The James Charles problem
Saturday, May 11, 2019Popular social media personality James Charles Dickinson found himself losing millions of subscribers after Tati Westbrook exposed his sexual predator behavior to her viewers after he released an ad campaign for Halo's direct competitor Sugar Bear Hair.
Let me add my two cents into this mess.
Regarding Sugar Bear vs Halo:
I do believe one of the reasons why Tati is upset (feels like it's a betrayal) is due to the fact that James was her friend and one with whom she shared the inner workings of her company such as upcoming releases (from her own words) to possibly financial information about sales and profits. By going to work for the competitor (most likely under contract with them now) her business is now at risk for proprietary information being shared with Sugar Bear. This is smackdab reeks of the same nonsense Jaclyn Hill pulled on Marlena Stell of Makeup Geek (MuG).
(For those that don't know that story, quick recap: Marlena and Jaclyn were working on a collab for MuG. The palette was supposed to be in white packaging, foil lettering, her signature on the cover, four candid photo booth-like photos on the back. While working with MuG for over a year on the palette, Jaclyn was working in secret with Morphe Cosmetics and ended up at the last minute dropping the MuG collab because they didn't have a contract despite MuG requesting her to sign it. Jaclyn took the ideas for the MuG palette to Morphe and released the first Jaclyn Hill palette which was identical to what the Jaclyn Hill x MuG palette was supposed to look like.)
I'm sure Tati is worried that James working with Sugar Bear will lead them to have insider knowledge of what's going on over in her company as they are direct rivals to each other.
Regarding the sexual predator allegations:
James audience is primarily underage girls (and boys) who fall between the ages of 11 to 17 yet has consistently over the last few months highly sexualized his social media accounts including discussing what he wanted for Christmas (a sex act) to posting photos of his butt and testicles on Instagram and/or Snapchat. He has been aiming his sexual content to minors while posting on his timeline how he loves straight men. This led to at least two young (straight) men coming forward in recent weeks with allegations against him, which he denied but tried to make it seem they were essentially gold-diggers and/or using him for clout.
Tati essentially confirmed that James was the one who actively pursuing straight men (which he essentially admitted to when attacking a young man in recent weeks on his platform) because he's a celebrity and could do what he wanted to. According to Tati, James essentially stated it didn't matter if a guy was straight, he was a celebrity and could get them. When these young men took him up on his offer to fly them places and pay for trips to be with James, James was expecting sexual favors in return but when rejected flips the script on them and attacked them on social media (at the time his YouTube channel was over 17 million followers and that excludes millions more on Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter).
The problem with James is that he has always exhibited bad behavior from the time he first became a sensation due to a lie about his senior year photos. That lie propelled him to be on Ellen DeGeneres show which further propelled him into the limelight. Next came the Cover Girl deal which he was quickly dropped from after social media posts came to light that painted him as an ignorant racist. He went on the attack towards anyone who would challenge him and used his social media "power" (his followers) to harass, intimidate, and stalk those whom he deemed to be his enemies. Kevin James Bennett was one person attacked, I was to a far lesser degree having been in his crosshairs in 2016 before he became big on social media. Over time, Tati and other people promoted him which continued his rise to fame and fortune. Unfortunately, his bad behavior over time became worse which ultimately led to his downfall but worse is that his audience is impressionable tweens and teens who idolize him and believe this type of behavior is normal or okay when it's not. Hopefully, James will learn an important lesson from this:
1 comments
I remember being 20. I wouldn't listen to anyone and was on a crash course. Thinking I was an adult and invincible, I thought I knew best for myself. I can see that arrogance in JC.
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