Trabuco Canyon man admits to harassing, doxxing female video gamer in federal plea deal

A Trabuco Canyon man faces several years in prison after admitting to a long-running, wide-ranging campaign to harass a prominent female gamer.

Evan Baltierra, 29, pleaded guilty Monday to one count of stalking, according to the Department of Justice. In his plea deal with federal prosecutors, Baltierra admitted to harassing the woman online, posting fake nude images of her, doxxing her, sending police to her home, and trying to turn her boyfriend's family against her.

According to federal prosecutors, Baltierra met the woman described as a prominent professional gamer at a convention in Anaheim in November of 2019. The gamer, who was not identified, felt uncomfortable after Baltierra asked to meet her in her hometown in Canada, and she blocked him on various social media accounts in June of 2020, federal officials said.

Baltierra responded by creating hundreds of social media accounts to send her threatening messages, including one sent via Twitter in January of 2021 that read in part, "[t]imes ticking…waiting for the right opportunity," according to the Department of Justice. In October of 2020, prosecutors say Baltierra "hired an unknown third party through an instant messaging mobile application" to photoshop the victim's face onto pornographic images. The images were posted to porn sites and internet forums between November of 2020 and March of 2022, and Baltierrra urged others to search for her name online in order to see naked pictures of her, according to federal officials.

The woman obtained a temporary restraining order against Baltierra in January of 2021, but that seemed to incite further harassment. After he was served with the protective order, federal officials say Baltierra doxxed the gamer, posting her real name and city of residence — which had been included in the protective order — to social media websites and during her live video game streams. He also posted her Twitter handle and the photoshopped nude images he had created to porn sites, according to prosecutors, and used multiple accounts to post harassing messages to disrupt her live streams.

"Baltierra's spamming of the victim made it impossible for her to stream herself playing video games and forced her to stop streaming in February of 2021," DOJ officials said in a statement.

Baltierra and the victim agreed to a settlement, in which he agreed to not contact her and her family and friends in exchange for her dissolving the temporary restraining order. But that did not stop Baltierra's harassment efforts, according to federal prosecutors — in June of 2021, just two months after the settlement was reached, he called her local police department, tried to get her home address, and lied that she made suicide threats online, and asked them to conduct a welfare check.

In defiance of the settlement, Baltierra continued to send threatening messages via various social media accounts in early 2022, including one that read, "get a casket ready." He wrote a letter to the parents of her boyfriend in March of 2022 that said, in part, that the situation was going to end badly to her, the same month he admitted to sending an unsolicited package to her that contained a box of condoms.

Baltierra, who faces a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison, scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 20.