Papaya Ex’s 2.7 Million-View Film Deleted By the Man She Hired to Manage It
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Nigerian actress and content creator, Abike Raheem, popularly known as Papaya Ex, broke down in an emotional video after claiming her YouTube manager deleted her film, The Spotlight, from the platform. The movie had reportedly amassed 2.7 million views and over 10,000 comments before it disappeared.
“All my hard work is gone. This guy has ruined me. My YouTube manager deleted my Spotlight movie with 2.7 million views and 10k comments,” she said. She added that she had fasted for 30 days while working on the project, a detail that shows how much of herself, spiritually and physically, she had invested in making the film.
The Spotlight, released on August 14, stars Papaya Ex alongside Michael Dappa and Ada Uli, and the plot follows a struggling musician trying to find his place in the Nigerian industry. She wrote, financed, promoted, and starred in it. The man she hired to manage the account is the one who, according to her, deleted it, and he has made no public response.
After Papaya’s outburst, what followed was less a scrutiny of the manager’s actions and more a focus on what Papaya should have done better to avoid the incident. Some fans urged her to “take greater control” of her own account instead of leaving such decisions to someone else.
This reaction is not unusual; when a woman’s work is destroyed or mishandled by a man she trusted to help her, the instinct is to ask what she did wrong, not what was done to her.
This is not an isolated incident either. Just weeks earlier, Papaya Ex was calling out Ghanaian TV stations for airing The Spotlight without her authorisation. Twice in one month, her work was used or erased without her consent, firstly by outside broadcasters and secondly by someone on her own team.
Women building independent film and content careers still routinely navigate industries, platforms, and even their own hired staff without the structural protection to hold onto what they make.
