James Charles, a name so chilling
that it requires a trigger warning.
Trigger warning: James Charles.
You can say a lot of things about James Charles.
Most of them are bad.
Like, really bad.
But objectively, he is one of the most well-known
influencers from the last 10 years.
And because of how much exposure
and business success he saw over the years,
James Charles is truly somebody who could have had it all
if only he wasn't a piece of shit.
If you're watching this video, odds are you've heard of James,
or you've at least heard of his infamy.
You may have had the petrifying experience
of seeing his BBL or hearing him say
"Hi sisters!"
This guy's digital footprint has some of the funniest
and grossest shit I have ever seen.
Because as we'll get into, he is a massive creepo, freako,
womp womp.
It is quite a tale.
So allow me to take you on an Unhinged James Charles Deepdive.
James Charles (or James Charles Dickinson)
was born on May 23rd, 1999 in Bethlehem, New York.
And he is Emily Dickinson's third cousin twice removed -
ignore that, it was a lie, I just lied.
In 2010, at the age of 11, he started his
very first YouTube channel called JaysCoding.
This channel mostly consisted of him covering songs like
"Pumped Up Kicks".
♫ "You better run, better run faster than my bullet." ♫
"Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood.
♫ "Carved my name into his leather seats." ♫
But most notably, this "It Will Rain" cover
where he's wearing this wolf hat.
♫ "- morphine at my door." ♫
And although these childhood videos are wholesome,
this would be the start of a very troubling
pattern of him singing unprompted.
Although my personal favorite video that I found on JaysCoding
was this six-second upload of just a image of an eye.
Like, bro really uploaded an image to YouTube,
and that is so of the time.
But in 2015, he would launch his second and main channel
that we know today as James Charles.
And this is where he started uploading makeup tutorials, such as
serpent makeup tutorial and Snapchat Galaxy makeup tutorial.
And as you can see, none of these look particularly good.
In fact, they're pretty bad, but I assure you
everyone's makeup looked really bad in 2015,
so that really means nothing I guess.
But he was gaining a really decent audience from posting these tutorials.
But the inciting incident, the catalyst that would launch
James Charles' career, happened in September of 2016.
And this moment would have irreversible repercussions on society and the Internet.
James was 17 years old at this point,
and he had just taken his senior photos,
which came out fugly according to him.
And so he hired the school photographer to come back
and let him retake the pictures with his ring light.
And as you can see here, his highlight is definitely going off,
his brows have a good Roblox look to them.
However, where I draw the line is that man bun.
What the f**k?
Anyways, his friend convinces him to post these
new glamorous pictures online and they go extremely viral.
Like, this picture of James was being shared
so much that CoverGirl noticed it.
And that is how he became the world's first male CoverGirl.
Now because this was 2016, it stirred controversy amongst conservatives.
And, you know, of course it did
because it's CoverGirl, not "CoverDong".
Seriously, though, I found this old Twitter thread
where people are just bitching about this like there's no tomorrow.
A great example is this one:
reads tweet.
There's also this one where a woman compares
James being on CoverGirl to a white person doing blackface.
Um... Nurse, she's out again!
Anyways, outisde of these randos making a stink out of it,
this opened up a lot of opportunities
for James.
I mean, he went on Ellen, I guess that's not that impressive, though.
As I mentioned in the Jojo Siwa video, you could literally fart into a bucket
and somehow make it on Ellen at this point in time.
And as his fame was escalating,
he did his first-ever fan meet.
Only 50 people showed up to this event,
and one of the videos that was taken there
was turned into a meme because at
some point James just sat down on the ground and started singing.
♫ Bring me a little water now! Bring me little water, Sylvie!♫
I don't know what my favorite part about this meme is. It might be
the Snapchat caption that says "f**k it up"
which insinuates that he's doing a good job singing right now.
Or it could be the fact that he raises
his finger up as if he's hitting those high notes.
This was, of course, the very first time
that he was turned into a meme,
but it's certainly would not be the last.
