Jake Paul's biggest controversies: How the notorious YouTuber found fame through scandal
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- With 20 million subscribers, Jake Paul is one of the most infamous YouTubers of his generation.
- He has leveraged a string of controversies to stay in the public eye, even during his boxing career.
- Paul has been charged with criminal trespassing and accused of sexual abuse, among other scandals.
At 27, Jake Paul is one of the biggest and most notorious names in the influencer industry.
But Paul's numerous controversies and scandals are what continue to propel the YouTuber to fame and fortune. More than 20 million subscribers tune in to watch his antics, and while he was booted from Disney Channel in 2017, Paul has leveraged his bad reputation to stay relevant.
Now, the creator is making a name for himself in the world of boxing. He's defeated Nate Robinson, Ben Askren, Tyron Woodley, and Anderson Silva, among others. Paul is set to fight Mike Tyson on Friday in the biggest showdown of his career (and a big test for Netflix's new live strategy).
Tyson said in a 2020 press conference that content creators like Paul benefit the boxing industry. "Now we got these YouTubers, 20 million subscribers? Boxing is coming back thanks to these YouTube boxers," Tyson said. "I believe the more anyone boxes, the better it is. Boxing has taken some beatings since the UFC has been around."
In an interview with Business Insider that same year, Paul said "boxing just sits differently" with him, as opposed to YouTube, acting, and music. "I wake up every day with fire in my belly," Paul said. "That's just where the passion, hard work, and dedication comes from."
Here's how Paul simultaneously became one of the most popular and most hated YouTubers, starting from his rise to notoriety on the short-form video platform Vine in 2013.
Kat Tenbarge, Rachel E. Greenspan, and Kieran Press-Reynolds contributed to a previous version of this article.
Jake Paul 2/YouTube
Like many top YouTubers — including his big brother Logan Paul, who's had his own share of controversies — Jake Paul got his start on Vine in 2013.
By the time the app was discontinued, Paul had over 5.3 million followers and 2 billion views on the app, where his brash humor and stunts especially appealed to a young audience. This notoriety among a young demographic landed Paul a role on the Disney Channel.
The series "Bizaardvark" is itself a nod to the type of social media fame that Paul accrued for himself, and his character resembled his real-life online persona. On the show, Paul played Dirk, host of a video segment on a YouTube-esque series called "Dare Me Bro," where his character took dare requests.
The year after the show premiered, Disney announced Paul's exit. Paul later revealed he had been fired.
Logan Paul/YouTube
Paul says he was fired due to a local TV news segment about his YouTube channel, which was the less Disney-friendly, real-life version of "Dare Me Bro."
KTLA 5 visited the West Hollywood neighborhood where Paul was living in July 2017 and interviewed Paul's neighbors about his YouTube stunts. They were extremely displeased.
By this point, Paul, then 20, had already jump-started his notorious "Team 10" YouTube collective. He had more than 8.5 million YouTube subscribers and filmed pranks and stunts in his neighborhood, which included starting a massive fire in his backyard, doing dirt bike stunts on his street, and building a waterslide to shoot people into his pool.
His neighbors called the situation a "living hell" and a "war zone." After Paul leaked his own address online, fans showed up en masse, and by that point, his neighbors in Beverly Grove had enough. Paul's neighbors met with police and city officials to discuss the possibility of a class-action public nuisance lawsuit, and the company that owned Paul's house sued him for $2.5 million.
After getting fired by Disney midway through the second season of "Bizaardvark," Paul announced he would be moving on to more adult acting ventures and focusing on his YouTube channel, business ventures, and personal brand.
Jake Paul/YouTube
Paul's ventures tend to revolve around a central theme: Paul tells his kid subscribers that education isn't important, since he didn't do well in school but still became rich and famous, and other kids should follow his lead. This might be best exemplified with Paul's widely mocked diss track about teachers called "My Teachers."
But Paul doesn't just diss education. He's attempted to start two of his own educational programs that theoretically instruct followers on how to be influential and make money through online pursuits like his own. Paul has enacted two very similar schemes themed around that idea. The first was called "Edfluence."
Edfluence was launched in 2018. It was supposed to be a series of videos that fans could unlock for just $7, purporting to give them a "roadmap" to success as an influencer. Except, as many YouTubers and publications pointed out, the $7 didn't unlock the program in its entirety. It just unlocked a few videos with basic tips like "have a phone," and "if you like makeup, create makeup videos."
If you wanted all the videos, you had to pay an additional $57. Other creators called it a scam.
Even worse, part of Edfluence's appeal was that Paul promised fans would have an opportunity to join "Team 1000," a seemingly expanded version of "Team 10," his YouTube-famous clique.
