Trisha Paytas, Jeffree Star & Shane Dawson Drama, Explained
Content warning: This story discusses discriminatory language and weight-shaming.
The world of big-name Beauty YouTube has (once again) imploded over the weekend.
YouTuber, singer and online chaos queen Trisha Paytas is at the centre of the drama, which involves a falling out between her, Jeffree Star and Jeffree’s (now former) hairdresser, Jay. Digressions include: private jets and an overpriced wig; classic YouTuber stuff.
Some essential background before we get started: back in February 2020, Trisha Paytas was invited on a trip to Las Vegas with Jeffree Star and his friends. The trip looked fine and dandy on social media, but several months later, one of Star’s friends, Tab David, uploaded a scathing video about their time away. In it, he called Star out on allegedly bullying and gossiping about one of the other people on the trip. He stated Star and his friends made fun of this person “all day”, and would “talk about how bad their skin was, body-shame them, talk about their weight, talk about their past drug abuse, talk about their recovery, just the most disgusting, horrible things”.
Trisha later confirmed that she was the person in question, stating she’d left the trip early after being reduced to tears. It made a relatively big splash, but was essentially overshadowed by other YouTube dramas at the time.
Fast forward to this week; things have really heated up.
After Trisha complained on her socials about being overcharged by Jeffree’s hairstylist Hair By Jay’s services, the stylist responded on Instagram Live by absolutely roasting the shit out of Trisha, making several disgusting and unacceptable comments. In the video, he calls her a “stupid dumb bitch,” mocks her crying, makes fun of how much she eats and suggests she goes on a diet.
Trisha’s response was a teary video entitled ‘why I’m scared of jeffree and hairbyjay’. She says she's “hurt and disgusted” by Jay’s video and goes into depth of how badly she was treated on the Las Vegas holiday. She calls Star “evil” and says she’s completely done with him.
“[Jeffree Star] brought me on a trip to shit on me, and I can’t have a say because he paid for it,” she said.
Jeffree took to Twitter to claim he’d apologised numerous times for his behaviour on the trip, but had nothing to do with Jay’s comments, calling them “fucking disgusting”. Cue: a battle of the quote tweets between Jeffree and Trisha:
So it’s pretty clear that this friendship is in the bin. And that Hair By Jay sucks. But how does Shane Dawson get swept into this?
Shane and Trisha have been besties since time immemorial. Even through a bevvy of Dawson’s most recent disturbing conduct came to light last year, including of racism, jokes about pedophilia and so much more, Trisha staunchly backed him, calling him “the greatest human”.
In her recent video, she calls Dawson out for standing by Jeffree Star and remaining one of his closest friends, despite all Star’s harmful behaviour. Paytas says she confided in Dawson after the trip, and said she was angry that he continued to support Star, recently featuring Star on his podcast. Paytas says she has since blocked Shane Dawson and his fiancé, Ryland Adams, on social media, for “her own peace”.
"Anyone who supports Jeffree is awful, like these are awful people," she said.
YouTube and Twitter comments are currently on fire with fans of each personality supporting their ‘faves’. Many are criticizing Dawson for remaining loyal to the problematic Jeffree Star, as opposed to his supposed ‘best friend’ Paytas, seemingly discounting all of Dawson’s own incredibly serious and problematic behaviour over the years. (More on that here, if you’re not up to date.)
With this morning came another development,with Jeffree Star tweeting the following, which many are choosing to believe mean he’s fired Jay:
After all of this, Trisha, in a pretty strange-looking wig, released a video entitled ‘I just want to move on’, where she continues to criticise Jeffree Star, Hair By Jay and finally Shane Dawson for not having her back.
In a particularly scathing moment, she comments on Dawson and Star’s friendship: “You sold your soul to the devil. You don't care how vile someone is as long as you can get those views and cash in.”
Jeffree is now tweeting about his new Pomeranian, so safe to say he wants to move on, too.
Just another harmonious day in YouTube land.
Written by Dani Leever, a writer and homosexual pop culture enthusiast. Find their words at @danileever or catch their gay DJ drag adventures at @djgaydad.
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