James Charles is Finally Cancelled
Last week, worldwide internet sensation James Charles admitted to sending explicit photos, harassing straight men, and explicitly messaging boys as young as 16. Almost 3 years after the instances supposedly took place, the 21-year-old came forward to discuss the many allegations that have been piling upon his name. Before we discuss the blunt apology video that was released on April 1, 2021, let’s start from the beginning when the allegations first started happening. Get ready because this is a lot.
In April of 2019 James’ date to Coachella Gage Gomez came forward to discuss manipulative behavior James’ manipulative behavior. He explained in his Youtube video “What really happened between me and James” (which has now been deleted) that James guilt-tripped him many times into doing things that made him extremely uncomfortable. Fans did not agree with James’ actions, but they let it slide. Little did they know this was only the beginning of Charles’s harassment allegations. The next person to step forward was Tati Westbrooke. In her hit video “BYE SISTER,” which was deleted but has since been re-uploaded by other channels, she thoroughly exposed Charles on behalf of acting inappropriately around straight men. To back up Tati, accusers flooded Twitter exposing Charles’ behavior with many images of his verified Tinder account. The images showed that in the gender section of the profile James was listed as a female causing many to theorize that Charles was attempting to show up on straight men’s swipe list.
Another incident that resurfaced was when the internet star attempted to flirt with singer Shawn Mendes while he was live on Instagram. In the live, Mendes was juggling circus balls and James inappropriately commented “Can you juggle me like that?” Though Mendes didn’t think much of the comment, some media and fans were truly taken aback by the comment.
Charles is known for featuring celebrity guests in his videos, making the content lighthearted and fun, but one video featuring Jeff Wittek caused a huge amount of controversy in the internet community. The video was titled “THE TRUTH... My Crush Does My Makeup.” In the video, Charles made many uncomfortable sexual remarks towards Wittek, even though in the video Wittek clearly stated that he is a straight man. James also uploaded a video with internet companion Nikita Dragun where they both confessed to “having a thing” for straight men. That video confirmed the many theories that Charles is fishing for straight men.
That was a lot. To put things into perspective, everything that was already listed all happened within the same month. Yikes. But Charles’ allegations kept flooding in. In February 2020, a 16-year-old by the name of Isaiyah came forward on social media platform TikTok with evidence of Charles’s inappropriate behavior towards him. In the TikTok, Isaiyah shared that he used to be a huge fan of Charles until his actions made him feel uncomfortable. Isaiyah exposed inappropriate chats and photos Charles’ shared with the 16-year-old. The photos show that Charles was encouraging Isaiyah to partake in the inappropriate behavior even after Isaiyah refused.
After these many allegations, siding with James was no longer an option. Truly disgusted fans fled to Twitter to discuss the mess that Charles’ tried to cover up. Thousands of tweets appeared all over bashing James for his unacceptable behavior. One former fan tweeted, “I used to support him but idk this has happened one too many times.” Ironically, after the allegations, Charles won an award at the “Kids’ Choice Awards” hosted by Nickelodeon. Of course, this only made matters worse. Internet celebrities such as Ethan Klein spoke out about the award; “Congratulations to James Charles on his Kids’ Choice Award! It’s great because kids have always been his choice too!”.
Finally, he had enough. On April 1st, James came forward. In his video titled “holding myself accountable,” he finally admitted that what he did was wrong. In the beginning of the video, Charles said he is no longer coming forward with “receipts” in an attempt to debunk the allegations because he knows what he did was unacceptable. “I need to take accountability for my actions, and most importantly, apologize to the people who were affected by them.” He didn’t go into much detail about the allegations, but he did claim that the reasons for his actions were because he was desperate. Sadly for James, no one fell for his naive excuse, and, in fact, the excuse made his now ex-fans angrier. “Desperation is not an excuse” Many quickly commented that desperation is no excuse for this behavior. Some comments even suggested that Charles should be incarcerated and that the magnitude of the issue is much bigger than an apology video. Towards the end of the video, James told the camera that he would be taking a break to reflect on his actions. He ended the video with a “See you soon.” A week later the video currently sits at 7.4 million views with a comment section with over 100k comments filled with disgust. For once, no one is helping James or siding with him which makes it safe to say, James Charles is finally canceled.