"Team 1000" never happened, and those who paid $57 just got access to a few disappointing videos about YouTube tips and tricks.
The website for Edfluence no longer exists, so people who paid $64 back in 2018 can no longer access any of the videos. But in February 2020, Paul launched a new educational subscription-based platform called the Financial Freedom Movement. It has essentially the same premise as Edfluence, but initially, you were asked to pay a $19.99 fee to create an account.
Shane Dawson/YouTube
Many of Paul's videos have come under fire for being inappropriate for a young audience, since a lot of them revolve around sexual and violent content.
In January 2018, for example, Paul uploaded a vlog called "I lost my virginity," which initially had a thumbnail of Paul and then-girlfriend Erika Costell posing seminude. The video was age-restricted, and after scrutiny from other YouTubers, Paul changed the thumbnail and eventually deleted the vlog.
However, Paul leaned farther into sexual content, creating a number of videos that feature the famous pornographic actress Riley Reid.
In February 2020, Paul was widely criticized for writing on X (formerly Twitter) that anxiety is self-inflicted.
"Remember anxiety is created by you," he wrote. "Sometimes you gotta let life play out and remind yourself to be happy & that the answers will come." He added some advice for anxious readers: "chill your mind out," "go for a walk," and "talk to a friend."
Paul has also been caught using the N-word, although the news was overshadowed by Logan Paul's infamous "suicide forest" incident.
In January 2018, TMZ published a video of Paul from Coachella in 2015. In the 49-second clip, Paul starts freestyle rapping over the song "Throw Sum Mo" by Rae Sremmurd and says the N-word twice. The clip drew backlash, but since the elder Paul's "suicide forest" vlog had been uploaded just days before the clip resurfaced, most of the attention was diverted.
Denise Truscello/Getty Images
Paul has faked two marriages, referring to the practice as entertainment "like the WWE," or partially staged wrestling matches.
The first fake wedding saga involved his ex-girlfriend Erika Costell, the same girlfriend with whom he made the virginity loss vlog.
The second fake wedding was to fellow YouTuber and provocateur Tana Mongeau — and the saga definitely paid off. From the relationship's inception to the wedding and eventual breakup, it was worth an estimated $600 million in media value.
But as Mongeau explained after the "divorce" (the wedding was never legally binding), elements of Paul's fake relationships have felt unfair to the women he's been involved with. Mongeau described the "wedding" night as "hell" and said while she dealt with a family emergency the day after, Paul continued on to their planned honeymoon, where he posed with a group of half-naked women.
Aurora Rose/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images
Mongeau isn't the only one of Paul's exes to say that Paul is a bad boyfriend.
In Shane Dawson's series on Paul, he interviewed Alissa Violet, another one of Paul's ex-girlfriends. Violet explained that she and Paul faked their relationship, but behind the scenes, she "chased" actual love and affection from Paul. Her story closely resembles Mongeau's own tell-all about the difficulties of trying to get Paul to engage in something real while maintaining a forced relationship on-camera.
More specifically, Violet accused Paul of emotional and mental abuse, describing one violent incident when Paul dragged her down a flight of stairs during a fight, breaking her iPhone in the process. (Violet said she doesn't view Paul as physically abusive.)
"I can't even remember a conversation where it was like, me walking away feeling good about myself," Violet told Dawson. "I'm still disgusted by it because it's not who I am."
Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP
On May 31, 2020, Paul and his friends shared videos on social media at the Scottsdale Fashion Square shopping mall in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Paul said he was there to take part in the George Floyd protests and to film the looting and vandalism in the mall, but police opened an investigation into his presence at the mall and he was charged with criminal trespass and unlawful assembly.
Paul responded to news of the charges on X, writing, "gimme my charges and let's put the focus back on George Floyd and Black Lives Matter."
Jake Paul/YouTube
Paul caused controversy yet again when he threw a massive party for his music video shoot in July 2020, during a high point of COVID-19 cases in California. Behind-the-scenes footage showed maskless influencers swinging from heavy machinery in Paul's backyard.
The mayor of Calabasas, Alicia Weintraub, spoke out about the incident at the time, saying she was outraged.
"The City of Calabasas will be enforcing a zero-tolerance [policy] for large gatherings that defy local public health orders," she told BI at the time.
In a later interview, Paul told BI that he didn't know if he'd continue partying, even after the incident, and criticized government leaders: "Our leadership is failing us, and everyone kind of just doesn't know what to do. But I personally am not the type of person who's gonna sit around and not live my life."
