Logan Paul Heads to Hospital After Prank Goes Wrong

Logan Paul was hospitalized with severe lacerations this week over a YouTube prank gone wrong. The embattled vlogger has been documenting his new interest in the Pokemon Trading Card Game. On Tuesday, he recorded himself punching out a window after apparently learning that a rare card was fake. Paul needed nine stitches and told fans he “ended up nearly bleeding out.”

Paul has captured his audience’s undivided attention recently by buying and trading in rare Pokemon cards — some worth tens of thousands of dollars. On Tuesday, he posted on his Instagram Stories about purchasing a “Pikachu Illustrator” card, which has sold for as much as $243,000 at auction, according to a report by Dexerto. In another video, he pretended to discover for the first time that the card was fake and immediately punched a hole in a window. Paul now says the whole thing was supposed to be a joke, but the injury to his arm is not.

Paul confused fans by claiming that he paid $150,000 for the fake card, but that turned out to be a part of the prank he was planning. He later explained that he knew the card was fraudulent, and he received it for free. He acknowledged that fans were attacking the person who sent him the card, writing: “stop harassing him lol.”

Paul later posted videos of himself covered in his blood at the hospital, with close-up shots of his injuries and his stitches. In one grotesque clip, he even tried to make his cut “talk,” pinching it open and closed with a cartoonish voice-over before realizing how badly that hurt.

Paul is new to the high-stakes world of vintage Pokemon TCG trading, but he has made a big splash on the niche hobby. Earlier this month, he hosted a live-stream where he purchased a rare 1st Edition Pokemon booster box, which was worth $216,000. With over 300,000 fans watching, he pulled a shadowless Charizard card from the box — worth $85,000 on its own. All in all, Paul found an estimated $200,000 worth of profit in the box.

Still, some critics are questioning Paul’s cavalier treatment of this small-time hobby and his bloody stunts on videos that young children are sure to watch. Paul has come under fire before for producing content that minors are bound to see. Most famously, at the beginning of 2018, Paul made national headlines for filming a video of a recent suicide victim in Japan’s “Suicide Forest.” So far, Paul has not addressed the controversies around his Pokemon card stunt gone wrong.