the first word in. In my experience working comms during times of crisis, "perfect" immediately goes out the window and is replaced by "quick." There's an enormous advantage to being the first actor to explain their version of events on the public, and even very experienced communications teams will make sloppy mistakes in this race to publish. With this context in mind, it's easy to see how Nijisanji screwed up their response to Selen's account of workplace conditions. Remember, Nijisanji's legal team has already been given notice of Selen's intent to publish a statement if negotiations fall apart and (presumably) has already advised her legal representation about potential risks that come with violations of an NDA. Now they see this document and have decided that it's a copy of Selen's statement, so they think that she's decided on publishing this
even after having been warned about the consequences of violating an NDA. Comms likely isn't party to any of this communication, but they are given a copy of the statement itself and they're told "legal says Selen intends to publish this."
The comm team pulls up the termination notice they've already written for Selen and they add a bunch of defensive language to get out ahead of the claims in her document. Copy like
makes no sense unless the communications professional writing it expects the "claims raised by Selen Tatsuki" to be available for public consumption in the near future. This solves the first mystery of "why did Nijisanji allude to bullying from talents when Doki did not:" Niji's legal team understood Selen's private account of her experiences to be a public tell-all account that management then instructed comms to preempt.
Additionally, comms also begins to brace for Selen's statement by preparing to counter specific allegations she raises. At least some of these allegations involve specific Livers, so the comms team (working with legal) shows talent selected portions of Selen's document in order to coach them on a statement about any sensitive information regarding past lives, workplace communications, etc. This explains the second mystery of "why did Elira, Vox, Ike, Millie, Enna, etc. see portions of Selen's document:" comms believed that each of these talent would need to respond to specific allegations about their behavior and began prepping these statements based on legal's failure to understand the nature of Selen's account.
Immediately after Nijisanji's termination notice, Dokibird releases her own prepared statement that does not include sensitive information or specifics but does reveal her suicide attempt and confirms the general claim that she believed NijiEN was an abusive workplace environment. Within an hour of Nijisanji's termination of Selen Tatsuki, Dokibird rises from the ashes and publishes a prepared statement that's obviously been checked by her legal representation. From a PR perspective, it's hard to imagine how this could have gone any worse for Nijisanji. Dokibird's statement begins with "I will not be silenced anymore," reminding the public of the still-recent #Where'sSelen controversy. She brings up bullying but leaves it ambiguous whether talent, management, or both are implicated, making Nijisanji's preemptive mention of talent seem like yet another instance of the company throwing its Livers under the bus. Finally, she brings up the suicide attempt, revealing that Nijisanji covered up this serious tragedy for over a month and puppeted Selen's account to reassure the public.
Seeing the massive shitstorm their failed strategy has caused, legal, talent, management, and comms all begin to flail, leading to the PR disaster that was Elira's stream. Honestly, I can't even begin to hazard a guess at the precise series of events that led to this stream. There are too many unknowns about the specifics of Selen's allegations at this point, too many parties desperate for vindication who might concievably be in a position to dictate how the company should organize its last-ditch efforts at crisis PR. You can read Elira's stream as a disgusting attempt to provoke Selen into revealing her grievances with Nijisanji so they can be litigated in the public square, a talent-initiated response to their real fear of personal information being leaked that management cynically encouraged in order to deflect from their own failures, or any number of other possibilities. The bottom line is that Nijisanji's talking points do not update to reflect the new terrain of the public dispute. They continue to treat Doki as a walking, talking brand risk despite her clear interest in just moving on from the controversy, and this just creates a whole new set of fan grievances and lurid theories of conspiracies and cliques.
Not yet understanding how Niji has misinterpreted her account of workplace conditions, Doki fires back on twitter
explaining her understanding that this document was private. At this point Doki responds to the ill-conceived Elira stream, rightfully conveying her shock that this document was shared with other Livers. She also speculates if talent was given access to her medical records, igniting yet another round of accusations and attacks.