This same year, James did a CoverGirl promotion with Zendaya,
and oh my God, this has gotta be
one of the most unintentionally funny videos I've ever seen.
So this video that they're doing is a challenge to see what makeup
looks they could come up with in the span of 5 minutes.
And so they're both in a rush and trying to showcase these CoverGirl
products along the way.
And about 30 seconds in, James gets befuddled and just starts
copying Zendaya and then acts like
everything he's doing was his idea.
- "I used it on my inner corner." - "Same."
(Huh??)
- "I used this as a base for the blue." - "Yeah, same."
And not only this, the end result is so bad,
she absolutely ate him up, I can't believe this video exists.
These two people should not exist in the same universe.
James would soon also start doing collabs
with massive YouTubers like Tana Mongeau, Joey Graceffa, and even
non-YouTubers like Maddie Ziegler.
However, he would soon find himself in his
very first controversy, and that is the "Ebola" tweet.
On Febuary 16, 2017, James writes:
reads tweet.
So obviously this is very out of touch
and just kind of assumes that Africa is like a diseased-riddled area,
and so people were not happy about this.
And so the very same day he did his first public apology ever.
He wrote:
reads tweet.
And people definitely still thought James was racist for, like, a good month
after this.
But the discourse got completely overshadowed by the events of
March 5th, 2017, which was the birth of Flashback Mary.
So what happened was that James was at an event
and he had WAY too much powder on his face,
and so when they took this picture of him, it caused a flashback that gave him this,
like, ghostly, ghoulish, sinister SCP look to him.
And the internet was immediately obsessed with this.
Like, this is definitely one of the biggest memes that has hit the Internet.
Ask anyone, ask your grandma, ask your local pastor, they know Flashback Mary.
The main comparison that was being made to James was of this spider from-
what is this show called?
It's called Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends.
Like, I can't express to you how many times I've seen this image against my will,
I wish I could permaban it from my brain.
Something a little disappointing about this meme, though, is that the
widespread image of Flashback Mary is not the real one.
This is the real one, and I will say, the flashback is still really bad,
but whoever edited this picture just made it 70 times worse.
An interesting artifact of the time that I found was this Redbubble page
that just exclusively sells Flashback Mary furniture, such as clocks and pillows.
I really don't understand Redbubble, people will just sell
tych-fck-ehchk-ANYTHING there.
Anyways, though, speaking of James Charles' foundation, he does not
know how to match that shit.
Like, there's entire compilations of him doing just that.
And in this video specifically, he describes himself as having
warm undertones.
"GASP. That looks like it could be such a good match for me,
everyone is convinced that my skintone is, like, not warm."
Girl, you are PINK! You are PINK!
I think the funniest part about all of this, though, is that he
literally has a YouTube video trying, like, 40 different foundation shades, and
in the end he still chooses the wrong one.
Side note, though, another James Charles-ism is that he chronically misuses
Facetune, especially in this era.
And to be fair, he's never hid that he uses Facetune, but it just looks so bad
that I don't understand why he continues to do it. Like, when I see these pictures,
I get uncanny valley, Russian Sleep Experiment, creepypasta vibes.
Moving on, though, we have the "It" debacle of 2017.
Now, the It debacle began on September 7th when James tweeted about
how he was gonna go see It, and how excited he was about it.
But literally five minutes into the movie, he started tweeting about how bad
it was, which, of course, is just nutty
because how have you already decided that
you don't like the movie, and it's only been five minutes?
And, like, why are you even on your phone?
About thirty minutes later, James tweets again,
and this time, he says:
reading tweet.
Both of these tweets annoyed people for obvious reasons.
Like, he's just been texting the entire movie.
It doesn't even sound like he's been watching it to know if it's bad!
And so in response to all the people questioning why he's doing this,
he writes:
reads tweet.
But then,
Finn Wolfhard replies to one of these tweets and says:
reads tweet
Granted, at this time, I think Finn was 12 or 13 maybe.
