NiP Hired A Celebrity Sex Offender As Senior Video Producer

Disgraced Finnish TV presenter Axl Smith spent a brief time working for the Swedish esports organisation.

Not everyone will know the story of Caro Axel Smith. He was a Finnish TV presenter known for his hosting on MTV Nordic, hosting the Finnish version of The Voice for five years and even was the Finnish voice for a character in the Disney movie Frozen. Then in March of 2016 Smith was arrested after police learned of allegations that he had a secret video surveilance system in his bedroom which he used for the purpose of non-consensually filming dozens of women he had sexual intercourse with. These videos had been shared via WhatsApp in a group he called “The Hype Ring” that contained some of his showbiz friends.

Smith resigned from his position at The Voice once the media got hold of the story and by the following year he had been convicted on thirty counts of wiretapping, four counts of defamation and two counts of disseminating information infringing upon private life. He was issued a suspended sentence of one year and two months and instructed to pay 150,000 Euros in compensation distributed among his 29 victims.

After his conviction Smith tried his best to disguise himself and adopted a fake name. He spent some time in London working under the alias “Cas Smith” before tabloids found that he had moved to Stockholm. Under the name Cas Malek-Smith he had been attempting to find media work away from the spotlight. Incredibly, despite details of the scandal and his use of aliases being in the public domain, Smith managed to find himself hired by Sweden’s most popular esports organisation, Ninjas In Pyjamas.

He was hired in early September 2022 after a brief process where he applied to join. During his time with the organisation Smith was set to work as a “Senior Video Producer” and worked on a number of projects. One of these tasks was to work with the then newly acquired women’s CS:GO roster, who he filmed for their announcement video. According to sources who worked with Ninjas In Pyjamas at this time none of the players seemed to be aware of his past.

Although most references to his time within the esports organisation appear to have been edited or taken down, a LinkedIn post from September 2022 made by then Vice President of Creative Studios Marco Cavazzana confirms the hire. “Happy to welcome 3 more ninjas to the dojo” it reads, listing Cas Malek-Smith as one of them, before adding “#GONinjas.” This was also reposted by CEO Hicham Chahine. An archived staff page from the time period also shows that there was a Cas Malek-Smith working at the organisation although it does not include a photograph of him.

In the process of investigating this story we interviewed people from the NiP organisation to confirm that this was the same individual. We shared up to date photographs with individuals he worked with and confirmed his identity with people familiar with the individual. A source speaking on background confirmed that the organisation had no idea who he was until they were tipped off by a previous organisation he had worked for and been similarly removed from.

For this hire to have gone ahead there obviously were a number of failings when it came to background checks and human resources. Given the nature of his conviction for him to have been given camera equipment, tasked with recording people and then set to work with the organisation’s women’s team represents a serious failure of duty of care. That said during the investigation we found no evidence of any conduct lapses from Mr. Smith and didn’t hear any complaints about his activities while working for NiP.

We contacted the organisation for comment and they provided the following statement:

We had a former employee who obtained his job based on a fraudulent CV and using a new identity. NIP was later notified by an external party about the true identity of this person. 14 hours after receiving that notice, the employee was dismissed summarily. We followed up individually with employees and with full transparency regarding the situation. In his 4 months of employment he had limited contact with players and we received no reports of abnormal behaviour.

In terms of PR it’s not been a great couple of weeks for NiP management. They have been publicly criticised for the deal that will take their offices into Abu Dhabi and leaked Slack conversations showed that they removed public posts supporting Ukraine at the behest of Riot China.