Jensen Karp

On March 22, 2021, Jensen Karp tweeted a photo of what looked like cinnamon and sugar- encrusted shrimp tails coming out of a bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, or CTC. 

Over the next two days, Karp and his wife, Danielle Fishel, posted numerous updates concerning the CTC Shrimp Saga.

Fishel joked about Karp’s discovery, saying “I usually wait for lunch to eat shrimp.”

After his first posts of the shrimp tails, Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s official Twitter account (@CTCSquares) commented that the shrimp tails appear to be “an accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren’t thoroughly blended.”  

And further stated, “We assure you that there’s no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp.”

Following CTC’s post, Karp claimed the cereal company was trying to gaslight him. He posted additional photos of the alleged shrimp tails, saying, “Ok, [well] after further investigation with my eyes, these are cinnamon coated SHRIMP TAILS, you weirdos.”

Hours later, he tweeted another photo of cereal pieces with black markings on them, stating that he ate a bowl before noticing the mysterious “black marks.” In a followup tweet, he says they are “cooked (?) INTO the square.”  He then asks for someone to tell him “they aren’t like maggots or bugs.”  

One user commented that the black spots might be mouse or rat droppings and Karp replied that he called Poison Control. He later tweeted, “Good news is, if it IS rat poo - I won’t feel the flu-like effects of an infection for a few days.”

Karp posted an update that evening stating that his wife, who “has a stronger stomach,” checked the other bag from the family box of CTC and found that the bag “seems taped up (?) and also appears to include…(I don’t even want to say it)...dental floss.”

Karp posted the next day that he had spoken with a carcinologist from the Natural History Museum in LA who “would totally love to look at [his] ‘specimen’ under a microscope” and “might even be able to extract DNA to confirm its species or if it’s indeed cinnamon sugar.”

CTC once again posted in response to Karp’s situation, saying they were investigating the matter and that they could “say with confidence that this did not occur at our facility.”  They go on to say that “Any consumers who notice their cereal box or bag has been tampered with, such as the clear tape that was found in this case, should contact us at 1-800-328-1144.”

Karp posted additional photos of the black pieces from the cereal he found at the bottom of the bag after some users began questioning whether he faked the photos or the situation.

Following the surge of attention on Twitter regarding the CTC Shrimp Saga, users began to take note that Karp’s wife is Topanga from “Boy Meets World,” and that he was formerly a rapper known as “Hot Karl.”

On March 23, 2021, Eliza Skinner, a writer and ex-coworker of Karp’s, commented on Karp’s posting of the potential rat droppings found in his cereal, saying, “I don’t specifically remember saying ‘I hope he gets poisoned by rats’ as I dumped change into a well, but it definitely sounds like something I would do.”

As doubt surrounding the legitimacy of Karp’s posts began to build, lead vocalist of the band Linkin Park tweeted in Karp’s defense on March 23, 2021, saying, “It would be a travesty if @JensenKarp became best known for finding shrimp tails in his Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He is also a razor sharp comic mind, an accomplished gallery owner and curator, spectacular radio and podcast personality, and all-round good dude. For the record.”

On March 23, 2021, artist Brandon Bird tweeted that “the shrimp tails guy is both a marketing professional and someone who’s lied to my face without flinching.”

He responded to a tweet by writer Rebecca Ruiz the next day, saying Karp “co-owned the gallery I did most of my shows at when I first moved to LA and the experience of how that soured and how he lied and gaslit over nothing made me never, ever want to deal with a gallery ever again.”

When Bird saw Mike Shinoda’s post the next day, he responded, “He’s nice to you because you’re famous. For the record.”

On March 24, 2021, writer Melissa Steten, an ex-girlfriend of Karp, posted about her experience dating him. She described him as a “manipulative gaslighting narcissistic ex-boyfriend who once told me he was surprised I hadn’t killed myself because my life was so worthless?”

She later announced that she was “getting lots of texts from girls still in therapy over [Karp’s] terror.”