And so James tweets:
reads tweet.
Which sounds like he's accepting the end of this.
Like, this should be the end of the conversation.
But instead, he starts backtracking times 3,000, and he says:
reads tweet.
For the next few hours, people on Twitter would not leave him alone
about why he was texting in the movie theater.
And so he eventually says:
reads tweet.
And this dug his grave in even more.
Because people were like, "What do you mean 'everyone does it,'
like, everyone does not do that!"
Personally, as an AMC Stubs member, this pains me.
Follow me on Letterboxd so I can feel important.
But this caused people to start doing polls about whether or not people
actually texted people during movies.
And the results were, of course, overwhelmingly NO.
No they do not!
And again, this should've been the end of the conversation, but he just keeps
acknowledging it, and he ends up filming an apology video in the backseat
of an Uber.
(James talking:) "I want to personally apologize to Finn and anybody else
involved in the making of the movie It."
And regardless of all of this, a couple days later, he ended up doing an
It makeup tutorial.
(James doing a Pennywise voice:) "Hiya, sisters! James Charles
here, and welcome back to my YouTube channel!"
Which, by the way, the first six seconds of this video
changed my life for the worse, so I'm gonna make you see this too.
(dubstep, intense music)
(scream sound effect)
In 2018, the "Sister Squad formed
And this was basically just of long
squad of these four best friends that
consisted of... I mentioned Ethan Dolan,
Grayson Dolan, and of course
James himself. Now Eathan Dolan / Grayson
had a huge Youtube channel that they
have been making videos on since 2014
And James ended up meeting them in late
2017 after he left he left a bunch of very
Questionably, thirsty Tweets on both of
Their Instagrams. These includes comments
Such as "Run me over with that
Motorcycle, daddy". "Choke me with that
Seatbelt, daddy".
And last but not least, " Hit me with that
Stick, daddy".
On June 9, 2018, the first ever "Sister
Squad" video was posted and this
Had a cultural impact like no other
Squad at the time. I don't care what
Anyone says. This is the truth.
The "Sister Squad" was such an
Immediate success and all their videos
Were pretty much just them hanging out.
Each one of the "Sister Squad" videos got
Around 30 million views a piece.
And so, they say that people were
invested.
In this friend's group dynamic
'It would be an understatement.
The most notable dynamics was that of.
Emma and Grayson because it was heavily
theorized that they secretly dating while
fans were constantly speculating them.,
making entire compilations of their
interactions. And secondly was the
dynamic between James and Grayson.
It was pretty much an open secret that
James had a crush on Grayson and there's
entire compilations of him unsuccessfully
flirting with him. And there's
definitely some of the incidents were
preplanned as a joke, but there's
also many that were pretty much very raw.
Very real like you can feel the rejection
in the air like groaning
this is very important to remember when
we get to bisister, so just keep this is
in mind that this group being able to
make millions and millions of views per
video and despite the way they seem so
close in these videos. These two things
have appeared to cause some turmoil
because by February 4th, 2019, Emma
unfollowed all of them and to be fair,
she did unfollow everyone but like six
people and posted on her story that she
had done that for a social media purge.
But to be honest, it doesn't really make
sense because if you are doing a social
media purge I think you still follow your
closest friends and just not anyone else.
So it kinda seemed like a convenient, uh,
excuse. And James Charles's response to
this was this tweet, "I posted a beautiful
makeup look today but you wouldn't know"
In November of 2018, James released his
first ever makeup pallet. And this, of
course, was James X Morphe. Now, let me
tell you, this pallet was extremely
popular at the time. Everyone that I
knew had this, I had this, and it was just
generally really well recieved. So this
new level of entrepreneurship really
brought him up a threshold of passionate
passionate fans. Like he did an appearance
at a Morphe store in Birmingham and
8,000 people showed up to the mall to see
him and it literally caused gridlock
outside of the store, like people were
trapped in their cars. That is how
popular he was at the time. However, it
wouldn't be long until James found himself
in another controversy. Also, oh my god, I
almost forgot to mention that he was
singing unprompted in front of this Morphe
as well.
singing
The 2019 Sisters Tour. So James was doing
a tour across the country and the most
expensive ticket that you could buy to see
him was $500. Which, a lot of people
were quick to call a scam. And he received
a ton of backlash for this. Personally, I
don't think this was a scam because you
were going to get what you paid for. Like,
it says right here what's included with
this. It says, "Exclusive hangout with
James Charles and the other Sister VIPS.
