https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a44535376/james-charles-interview-2023/
It is the year of our internet 2023, and as surely as the sun rises, an internet celebrity has an apology to make. So here I am, sitting in James Charles’s Encino mansion like a pop culture priest, ready to take his confession.
Let us begin: “I don’t want to sit here and fucking mope and whine and cry, because nobody wants to hear it,” says Charles, sinking into a plush couch in his casual open living room. “I had to do a lot of thinking. Like, Okay, babe, this is your fault. No, you’re not a pedophile. No, you’re not a fucking groomer. No, you’re not a predator. But you made a big mistake.”
At this point, you’re likely familiar with the specific quid pro quo inherent in celebrity profiles like this—the ones that come together post-cancellation, after a respectable amount of time has passed post–cancelable sin. It’s no surprise that a star’s willingness to answer intimate questions about a catastrophic stretch of their lives increases dramatically when they have a project to promote. In today’s case, that’s ostensibly Charles’s new makeup line, Painted*.* But it’s also Charles himself—a warier, acceptably contrite but still just a little extra Charles. This very interview is to be a trial balloon, its reception the answer to the question both of us—and maybe you, too, if what autopopulates in Google Search can be believed—are here to ask: “Is James Charles still canceled?”
After all, would a still-ousted person be allowed to pose for red carpet cameras at the People’s Choice Awards or chat amiably with paparazzi while out and about in Hollywood? Would a still-banished person have hundreds of thousands of fans enthusiastically engage with his YouTube beauty tutorials? Would a truly exiled person be 24 years old and living in a reportedly $7 million farmhouse that looks like a cross between the homes featured in the later seasons of Vanderpump Rules and any season of all iterations of The Kardashians? (You know: black-and-white modern exteriors, hyperorganized interiors. When I arrived, I noticed Oreos decanted into glass jars on a pristine marble kitchen island, a display technique first popularized by Khloé Kardashian back when Charles was still in high school. Charles’s two dogs, also black and white, were playing nearby.)
There’s a lot riding on the answer. Painted—a solo venture four years in the making—launches in just a few weeks. “People have speculated that I have partners or investors, which I don’t know how that rumor got started,” Charles says. “This line is fully self-funded. Every single dollar that has gone into the brand has been from my personal savings and checking accounts. I have no investors, no partners, no billion-dollar backers behind me.”
When I polled friends and colleagues about Charles in the run-up to this day, the general consensus was that he had done something bad, but no one was clear on exactly what.
That neither of us knows how it will go is due to the murky nature of cancel culture and its crisscrossing trip wires of implied and loosely enforced rules. And because of a hungry and fickle internet that doles out forgiveness (or maybe just forgetfulness) seemingly at whim. It’s a landscape—hellscape, some would say—in which all comebacks are tentative and where the conversation around an offense often ends up obscuring the offense itself. When I polled friends and colleagues about Charles in the run-up to this day, the general consensus was that he had done something bad, but no one was clear on exactly what.
As a Very Online millennial, I had long been ambiently aware of Charles while also knowing next to nothing about him—the influencer’s platonic ideal. Bored at home during the pandemic, I watched the Dramageddon “feud” he had with another YouTuber whose name I can never remember, a hilariously non-scandal scandal that possibly had something to do with hair vitamins? Anecdotally, it seems like everyone in my life under the age of 25 considers Charles an internet celebrity, and no one over 45 has ever heard of him (unless they have kids). Those in the former group know that he’s been famous since his teen years, although his storylines, so to speak, are all self-produced.
Charles first went viral in 2016 after he brought in a ring light and used glossy highlighter to accentuate his cheekbones for his high school yearbook photo. Suddenly, he was everywhere—the first male spokesperson for CoverGirl, a guest on Ellen. He did a commercial with Katy Perry, filmed with the Kardashians, and hosted a YouTube reality competition show aptly titled Instant Influencer. The combination of his fresh-faced, youthful earnestness and bold, maximalist aesthetic made him one of the most financially successful beauty YouTubers of all time, with a rumored annual income of more than $10 million in 2020. At one point, he was so popular that a reported 30-second appearance he made at a British mall drew thousands of teenagers, helping create a traffic gridlock so extreme that some drivers apparently abandoned their cars overnight.
In a corner of the internet known for constant sniping, backstabbing, and hopelessly convoluted rivalries, the same lack of guile and perma-logged-on status that drew viewers to Charles also made him a magnet for drama. There he was, posting regular apologies for things like insensitive tweets about Africa and Ebola or for asking Shawn Mendes to “juggle me like that” during an IG livestream in which Shawn (literally) juggled. Charles developed a reputation for a kind of over-the-top thirstiness, a quality that could be interpreted as refreshingly candid or slightly cringe, depending on who you asked. (At least one rival, it should be said, interpreted it differently—his Dramageddon opponent initially accused Charles of using his fame to “manipulate” straight men. True to influencer form, she retracted the claim and apologized a year later.) Yet all the drama seemed to ultimately earn him one thing: more followers. At his peak, Charles had nearly 26 million YouTube subscribers, on top of tens of millions more on TikTok and Instagram.
That was all before though.
In February 2021, at age 21, Charles confronted a career crisis he couldn’t quickly apologize for or capitalize on. He was publicly accused of sending lewd photographs and inappropriate sexual messages to a then-16-year-old fan. Charles says he was misled into believing the boy was 18 and that he blocked him as soon as he learned the truth. “I’ve never been more disgusted in my life than when I found out that that kid was 16 years old,” Charles says now. “I was mortified, absolutely mortified.” (The fan did not return Cosmopolitan’s request for comment.)
The allegation triggered more complaints against Charles. They were primarily disseminated in the form of TikToks filled with screenshots of flirtatious conversations Charles had allegedly conducted with a number of male fans. A few of the reported accusations, like the initial one, were serious and claimed to detail inappropriate online interactions between Charles and minors. Other claims, including an incident in which Charles allegedly called someone “Daddy,” felt muddier. Almost all of them were eventually rounded up into viral Twitter threads by a controversial poster who keeps track of internet scandals, now under fire himself (yes, even the chronicling of this saga has been surreal and convoluted and Cosmopolitan could not independently verify these messages, many of which have since been deleted).
In the end, substantiated or not, multiple media reports indicated that at least 15 boys and men had accused Charles of inappropriate behavior. Charles says now about the breadth of the allegations, “The source of where the list came from was not doing any sort of research, no fact-checking.” Some of the screenshots depicted consensual conversations between adults, he says; others were “completely fake” and “never even happened.” Charles has never been legally charged with engaging inappropriately with a minor, let alone proven to have knowingly done so. Nevertheless, that April, Charles uploaded a 14-minute YouTube video titled “Holding Myself Accountable,” where he admitted to inadvertently exchanging messages with two 16-year-old boys he said he was led to believe were 18, and he apologized for his “desperate” behavior.
Cosmopolitan reached out to multiple people who said they were minors at the time of their exchanges with Charles. One asked if we would be willing to pay and did not reply again when told our publication does not compensate sources for interviews. But another former accuser wrote back via Instagram DM with a new revelation: He had, he said, already privately apologized to Charles a few months ago for “telling him I was 18 a few years ago & the TikTok I made that blew the situation up.” (When asked to elaborate, the person did not reply. Charles’s team says someone did message Charles this spring admitting he lied about his age.)
If a celebrity with tens of millions of followers came sliding into your DMs, would you respond? I probably would. Charles says he recognizes the power imbalance at play in his interactions online. He should have verified everyone’s ages, he says, and been more sensitive to how his fame could color the way others responded to him.