Her third tweet claimed that Karp repeatedly treated other women the same way: “Look, I’m no sweetheart, I’ve done/said some dumb things dated problematic men, but to have so many women reach out with the SAME EXACT story confirms that what I dealt with wasn’t because of me. It’s a disturbing tactic he used to control and demean women.”

Fellow writer and ex-girlfriend of Karp’s, Stephanie Mickus, followed Stetten’s lead and posted about her own experiences dating Karp. She said, “I was blocked in 2014 b/c I was not gracious enough after a surprise threesome! But not before I was told to ‘be careful or I would never work in this town again.’”

The immediate backlash following Karp’s CTC Shrimp Saga saw internet users labeling him as the next “Milkshake Duck.”

The term “Milkshake Duck” originated in June of 2016 when Twitter user @pixelatedboat posted, “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist.”

According to UrbanDictionary.com, a milkshake duck is defined as “Someone who gains sudden fame for something nice and positive, only to soon after be revealed as a deeply flawed character with terrible opinions and/or a shady past, often involving corrosive social/political ideologies, which quickly tarnishes their fame and the good will people momentarily had towards them.”

On March 24, 2021, Karp posted a final update on the CTC Shrimp Saga, claiming he was “waiting for the envelope [I] agreed on from General Mills to send them back pieces and some of a shrimp tail will leave home for DNA testing at Noon.”  

To date, this is the last post Karp has published on Twitter.

On March 24, 2021, comedian John Cullen commented on Karp’s CTC Shrimp Saga accusing Karp of stealing a podcast idea. He went on to provide timestamped screenshots in an attempt to prove Karp’s theft of his intellectual property, saying, “Next thing you know shrimp man will claim that he found the podcast idea and name he stole from us in a bag of Cheerios.”

On March 24, 2021, following Melissa Stetten’s tweets, actor and writer Rory Uphold began to relate her own experiences with Karp, stating, “I ended up in the hospital. Took me a year to recover mentally and I still struggle.” She went on to say that Karp “is the most abusive person I have ever been with.” Both tweets have since been deleted.

Comedian, actor, and writer Brittani Nichols, who worked on the second season of “Drop the Mic” with Karp, used her negative experiences with Karp to promote the investigative series “A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” saying she would tell her story if her post got 500 retweets.  

Less than an hour passed before she said, “It got 500 retweets so I’m keeping my word and talking about my time working for the cinnamon shrimp man. It is my duty as a Gemini to harness my power for good so here I am.”

She went on to say that Karp and other executive producers stole the idea for the show “Drop the Mic.” She tweeted, “I was told leadership had to be talked into hiring a person of color for the RAP show. 1st season there were 0 writers. My season, I was the only black writer and there was a black WA.” At the end of the season, Nichols was “freestyling about how I was happy the job was ending” because of Karp’s presence.

Nichols alleged that Karp “would essentially destroy what we’d written by rewriting lines with the same premise as our jokes, yet worse.  He routinely replaced lines about black celebrities with couplets about how they just looked like other black celebs that they did not at all resemble.  I expressed discomfort with this several times but again, he never spoke to us so I had to shuffle this through the head writer.”

When “a black 90s R&B group came on the show and wanted to write their own battle, [they] initially included an anti-Asian line, a line calling a black man an Uncle Tom, and a line insinuating they would sexually assault the Asian woman in the opposing group on their tour bus.” This group worked exclusively with Karp and “the opposing group had no idea they were about to hear these things.”

“The anti-Asian line got pulled but the head writer wasn’t getting traction with anything else. I was like they can fire me if they want but I’m not about to let a group of dudes rap a line implying sexual assault of this woman to her face on stage in front of an entire production. I found [Karp] on the stage to discuss. He told me that’s not what the line meant but it was pretty clear I was going to make this a thing if they didn’t take it out so they took it out. The Uncle Tom line stayed in.”

