An Orange County man has been arrested on suspicion of stalking a professional online gamer during a years-long harassment campaign, the Justice Department said.
Ivan Baltierra, 29, of Trabuco Canyon, was arrested by FBI agents on Monday and was due to appear in US District Court in Santa Ana.
He has been charged with one count of stalking and, if convicted, would face a maximum statutory sentence of five years in federal prison.
According to the arrest affidavit, Baltiira launched a campaign of harassment against the woman who used the name Nal in her role as a high-profile World of Warcraft player on the streaming platform Twitch. At one time, he was the moderator of her stream channel.
Baltierra met Groove in person during a fan meet-and-greet at gaming convention BlizzCon in Anaheim in November 2019. He reportedly expressed a romantic interest in her, and she declined, stating that she had a boyfriend.
In June 2020, after being told that Baltierra was trying to find his address so that she could meet him in Canada, he removed her as a moderator of his stream channel and blocked him from his social media.
After that, she said, there were months of threats and harassment against her and her boyfriend, including the distribution of images in which her face was plastered over sexually explicit photos.
Null made his allegations public in December 2020, when he sought crowdfunding support to pursue legal action against Baltiira. Two months later, he quit his gaming career, citing the stress of his “frequent harassment”.
That same month, February 2021, she obtained a temporary restraining order against Baltierra in Orange County Superior Court, and she signed an agreement to end the harassment campaign.
But the arrest affidavit states that he kept on chasing the victim.
The affidavit said that in March 2022, a search of Baltierra’s residence found “multiple photoshopped nude photos with the victim’s face” and evidence of email accounts from which disturbing messages were sent.
According to a 2011 article in the Orange County Register, Baltierra joined the Marine Corps after graduating from Mission Viejo High School. In April 2019, he was sworn in as a Los Angeles airport police officer. It is not known how long he served in that position; Online government records indicate that he was paid in 2019 itself.