One on one photo with James Charles.
Exclusive Sisters VIP goodie bag. And
exclusive autograph tour laminate. Front
row seats and early access to merchandise
vendors". Okay, that last one is crazy.
Like, if your spending $500, I think you
should get some free merch. In no way do I
feel like this is worth $500 and like, in
my perspective, I would feel like an
asshole to hide a meet and greet with me
behind a $500 paywall. However, if you
really wanted to have all that stuff and
spend $500, that is your business. James
did say that he would try to talk to his
team about lowering the prices, but they
did remain the same. And in case your
wondering what the luxury VIP James
Charles experience was like, there's a
video on YouTube titled, "I PAID $500
TO SING WITH JAMES CHARLES" and it's him
surrounded by a huge group of girls
singing Listen by Beyonce very poorly.
singing
A genuine perk I see for anyone who went
on this tour though, was that they got to
witness the New Rules kick. In real time.
video plays
This became a meme just purely out of
being the perfect storm. People just found
out that some tickets to the tour cost
$500 and then they see this. Poor
singing and poor dancing. And that third
miscellaneous kick, muah.
Let's take a break to talk about something
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us today. And now, back to the video.
Welcome back! Now we're entering the calm
before the storm and what I mean by that
is that we are on the cusp of dramageddon
This is literally April 2019 and no one
had a single clue that the biggest drama
of the internet would ever see what about
to occur. Now, let me introduce to the
central characters of the dramageddon.
Ok, so here we have Tati Westbrook. She
was a beauty guru as well as James'
mentor and close friend. He even referred
to her as a mother figure. As you can see
here, this is James doing Tati's wedding
makeup like that's how like this was how
close they were and prior to these
coming events, Tati had started her own
supplement company in 2018 called Halo
Beauty, and they basically sold like hair
vitamins and skin vitamins, hoopla hoopla.
Enter Jeffree Star. If you don't know who
Jeffree Star is, he's probably in the top
10 worst people on the internet and to
fully explain why that is that would
require like a whole three hour video.
inaudible
he has a very successful makeup company
called "Jeffree Star Cosmetics" and his
channel at this time was massive in the
beauty community. However, not
as massive as James' and side note,
in 2024 he lives on a farm and sells yak
meat. So, there's that. Our last big
dramageddon figure is Shane Dodsen.
Shane is probably also on that top 10 list
of worse people online. Come to think of
it, James is too, but we will cross that
bridge when we get there. What is
important to know now though, is that in
landscape of 2019 YouTube, for some reason
Jane Dodsen, like a respected
documentarian, and he has just done a
documentary series about Jeffree Star.
Looking back on it, these videos were not
good and 60% of them were just like
filler but each and every one of them got
around 30 million views. With that it
mind, this brings us to Coachella 2019.
This is where is all kicks off dude.