Leon Bennett/Getty Images
On August 5, 2020, the FBI conducted a search of Paul's mansion in Calabasas, California, in connection with Paul's involvement in the Arizona mall raid. The federal agents seized firearms from the house, according to The Washington Post.
The US Attorney's Office later said Paul would not face federal charges related to the investigation.
Michael Reaves/Getty Images
In an interview ahead of his November 28, 2020 fight with Nate Robinson, Paul said he believed the deadly virus ravaging the country was "a hoax."
"There are people losing jobs, there are small businesses who are going bankrupt, there are millions of people who are unemployed right now, people are turning to alcohol and drugs to cope with everything that's going on. This is the most detrimental thing to our society," Paul told The Daily Beast. "COVID cases are at less than 1%, and I think the disease is a hoax."
Paul later claimed in an interview with The Verge that The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern had taken his quotes "out of context," so Stern shared the full audio of their interview in which Paul made the comments. (He did not take it out of context.)
Megan Briggs/Getty Images
In April 2021, two women came forward with abuse allegations against Paul.
The first was Justine Paradise, who has over half a million TikTok followers. She released a 20-minute YouTube video in which she accused Paul of sexual abuse, alleging he forced her to perform oral sex on him in his bedroom at the "Team 10" house in July 2019. She said they danced and kissed consensually at first, but that it became non-consensual as Paul got progressively physical with her.
Paul denied Paradise's allegation in a Twitter statement, calling it "manufactured." He said he never had a sexual relationship with her.
Later that month, the actor and model Railey Lollie accused Paul of groping her without consent in 2017, per The New York Times. Lollie began working with Paul when she was 17 and said he would call her "jailbait," the Times reported.
"I was with Jake for months, and I saw what kind of person he was behind the scenes and what kind of person he put out to the rest of the world," Lollie said.
It's unclear whether the influencer was ever investigated or sued in connection with the abuse allegations. Paradise said in a follow-up update to her allegations video that she had received an onslaught of death threats in her private messages.
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
In May 2021, Puerto Rico's Dept. of Natural & Environmental Resources launched an investigation into Paul after footage emerged of him driving over a protected beach on the island nation.
Sea turtles commonly nest on Puerto Rico's beaches from February to August, and locals and tourists are advised to tread carefully to ensure that the protected species hatch safely.
Puerto Rico's Environment Secretary Rafael Machargo told the BBC that people who break the law by riding on the beach could "face fines and other penalties, if applicable."
Paul received significant backlash online, and more than 220,000 people signed a petition urging authorities to "charge him with a crime."
Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Paul has continued to drum up controversy in the sports world, especially for calling out fellow boxers like Tommy Fury, Nate Diaz, and Canelo Alvarez.
After beating former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva in a boxing match in October 2022, the influencer made a derisive statement aimed at UFC President Dana White.
The following month, Paul teased a video on Twitter suggesting he would face off in a fight against Andrew Tate, the kickboxer-turned-influencer who went viral for his misogynistic "self-help" tips. Paul previously said that Tate, who has been banned from multiple social media platforms, would be "too scared" to fight him or his brother Logan.
Paul also continued to make videos on his YouTube channel, which maintained a consistent level of subscribers throughout 2022, according to the data analytics website Social Blade. However, Paul only gained 100,000 subscribers in the year's final month — a sign that maybe viewers were growing tired of him or his influencer relevancy was fading after his pivot to boxing.
Jake Paul/YouTube
Shortly before President-elect Donald Trump won his bid for reelection, Paul urged his followers to vote for the Republican candidate.
In a video shared on YouTube, Paul valorized Trump's 34 felony convictions by comparing him to America's founding fathers.
"Trump is labeled a 'felon,' but remember, the founders of this country were seen as felons by Britain because they demanded change," Paul said. "History shows that sometimes those who challenge the system are the ones who make a difference."
Paul also said he believed Trump would "quite literally save America," though he noted that he couldn't vote for Trump himself after moving to Puerto Rico.
Paul was criticized for spreading false or misleading information in the 18-minute video — like his "thoroughly debunked" claim that federal disaster funds were diverted to Ukraine after recent hurricanes hit the US — though his endorsement didn't come as much of a surprise to his followers.
In 2023, Paul aligned himself with Vivek Ramaswamy, the "anti-woke" biotech millionaire who Trump recently tapped to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency. Paul also requested a meeting with then-presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., who is now Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to the digital culture reporter Taylor Lorenz, Paul's continued relevance in pop culture is thanks to a strategy popularized by conservative "manosphere" figures.
"They perform masculinity," she said in Matt Bernstein's YouTube video "How the Right is Winning Young Men." "It's leaning into this hyper-masculine lifestyle and culture."
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