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Haliey Welch, best known as 'Hawk Tuah Girl,' faced backlash during a live recording of her Talk Tuah podcast at VidCon 2025 in Anaheim, California. In a live taping of her podcast Talk Tuah on June 19, 2025, which she co-hosted with her friend Chelsea Bradford, Welch and her guest Whitney Cummings soon lost the audience.
Welch considered turning a viral catchphrase into a comeback tour after her crypto scandal, but instead faced boos, curses, and people walking out.
When the crew sat down, Cummings appeared to turn into an impromptu guest host and conduct the conversation. When Cummings turned the interview to discuss Welch as a content creator, Welch stated that her fame came down to being,
"at the right place at the wrong time."
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As the recording was underway, the audience was still quite rowdy, with Cummings directing the crowd on some occasions to "Shut the f*** up."
When the talk turned to the raunchy comedy of Cummings, and the references grew ever more explicit, more people drifted out.
Hollywood reflections and crypto lawsuit at VidCon 2025
Although things appeared to calm down, Haliey Welch revealed that her career aspiration was to be killed in a horror movie. Cummings inspired Welch to produce her film. Since Cummings had her own experience in Hollywood, where she pitched her sitcom and got it done herself, she encouraged Welch and the audience to do the same and not depend on anybody to recruit them.
She drifted into her Hollywood reflections with her speech. Cummings said that the industry as full of nepo babies and "nerds trying to meet hot women."
In explaining her experience of being a taller woman in the entertainment business, Cummings even angered more people to walk away by stating that all people in Hollywood as a m***** or a d****.
When a fan asked Haliey Welch about the release of her cryptocurrency, which was theorized to have lost investors millions and resulted in a lawsuit, Welch replied,
“Does this look like the face of a girl who could talk to you about crypto?”
Welch explained that if the crypto scam had been committed by a man, then it would have gone over differently, and he “probably would have been promoted.”
By the time the panel began to conclude, it appeared that half of the original audience was still there, eagerly awaiting to ask Welch a question about her life and work.
Haliey Welch’s crypto controversy explained
The VidCon live podcast represents a significant setback in her efforts to rebrand herself beyond her crypto scandal. Late in 2024, Welch promoted and endorsed one meme coin, called $HAWK.
The coin experienced an incredible jump in prices, exhibiting a market capitalization of close to $490 million before losing more than 95 percent of its value within less than 24 hours. Haliey Welch was not formally accused of misconduct, but disclosed in interviews that she was approached by both the FBI and SEC about her involvement.
Early this year, Haliey Welch had quit her partnership with Betr Holdings (a media company co-founded by Jake Paul), rebooted her podcast, and announced that she is working on a documentary with Bungalow Media + Entertainment detailing her journey to fame.
