Activists Say This Pickup Artist Is Harassing Women in Mexico City to Promote His 'Seduction' Bootcamp

An Australian pickup artist going by the pseudonyms “Bradicus” and “Brad Hunter” specializes in YouTube videos showing him chatting up women, kissing them, and taking them back to his place. He travels the globe, everywhere from Brazil to Singapore to the United States, filming his purported attempts at picking up women in broad daylight—what he calls “daygame seduction.” Interspersed between on-the-street footage are montages of cuddling and make-outs, some filmed up-close by Bradicus himself and some shot at a distance in the style of undercover footage. Some women’s faces are shown, while others are blurred. All of these clips are in service of promoting his personal PUA brand and “Online Seduction” course, which promises to teach men “how to have HOT GIRLS delivered to your door daily” and runs as high as $697.

For the last several months, his videos appear to have been filmed in Mexico City, including one titled, in part, “5 Reasons Why I LOVE Latina Women.” Now, Legislative Assembly of Mexico City deputy Alessandra Rojo de la Vega has launched a Change.org petition in hopes of getting him kicked out of the country altogether, alleging that some of these clips have been filmed or published non-consensually. Rojo de la Vega started the petition after being contacted by one of his alleged targets.

“She wanted to know if she could report him to the police and how she could help stop him doing all this damage he was doing to these women,” Rojo de la Vega told Jezebel.

In a statement to Jezebel, Bradicus said that the allegations against him are “false and baseless.” “I have nothing but love and respect for the women of Mexico,” noting that he is “a huge advocate for women’s rights and feminism.” He stated that he never records women without permission. He told Jezebel that “many of the women in the seduction courses are paid actresses or models who were paid to be on camera.” Bradicus said he is leaving Mexico and is discontinuing his seduction courses, although an email promoting Online Seduction was sent out a few hours after his statement to Jezebel.

On August 19, YouTube deleted his channel for violating terms of service. That same day, Online Seduction sent out an email to subscribers trumpeting that the project has “reached INSANE SUCCESS” resulting in “a Nationwide media scandal,” “Feminist hate,” “Death Threats,” and a “[sic] Which hunt.” The email encouraged subscribers to sign up for the course and concluded, “They can try to break us, but we remain strong.”

Before YouTube deleted his account, Bradicus appeared to have removed his three-part YouTube series on picking up women in Mexico. Still, his account continued to host several videos shot in the country, including a stereotype-ridden dispatch on why he loves Latina women. “Sometimes I wake up when I have a Latina girl over… and the whole house is clean. The bed is made… They get pleasure out of serving their men,” he said. Later, he added, “Latina women love sex.”

Bradicus is not the first pickup artist to be banned from YouTube. In 2019, a BBC reporter went undercover to expose PUAs videotaping street-based interactions in London with women who appeared unaware that they were being filmed. These pickup artists posted the videos online to promote their “seduction bootcamps.” Following the BBC’s reporting, YouTube terminated the accounts of the involved pickup artists. One of the PUAs featured, Adnan Ahmed, was found guilty of “threatening” behavior and sentenced to two years in jail.

Rojo de la Vega alleged that some of the footage Bradicus publishes online is “taken when [women] have absolutely no idea they are being photographed or filmed.” (Bradicus denies the allegation.) In other cases, women appear to be aware that they are being filmed, but, as Rojo de la Vega argued, that doesn’t mean that a woman has consented to having her image used on social media or within the context of promoting a PUA seminar. “We are not an object of entertainment or consumerism,” she said, noting that she wants to stop the promotion of Mexico as a place of “sexual tourism.”

The Change.org petition has made local news and Bradicus, who boasts about using mainstream dating apps, was banned by Bumble, according to a tweet from the company. Remo Moretta, the Australian ambassador to Mexico, has condemned Bradicus’s behavior, calling it “unacceptable.” He elaborated: “If a crime has been committed, it should be reported to the relevant authorities.” Rojo de la Vega argued that there are several routes to legal recourse that Bradicus’s alleged victims could take, including under a 2018 “revenge porn” law that criminalizes the sharing of sexual content without permission.

Recently, Bradicus began dispensing advice on picking up women amid covid-19, including by meeting them on dating apps and then using WhatsApp to send automated messages to hundreds of women at once. In June, he posted a Facebook photo of himself, without a mask, talking to a woman on the street alongside the comment, “Don’t use the corona as an excuse. Go and make it work for you.” That same month, in a video apparently shot in Mexico City and overlaid with the text “How to Get Laid in Lock Down,” he confronts a woman passerby, who is wearing a mask, and asks her to appear on camera. He proceeds to talk to her, while not wearing a mask, about how men should successfully approach women during a pandemic.

Before his YouTube removal, his channel featured dozens of videos filmed elsewhere in the world, some of which featured titles such as “Picking Up Girls In London England + Berlin Germany.” More disturbing examples included, “White Man Picking Up African Girls in Ethiopia” and “Meeting Pretty Girls In The Poorest Country In Europe.” There was a stock format to many of these clips: From afar, a camera captures him as he approaches women on the street with openers such as, “Uh, very beautiful Russian lady, hi.” Edited into these undercover-style clips, or in their own standalone compilation videos, was the evidence of his supposed “seduction” success: namely, footage of him getting cozy with various women.

He may have lost his major platform for publishing these videos, but on a site called “Bradicus Vault,” he’s selling $397 lifetime memberships to access “videos that got over a MILLION VIEWS and literally GOT ME BANNED FROM COUNTRIES.” He calls it “the only place I can put the videos I really want to make.”