Lotus Zazu: "I don't think ESL have been acting in good faith at all"

Lotus has gone through obstacles between the most recent season of Impact League and now.

Samantha "Zazu" Blair spoke with Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore about the team's rebuild, their journey at Frag, and the controversy surrounding ESL's changes to the ESL Impact League's verification rules.

The full interview can be found below on YouTube, with key snippets underneath.

There has been much reporting from me and much discussion from you about the fact that the team ultimately missed out being able to compete due to a variety of logistical mess-ups from ESL and what we can describe as a confusing and almost Kafka-esque process of gender verification. How does the team feel about how they were treated by ESL in this situation?

We feel extremely shafted. We put in so much effort, we played all these Cash Cups, for four months straight we practiced almost every single day for about four or five hours a day. As soon as we got the message from ESL about the verification changing I was like, "Hey team, the verification is changing. Start getting these papers now so that I can send them to ESL." Not having that come to fruition is really tough for us.

Do you think ESL has acted in good faith with how they've been handling the ESL Impact League in 2025?

Absolutely not, I think they're trying to make it more difficult for trans women to play Counter-Strike due to a few bad actors in our community that ultimately don't reflect the community of us trans players. All of the trans players I know play legit, they have their papers, they have everything in order so making it extremely difficult or almost impossible in our case to get these papers in is just screwed up. It screwed us over, it screwed over MEGA JUNERS. I don't think they've been acting in good faith at all.

You said there were bad actors, what exactly drove ESL to make these changes?

I won't name names but there were a couple Cash Cups in which players did not have certain requirements, they ended up playing and they ended up getting found out and disqualified. I think that is what led ESL to be like, "We got to lock down on this." I understand that ESL feels the need to lock down on that but the way in which they're doing so is really unfortunate to the people that try their hardest and are legit. To eliminate all the bad actors but also some good actors is very upsetting.

These bad actors, what do you think motivated them to behave in the way they did. Did they just not care about verifying? We've often heard these conspiracy theories about men pretending to be transgender to try and steal money from the ESL Impact League.

I have no idea who they are, but the individuals in question had white supremacist stuff in their steams and that led me to believe that they are just here to make a quick buck.