When I think of public relations, specifically crises in public relations, my mind often immediately goes to celebrities. I am an avid fan of all things pop culture, so I tend to gravitate towards things of that nature and aspect when thinking about media or public relations. When I read over the prompt and instructions for this paper, I knew right off the bat that I wanted to focus on a celebrity and their reactions to negative press and how they handled it. Over the years, there have been plenty of celebrity public relations crises that I could choose from to write about, but there was one specific person that came to mind while picking a topic for this paper. That person is James Charles.
James Charles was made famous back in 2016 when his senior photos went viral because of his makeup and highlight in the pictures. After quickly gaining fame, Charles was named the first male CoverGirl model and appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. James’ following grew rapidly, leading him to become mega-famous on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and in recent times, TikTok. The majority of his content is beauty and makeup based, although he has branched out some to create fun content with his friends and other collaborators. The now 21-year old has gone through multiple scandals and negative press that it is almost hard to keep straight. I thought it would be interesting to look at some of his scandals and analyze how he tends to handle it or deal with them.
In the beginning, Charles’ public issues were on a smaller scale. In 2017, he received backlash for tweeting racist tweets about Africa and the Ebola crisis. James quickly deleted the tweets and apologized about the insensitive words. At the time, CoverGirl spoke up and said that it did not support Charles’ comments but they did not sever ties with the influencer. Later that same year, James got himself into another issue on Twitter, this time with the cast of the movie It. James called the movie “awful” and received some hate comments from both fans and the cast of the movie. About a month after the Twitter feud, Charles put out a YouTube video creating a Pennywise makeup look and tutorial which, predictably, generated some serious backlash mainly from internet trolls.
As James Charles gained more fame, his public relations crises became more serious and caused bigger backlash. Throughout his career, James has been known to comment flirty or “thirsty” comments on different male Instagrams, specifically male celebrities. Shawn Mendes, among others, was one of the victims of these comments that prompted a lot of hate from social media users. This has happened multiple times throughout James’ career and there have been times that it has happened on the Instagrams of men that were not famous. Many times, the reason James’ comments got hate was because he would comment on the pictures of straight men and some were feeling uncomfortable with him being so forward towards people who were not pursuing him back.
In the 2019-2020 year, James’ career really began going downhill. After a huge scandal and fellow beauty vlogger and former friend, Tati Westbrook, that spilled over into almost hour long videos from both influencers, James Charles was seriously beginning to see his career get canceled. While his former scandals had seemed to pass on quite quickly, this one caused James to begin losing endorsements, brand deals, and followers. Before beginning to dig into his public relations solutions, there is one more recent scandal that was detrimental to James’ career. In February of 2021, a 16-year old boy came out with the claims that Charles groomed him and pressured him into exchanging sexual photos via Snapchat. James spoke out against these allegations, saying that he was unaware of the boy’s age at the time of them speaking. During this time, James continued to post and create content as if nothing happened.
However, the story did not stop there. That same month, three more boys came forward sharing their negative experiences with James Charles. One of the boys, 17-years old, shared screenshots of Charles still flirting and coming onto him even after learning his age. This really began a fast downhill spiral. More boys began coming out with their own stories about negative sexual experiences with Charles and James began to lose friends, followers, and endorsements with big brands. After taking a months long break from posting on any of his social media platforms, James came back in July with a YouTube speaking on his side of things. Although the makeup guru has now been demonetized by YouTube, he has gotten back into the routine of posting content for the fans that have not unsubscribed or unfollowed him.
Personally, I believe James often does a horrible job reacting to negative press and public relations crises. The majority of the time, his reactions consist of either deleting the social media posts that caused the scandal or he posts a YouTube video apologizing for whatever happened. Sometimes, I feel like James Charles tends to get a lot of flack for small things or issues that normally would not cause such a stir. However, I do not think that he does a good job of handling or making people think he is actually sorry for whatever he did. It often seems like he does not really care about being sorry for what he did, but just wants to pass over the issue and move on. His plans of action are usually dismissive and seem hasty and not well thought out. In a world of cancel culture, people are harsh and aggressive and want to know that people are truly sorry for what they did. If they do not see that, then that person’s career is as good as done; and I think that is exactly what is happening with James Charles.
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