During this time, James was "seeing" an
influencer named Gage Gomez. "Seeing" it
in air quotes because it was less of an
actual relationship and more of actual
like bicurious experimental time on Gage's
end, but they were photographed at this
Coachella multiple times, which made fans
start to speculate that James had a
boyfriend. And so, a lot of people began
to tweet James about this and he actually
responded to one of these tweets saying
something along the lines of "No. I'm
sadly still single. I was manipulated by
a conman." I looked everywhere for this
tweet and read it and writing down
every thing it said at this point but
can't find it anymore. So, sources that
trust me. James just subtweeted
that Gage, several times over the
Coachella weekend, including this one
which says, "I'm sitting sobbing in my
hotel room at 8 am and have to be on set
in an hour. This is no one's fault but
my own because my dumbass continues to
go for the same type of insecure cute
boys and it gets me hurt, every single
time. I was started fucking to hate
myself". Tensions are rising. Things are
bubbling up, ok. And the next day of the
festival, James ended up getting mobbed
by fans because for some reason he didn't
have like a VIP ticket which would have
let him in like exclusive spaces to not
be around so many fans. And so, all these
people are running up on him right. He is
like, holy shit, what do I do? And this
led him to text his friend and fellow
beauty guru, Nikita Dragon. And he asked
her for help about the sicky situation.
And so, she connects him to the Sugarbear
Hair Team, because they're had their
own VIP tent space, and they were going
to let James in and in exchange for him
doing just one Sugarbear Hair
ad on his Instagram story and so,
with no other choice, he signs the
contract and gets in that tent. But let
it be known that Sugarbear Hair was a
very popular was a very popular vitamin
brand as in Beauty Vitamins, as in for
your skin and face. A.K.A. a direct
competitor to Tati Westbrook's
brand "Halo Beauty" Dramageddon arrived!
Her story in the making. On April 22,
James posted his contraction obligated ad
on Instagram. Notably, as you can see
here, he's actually promoting their sleep
gummies, not their skin or hair ones. But
he does this and then he gets on a plane
to Australia. For what I am about to say
next, at this point in time Tati
Westbrook is 37 years old and James was
only 19. By the time James landed in
Australia, Tati had already posted
multiple stories of her crying and
saying she feels so betrayed by a close
friend and she had been taken advantage
by somebody she thought she can trust and
she helped so much and it was very
obvious, like that she was talking about
James. Like he literally just posted that
Sugarbear Hair ad so, people added two
plus two together so unbeknownst to James,
thousands and thousands of people had
begun adding him on Twitter, messaging
him on Instagram. People he knew were
sending him messages being like what's
going on with you and Tati. And so, he
gets off the plane, right. He sees this.
He tries to call Tati. He tries to text
her. He tries to call her husband.
Neither of them answers but Tati just
continues to post on Instagram. So, he
decides to just make a public
apology post. So the apology read," I want
to publicly apologize to my close friend
Tati. She has been like a mother to me
since before my first days in this
industry and has given me more love so
important resources and advice that I
could ever ask for. This weekend I did an
Instagram story for sleep vitamins that
I have been taking because the brand helps
me with security when the crowd around me
at Coachella became unsafe. I did not
accept any money for the post. As most
of you know, Tati has a vitamin brand
which I take on a daily basis but at the
moment, I did not think about the
competition, which was a major oversight.
I've supported Tati both online and off
like she has done for me and I am
devastated that I hurt somebody that I
truly love and have endless respect for".
I think the mature thing for 37-year-old
Tati to do after seeing this would be to
just talk to him, but instead she just
continued ignoring him and posting and
posting about this situation and crying
online. And so, a few days later on May 4,
2019, Gabriel Zamora, another beauty guru,
posted this video titled "Makeup and
Opinions". And during this video, he
indirectly talks about the drama going on
between Tati and James, saying that it's
stupid that basically, Tati keeps like
sub tweeting about him but won't
actually say what's going on or just talk
to him and he's honestly so right, like
this 37-year-old woman just implying that
her 19-year-old colleague has done
something awful for days on end but then
refuses to say anything about it
to divulge more information and so
Gabriel concludes this segment of the
video by saying "Girl, go sit on the
internet and talk about it then". And
those words would unknowingly be the
final straw, the final catalyst for the
video that we all know today as the
"Bi sister". "Bi sister" is one of the
most iconic YouTube videos of all time.
Seriously, the cultural impact of this
cannot be minimized. Cannot be silenced.
