James Charles sparks backlash with YouTube return after grooming accusations

YouTuber and makeup artist James Charles has returned to social media after taking months away from posting amid accusations of grooming young fans — and the internet isn’t happy with his comeback.

James Charles has been immersed in a swath of controversies throughout his time as a YouTube star. Following the drama with Tati Westbrook in 2019, Charles was hit with multiple accusations of inappropriately messaging underage fans in 2020.

This prompted a slew of backlash against Charles, causing him to get demonetized on YouTube and even dropped by Morphe amid his response to the allegations in a now-deleted video titled ‘Holding Myself Accountable.’

Several months later, Charles returned to YouTube with another explanatory video titled ‘An Open Conversation’ on July 2, 2021, where he addressed the situation surrounding him and claimed that many of the conversations posted to social media had been completely faked.

“I’m still a human being that deserves privacy and respect like everybody else,” Charles said. “It’s one thing to have a super innocent and casual conversation with somebody on Instagram DMs or a dating app, and then to scroll on your For You Page an hour later and see every single message that was sent.”

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Charles also stated that he was at fault for “putting myself into these types of situations,” and detailed several ways he has switched up his dating life as a result.

“I’ve stopped allowing myself to be a science experiment,” he continued. “I’ve been on dates before where guys have tried to take pictures of me on the DL. It’s now gotten to a point where a lot of times if a person comes over, I’ll ask them to leave their phone at the front door.”

“I recognize that these types of things can happen when you have a platform. It’s up to me to protect myself and make sure that I am not allowing myself to be so easily accessible to let those people in in the first place.”

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Despite Charles’ ‘Open Conversation’ with viewers, much of the internet is decidedly against his coming back at all, with plenty of commenters speaking out against him in pointed tweets.

It’s unclear how Charles’ content will look in the future, but for now, it seems as though he isn’t receiving a warm welcome.