Steven Bonnell Is Having the Worst Year in Living Memory, and That's Saying Something

Darlings, put down the popcorn for a moment.

Steven Bonnell, known to the internet as Destiny, has been lighting himself on fire in public for the better part of two years. The revenge porn allegations in February 2025. Elon Musk calling for his imprisonment. A full legal breakdown published by LawFold.com in April of this year. The man generates drama the way Bungie generates disappointment: reliably, relentlessly, and somehow always at maximum volume.

But per a public obituary in the Sauk Valley News, Jerry Bonnell of Amboy, Illinois, 1953 to 2026, passed away in April. Destiny's father. Gone the same month his son's legal situation was being dissected for public consumption across the internet.

That is a brutal coincidence. Brutal.

We are not going to make this cruel. Jerry Bonnell was a private man from a small Illinois town, and he does not belong in the discourse. He deserves none of this.

What is worth saying is that Destiny has spent years constructing a persona bulletproofed by aggression and debate-bro certainty, a guy who seemingly cannot be caught off guard, who has a take on everything, who will walk into any fire. And 2026 has been the year the fires stopped being rhetorical. Legal exposure. A career in genuine flux. And now a private grief that the internet is now, inevitably, aware of because a local newspaper published an obituary and Google indexed it.

The audacity of circumstances.

He doesn't get a pass on the allegations, on the pattern, on any of it. Keep receipts, always. But grief is grief, and losing a parent while your life is being litigated in public, by strangers, for sport, including by columns exactly like this one, is something else entirely.

We wish him, genuinely, whatever peace he can find. My loves, that is not something I say often, and I mean it.

The drama will still be here when he gets back.