Unexpected drama is shocking the beauty influencer world. Tati Westbrook, 37, influencer, vlogger, and owner of a beauty supplement company is feuding with her former friend and mentee James Charles, 19, who is also an influencer, vlogger, and model. After Westbrook posted a tell all video about their fight on Friday — which has gotten over 25 million views since it was posted — James Charles lost more than a million subscribers on his Youtube channel over the weekend. Here’s a breakdown of all the drama.
The drama between Tati and James began on April 22 while James was at Coachella, when he did a short Instagram video for Sugar Bear Hair, the gummy vitamins seen all over Instagram. The gummies are a direct competitor with Tati’s beauty supplements, Halo Beauty. After the video was released, Tati posted a clip of herself reacting to the video to her Instagram, saying she felt “lost” and “betrayed” by an unnamed person.
Following Tati’s video, James posted a statement to his story, which was re-posted by Buzzfeed. “I want to publicly apologize to my close friend, Tati,” James wrote. “She has been like a mother to me since my first days in this industry and has given me more love, support, resources and advice than I could ever ask for.”
“This weekend I did an Instagram story for sleep vitamins that I’ve been taking because the brand helped me with security when the crowd around me at Coachella became unsafe,” he continued. “I did not accept any money from this post.”
Not at all! After James Charles apologized, a third beauty vlogger named Gabriel Zamora posted a Youtube video on May 4, calling Tati’s behavior “fraudulent” and blaming her for videos “being made where James is being made out to be this horrible human being and I’m just confused as to what happened.”
In a video titled “BYE SISTER,” posted on May 10, Tati explained everything about the feud with James Charles from her perspective. According to Tati, she and her husband had invested a lot of energy and time into James Charles and his career. While James’ video for Sugar Bear Hair did spark the fight between Tati and James, Tati insisted that her relationship with him had nothing to do with money.
“My relationship with James Charles is not transactional. I have not asked him for a penny, I have never been on his Instagram,” she said. But it wasn’t just the supplements that Tati had a problem with. She explained that she was tired of apologizing for James’s behavior — which she alleged included everything from saying mean things about other beauty influencers to sexually harassing men who weren’t interested in James.
On Saturday afternoon, James posted an eight-minute response video titled “tati” which has so far had over 24 million views. In the video, a make-up free James delivered an apology to Tati and her husband. He also apologized for the way he he spoke about other people on social media.
“A lot of the time when I’ve had to address things in the past, I’ve acted out of impulse and I’ve gone off and tried to pull receipts or facts or screenshots and play the victim and I’m not doing that today, I’m not,” James said. “That is all I have to say, I’m sorry.”
Based just on the James’ loss of subscribers, it seems that Tati has a lot of people coming to her side. James Charles already had a history of controversy. In 2017, he made an insensitive tweet about Africa, and in his apology for the tweet, called the continent a country.
But as CNN reported, he lost over one million followers since Tati posted the video. A video that tracks subscribers to each of their accounts shows that while James is losing followers, Tati is gaining them.
But for the most part, everyone used a feud between two wealthy vloggers to make a few jokes.
Tati has not publicly responded to James’ apology video yet.
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