Nichols ended her story saying that “for transparency, he emailed me like two years after this happened to tell me I was right and to thank me but there wasn’t an apology.” She then finishes her tweet encouraging readers to “please read about the LASD deputy gangs series as it’s very important.”

Karp’s ex-coworker Eliza Skinner, who was head writer on “Drop the Mic,” confirmed Nichols’ story on March 24, 2021, stating, “I was the headwriter in question in this thread.”

In a follow-up post, she refuted the claim that she had ever dated Karp. She says, “I never dated Jensen Karp. I would never have dated Jensen Karp. I worked with him - and it was awful. Do a quick fucking google before you write about me - just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean the only relationship I can have with a man is romantic.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Skinner expanded on Nichols’ story, as she described her experience working three seasons of “Drop the Mic” with Karp.. Skinner said she raised concerns about Karp screaming at her, as also noted by Nichols, and that she took her complaints directly to Karp, as advised by another executive producer. 

She continued, “I sat down with [Karp] with my list of complaints and said, ‘Please, you cannot do these things to me, you cannot do these things to the writers,’ and he agreed to them. But eventually, as we worked, it kind of eroded away. It was really tough. I ended up feeling like a lot of my job was to protect the writers from the way he was treating me and to fight for salvaging as much of their work as I could.”

Skinner said that Karp often took lines referencing people of color and made them offensive, constantly revisiting the idea that all Black people look the same. “His feeling was that’s part of rap battle culture. My feeling was we’re not just a rap battle culture show, we’re a comedy show. So, these should be funny jokes and, to me, racist jokes, any kind of bigoted joke is lowest common denominator.”

Skinner stated that she was later fired in 2018 “according to Karp’s wishes.”

On March 24, 2021, another of Karp’s ex-girlfriends accused him of abuse during their relationship, and described long-lasting damage from it. “‘Cinnamon toast shrimp guy’ is not a good person. He is selfish, controlling, manipulative, and ruined my life for close to a decade. Even after he broke up with me, he kept in close contact to try to mold me into the person he wanted me to be…under the guise of ‘if you just do this, we can get back together and live happily ever after’ but that was never the case. Please stop giving him your time and attention.”

On March 26, 2021, former Gallery1988 manager Lily Idle posted an extremely critical statement about Karp. Idle recalls Karp “completely screw[ing] an artist out of any profit from a solo show that was the culmination of a year’s worth of painting” for his own “potential personal gain.” Karp allegedly blocked the sales of the artist’s work by not displaying the prices of the pieces on the show cards and not allowing purchases from the gallery’s website.

Before the abuse allegations began to circulate, Karp commented on the CTC Shrimp Saga in a March 2021 article from The Daily Beast. Karp said, “I have a career outside of being the stupid shrimp guy that would be on the line as you know, including being an Emmy-nominated writer. I wouldn’t do this. That’s very annoying and I don’t want to be part of that.”  

According to The Daily Beast, he has not commented on the abuse allegations that surfaced following the CTC Shrimp Saga.

In the same article by The Daily Beast, another previous coworker of Karp’s from Gallery1988 compared him to the Marvel character Loki, claiming Karp is, “not untalented, but he’s not talented enough to be doing what he’s doing because he doesn’t put the work in. He’s not a hard worker. He just kind of takes, takes, takes and then moves on. The real Loki trick is that he’s very charming. When you talk to him, he uses language really well, he’s funny enough. The charm and the moxie are disorienting at first, you get kind of lost in it. Then you peel the layers back and you realize that [he] is there to take what you’ll let him until you’re left with nothing.”

The ex-coworker also stated that Karp was “routinely erupting at people.” They described Karp as “ego-driven, fame-hungry, un-collaborative, selfish, and narcissistic.”  They then commented on the CTC Shrimp Saga, saying, “You can’t shovel that much shit and serve it to so many people and not have expected it shoveled back eventually. I almost think it’s too perfect that he found black specks in the [cereal] bag. If it’s rat shit, it’s just too specifically poignant.”