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 that definitely isn't overpriced. Today's video is sponsored by care/of. You guys, I'm so excited that care/of decided to partner with me again because I genuinely love my vitamin packs. Like, care/of has truly made remembering to take your vitamins and incorporating them into your wellness routines so convenient. And all I had to do to get the vitamins that were right for me, was take this little online quiz and it basically asks you questions about your lifestyle, and about your health goals. Then boom. care/of sends you doctor back recommendations right to your door in compostable packets. So! When I took my quiz, I said that I was concerned about my skin health, my eye health, and also that I wanted to improve my focus. And they ended up recommending me Astaxanthin, that's good for your eye and skin health. Then I got some Ceramides which is of course also good for your skin health. I got some Rhodiola which is for stress and focus. And honestly I could really rave all day about all of these, because since I've started taking these, I'm hooked and I've never been more satisfied with my skin, my hair, and my focus. Like, I feel like I'm genuinely getting good results. Care/of also has these wonderful powders that I love. I love their Collagen, seriously. I have tried other collagens and I hated them. They wouldn't dissolve in my coffee. They had a weird taste. And like they would just change the consistency of the coffee itself, like it was horrible. This is very important to me, like you guys don't even get it. So if you want to be super stoked, have some personalized vitamins that are researched-backed and reap all their benefits, click here to take the quiz and use my code NIKKIC for 50% off subscription items in your first order. Thank you so much Care/Of for sponsoring 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 in and like that world intermixing out of respect. And so, with that in mind, we need to talk a little bit more about the elephant in the room with bi-sister and that is that Tati spent the majority of video talking about her beef with James, with the vitamins, but then in the end claims that she making this video because of the sexual allegations. Including , but not limited to sexual harrassment of the waiter at the restaurant, also just have to mention it. I don't know if you noticed this but the Jeffree's Star Lipsticks but the pudding in the background of this video. Oh My God! Move over classic literature writers. That is the best foreshadowing I've ever seen. Regardless, the immediate public response to bi-sister was categorismic. The video quickly accumulated 30 million views and a trend sparked within the hour burning or destroying your James' murphy palace. There are many of these compilations. This one alone is 10 minutes straight of people just destroying their James' murphy palatte. James Charles' over party was tranding on Twitter. My personal memory of this is going on Snapchat and seeing on one of my friend's stories that there was a line out the door at my local other girls were just returning the James' palette. I really, really wish I could have found footage of that because it contributes to a bigger picture here and that is, I think, everybody had a little bit of mass hysteria with this because I have just never seen people react in the way people have reacted to bi-sister. Like people have done other alleged things that are of equivalent or worse and we have not seen something like this happen. Anyways, within all this havoc, later that night James post an apology video simply titled "Tati". This is a nine minute video but I am willing to bet the actual amount of talking in it is more so around like four because within it, James is very clearly jetlagged and tired like he's whispering. He's talking really slow.