I still remember where I was when "Bi
Sister" happened. It was a cold, windy
day. On May 10th, 2019, when Tati decided
that she needed to spill the tea "on
James' Charles". This video is insane
from start gulp to finished. It begins
Gabriel Zamora's famous last words, "Girl,
go talk about it on the internet then".
"If you are going to go on the internet
and cry, heavily implied that there is
a horrible human being and everybody can
get what it is. Girl, sit on it and talk
about it then".
Imagine being the person that made this
happened. But there were three major
claims that Tati makes in this video
against James Charles and let's just
tackle them bullet point by bullet point.
First and foremost, she claims that James
purposefully sabotaged her vitamin gummy
business by reorchestrating the Sugarbear
contract. Two, by James' obnoxious and
talks about and bawls.
Three, and the most serious one, is that
he tries to manipulate straight men. But
let's start off with the vitamins. Tati
lists multiple ways in which she
supported James over the years by pouring
over contracts for him, setting up his
Google accent by him even after he tweeted
about Ebola. But despite all this stuff
that she's given him, she claims James
gave her no warning before he posted his
Sugarbear Hair ad, and also that he
actually made the whole Coachella security
thing up like he wasn't getting bombarded
by fans or anything. He just already
planned to do the Sugarbear Hair ad. Her
reasoning is that there is no way that a
company would ever just go out of their
way to give you a contract just like that.
And so, he has to be like and even if
there was a security problem.
Even if he was getting rushed by fans, he
should of simply walked away.
You should have walked away. You should
have held on to your integrity.
You're phony. I know that now.
These are all really interesting things
to say because at the high of James' fame,
I would think that a lot of companies
might want to leap at the opportunity to
work with him. I also kind of love it when.
I am kind of gagged by the way that she
just says "walk away from people mobbing
you."
A lot of people are like were like what
is he supposed to do. It's dangerous.
Like leave. Go home.
Why are you drowning? Just breathe.
Why are you getting cyberbullying?
Walk away from the computer. She goes on
to blame him for potentially losing
thousands and thousands of dollars due
to his Instagram ad. Because nobody is
going to buy two different brands of hair
gummies.
It's not a palette. It's not something
that people buy multiples of.
Then she then contradicts herself by
saying that she doesn't needs ads. She
doesn't want ads and her product is
selling like hotcakes
We're selling like hotcakes. Like I don't
need to at this point. It seems like I
am going on about this first bullet point
for a while. It's because the majority of
the video is actually about the gummy
vitamins. She claims that James said
he couldn't advertise for halo beauty on
his channel because he had too many young
fans watching and he didn't want to like
market them supplements and then so, she's
like "But here you are on your Instagram
story, selling sleep pills to kids which
is whoa That's reached. Mam, these are
melatonin gummies.
Moving on to the fucking balls and
straight allegation section.
Unfortunately, those two things are
interlinked in this video. So that's why
roping them together. That is why I'm not
taking the last one seriously. It's that
Tati has... Tati has done this to me.
Tati claims that James tried to manipulate
a waiter at her birthday dinner into
thinking he was guy. She also claims that
he was saying very loudly explicit things
that he wanted to do to him.
But what was most shocking to her was the
fact that he was willing to talk about
all this in front of her family and his
dumb parents which is why we get the
iconic sucking c*** line.
Sucking and dick and cock. Like
there is a time and you did it at my
birthday dinner.
She claims she told James to leave the
waiter alone and that he was straight.
And in response he said it doesn't
matter. I'm famous. She concludes the
video with talking about some other
vague instances of James trying to
manipulate straight men and James said
the only reason why she's posting this
is because it's a last ditch effort to get
through to him so that he will stop
trying to manipulate and seduce these
straight men. Okay, let me just do a
quick claimer here. I'm going to be
treating the bi-sister allegations as
their own separate thing. Not really
trying to connect them to further
allegations because I feel like that will
get very crazy and twisted and that is
not what I want because a lot of
bisister, as you will see, gets debunked.
Were as in the future. there are actual
victims that James like has deceits