Legal is once again called in to assess this accusation of leaking private HR document/medical records, which would be incredibly damaging if true, and at this point someone finally realizes the scope of the miscommunication. Speaking as a comms professional, I am almost certain that the next
statement
we get from Nijisanji was written by a lawyer covered in flop-sweat and covering their own ass rather than an in-house comms team. The statement alleges that "In order to check the validity of Selen and her lawyer's claim, ANYCOLOR Inc. shared only necessary parts of the information sent by her lawyer with our Livers and led an internal investigation," ignoring the fact that sharing
any of the information in this account of workplace abuses would be in violation of Selen's request for that document to remain private and ignoring the fact that Livers would not necessarily need to be informed of these specific allegations in order for Nijisanji to investigate the validity of Selen's claim. They also write that they have not given other talent any of "the specific information and documents which Selen’s lawyer requested that we do not share with our Livers," which fluent readers of legalese will notice is different from "the specific information and documents which Selen's lawyer requested we keep private from all non-legal department parties."
This statement ends with a "we investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing"-type reassurance, but reading between the lines it's clear that something has broken down with Nijisanji's handling of private documents. Nijisanji's legal team has invented a new reason for why talent was shown this document to cover for their initial misunderstanding of what the document actually was, but the writing is still on the wall for anyone paying attention.
Around the same time as this statement, Doki walks back the claim of leaked medical information but reiterates that some of her information was improperly shared. She once again explains that she just wanted to move on from this chapter of her life, and by this point both legal and comms understand that there's a possibility to de-escalate the situation. Someone from Nijisanji's side makes an overture to Doki's lawyer, and at last the two parties begin to address the underlying misunderstanding.
Finally, Doki posts a final statement
that explains the pertinent document, alludes to some unspecified miscommunication without admitting any specific failure on her part, reiterates her intention to keep private information private, and calls for all fans to cease harassing talents. More than anything else discussed so far, it's this final statement that has me convinced this whole disaster started with legal's failure to properly understand Selen's account of her experience. Doki's final tweet reads like a carefully crafted statement that has been vetted by both parties in order to put the controversy to rest. Under the hood this statement does a lot of things all at once, and it's worth unpacking them all to understand the various concerns that are being addressed.
- Doki rebuts the specific claims that Elira, Ike, and Vox made towards her, explaining that the recording was a one-time remnant of a pre-event mic check and that the sensitive information was always intended to remain private. This allows her to get the last word in on these allegations, avoiding any situation where fans might be left with the impression that Selen ever intended to leak this information.
- Doki acknowledges the potential for information to be lost in translation, thus lending support to the idea that both party's lawyers failed to understand one another. Explaining how things ever got to this point, Dokibird writes "All of the communication was done between lawyers in Japanese. Things are not black and white and everything gets more complicated and muddled when lawyers are involved in a different country. When things are conveyed to multiple parties through different degrees of communication, everything turns into different narratives and different translations." This copy explicitly alludes to the general shape of the error without delving into specifics or pointing fingers, letting Doki explain the series of miscommunications without throwing anyone under the bus.
- Importantly for any specific parties in Nijisanji who may have misinterpreted Selen's document, Doki gives a fig leaf justification for Nijisanji's terrible response by explaining her intentions for public comment have changed over time. Doki writes that "Everything I post to the public about the situation was a response. If it was a month ago, it will have been different as I was angry but I was also very alone in my head. But it's not a month ago and I've accepted it." One month before Doki's final statement would be around January 14th, before Selen requested to leave Nijisanji. If she indicated that she planned to respond to a termination with a public statement around this time, her words here give anyone responsible for this mishap a fig leaf excuse that they can point to in order to explain what happened. Whoever is responsible for this mishap is almost certainly losing their job, but these few sentences give any responsible parties the thinnest possible sliver of justification they can cite to management. Anyone who sees the boulder of layoffs rolling downhill in their direction might plausibly push for it to be included.
