Vlogger Elle Darby says she got death threats after asking for free hotel room

A video blogger claims she received "death threats and cancer wishes" after it emerged she asked the owner of a Dublin hotel for free accommodation in exchange for social media posts.

Elle Darby found herself in a public spat with Paul Stenson, owner of the Charleville Lodge Hotel and White Moose Cafe, after he posted her email to him on Facebook. In the email, Darby asked Stenson to stay at the hotel for free over Valentine's Day weekend and proposed a "possible collaboration".

In response, Stenson posted his denial of the request and ripped into the vlogger for asking in the first place. "It takes a lot of balls to send an email like that, if not much self-respect and dignity," he wrote on Facebook.

Stenson later banned all bloggers from his hotel, citing their "sense of entitlement".

Darby was accused of outing herself after posting a video about the issue on YouTube. Stenson does not mention her by name in his Facebook post, but Darby said people still figured out who he was speaking about.

In a video posted Tuesday (23 January), Darby said: "A post was uploaded to Facebook which included a screenshot of my email.

"The parts with my name on had not been blacked out...it had, like a black highlighter over them but - if you turned up the brightness on your screen - you could see my name, my channel, my URL..."

Darby claims she was inundated with a wave of abuse over social media in the following days, prompting her response video this week.

"[That video was] something to clear it up after all of the troll messages I'd been getting..." she said. "I don't think the situation should ever have escalated to what it escaped into...me getting death threats and cancer wishes..."

The vlogger, who has 87,000 YouTube subscribers and 76,000 Instagram followers, said she has turned off comments on her YouTube video and a few of her Instagram posts. She also maintained that she wished to forget about the incident, saying she will not post any additional videos addressing the spat.

Meanwhile, Stenson has used the publicity to sell T-shirts and has continued to share the "bloggergate" hashtag.