- Doki's statement ends with a request for fans not to harass the Livers and a straightforward explanation of her intentions to keep these matters private. NijiEN's credibility is on fire by now, and Doki is the only party in this dispute who fans and the outside onlookers might plausibly listen to. She's always been very clear that fans should not harass talent, but ending on this point one last time is crucial for Niji if they want to start putting out the fires. Doki has also been fairly explicit about her intentions to keep moving forwards, but her comments that "For those who wish to see receipts or documents or anything else, hoping I will reveal them, I'm sorry but these are the things that should be private and if needed, between lawyers" is the most explicit version of this message thus far. By writing this Doki has effectively demonstrated to both her fans and Nijisanji itself that she does not intend to leak sensitive information. This single sentence conclusively address the fears that prompted Nijisanji to over-react and provides a commitment that Niji can hold against Doki in the court of public opinion if she decides to provide reciepts while also letting her twist the knife one last time by implicitly blaming Niji for their improper handling of private materials. This sentence is very cleverly written and manages to convey all these ideas in a very concise way, and whoever wrote it 100% knew what they were doing.
- Finally, and most importantly, this statement was translated into Japanese. If everything I've laid out so far wasn't enough, this last detail convinces me that Doki's most recent statement was a collaboratively-edited attempt at de-escalation. If I'm right that Nijisanji was somehow involved in vetting this final statement, it makes sense that they'd want it translated for JP-only staff and shareholders/board members to read. Remember, Doki does not speak fluent Japanese herself, so someone was either hired to translate this statement or provided the service free of charge. It's plausible that one of Doki's many bilingual friends in the vtubing world offered to step in to clear up any misunderstandings, but it seems more likely to me that someone in Nijisanji either translated the document in-house or paid for the document to be translated by an outside contractor (probably more advisable in light of everything that's happened so far). Going this route allows internal Nijisanji staff and stakeholders to easily assess how this situation is being resolved while also giving Doki a chance to explain herself to the JP-only audience who has largely been unsympathetic to her situation.
If I'm right, what should we expect to see next? Assuming everything I've laid out thus far is more or less accurate, Nijisanji now has two options for their path forwards. The first is a
long period of silence from EN Livers, followed by a gradual ramp-up of streaming and a total cone of silence around the subject of Selen and her termination going forwards. In this version of a PR strategy Nijisanji would pivot from their misguided attacks and attempt to just memory hole these events, counting on the internet's short attention span to eventually take the heat off their talent and hoping that enough fans stick around to keep the EN branch financially viable. The second approach Nijisanji might take is one more final statement explaining the failure to communicate in general terms, apologizing profusely to Selen and promising that those responsible have been fired out a cannon into the sun in order to take some heat off the talent and the rest of management.
In my experience working with public-facing companies I've found that the C-Suite is (unfortunately) often loath to fully explain fuck-ups even after they've implemented fixes, since the same details that might lead a member of the public to forgive will also lead a shareholder to lose confidence in the stock. Whether I'm right about this series of events or not, my hope is that Nijisanji makes the necessary changes to turn the ship around and then offers the public as much transparency as they reasonably can in order to dispel the cloud hanging over the remaining talent. But walking this path would require them to make damaging admissions about
profound failures while also collaborating with Doki in order to ensure her wish to move forwards is honored, and all these difficulties make me believe that a total memory-holing of this disaster is more likely.
Final thoughts: Reduced down to its essence, the basic task of a comms team is to understand an issue of interest, analyze the public's view of that issue in real time, and craft messages that ultimately move the public's view in the client's desired direction. If the version of events I've laid out here is more or less accurate, Nijisanji's PR strategy failed because they managed to screw up each of these three tasks. Nijisanji's comms team may have gotten off on the wrong foot because they were given bad information about the issue of interest from legal, but their subsequent failures to adjust their strategy in response to Dokibird's statements and the public's speculation are additional black marks in their own right separate from this original mistake.
All of these communications mishaps are
also separate from the failures which occurred in the sphere of talent management, where EN managers failed to support and protect their most popular female streamer so badly that she attempted suicide and then hired legal representation to negotiate an exit from the company. My point in analyzing the communications dimension of this debacle is not to apologize for this mismanagement of talent but rather to explain how a bad PR response turned an intrinsically-bad piece of news for the company into a catastrophic scandal that has jeopardized the whole branch. Ironically, it might be fortunate for us that Nijisanji's comms approach missed the mark this badly, since a more competent communications strategy might have papered over these underlying problems and allowed the underlying mismanagement of talent to continue. My hope is that this catastrophe leads NijiEN's senior leadership to take a look in the mirror and make real changes to improve talent relations, comms, and translation services, but based on the moves we've seen thus far I can't say that I'm optimistic.
