In January 2018, Logan Paul woke up one morning and decided to post what he thought was just another innocent daily vlog. In reality, this video, depicting him in a real suicide forest in Japan, was the biggest mistake of his career. Flash forward six months and he’s still trying to clean up his mistakes.
After the incident in January, which, if you somehow missed it, involved Paul making light of a suicide forest and even featured footage of a body being found, Paul seemed to be laying low. After being dropped by YouTube and basically hated off the internet, Paul is only now trying to rebuild his broken career, and people still aren’t having it.
Many people agree that Paul is not going about the whole “career rebuilding” in the right ways — at all. For example, next month he and his brother, the also controversial Jake Paul, are set to go up against YouTubers KSI in an amateur boxing match in Manchester, England. After an awkward publicity event in England last week when KSI got the crowd chanting, “F**k the Pauls,” Paul recorded an interview with BBC Radio 1’s “The 8th with Charlie Sloth.”
After BBC Radio 1 tweeted a promotional video for the show, they were met with a steady flow of backlash. Fans were complaining that Paul should not be given any airtime, citing the incident from the winter. Quickly after, BBC Radio 1 announced that they would not air the interview after all, but claimed that it was just because the content was not good enough.
On top of this, last Friday the first interview of Paul in months was posted on YouTube. The interview was conducted by Casey Neistat, who has almost 10 million subscribers on YouTube himself, and was over half an hour long. Even Neistat admitted that he was afraid that Paul was just using it as a charade for PR and wondered if he was enabling Paul.
In the interview itself Paul did admit that the incident in the winter was not the right call, blaming it on getting caught up in the environment of being validated by so many millions. While understanding your mistakes is all well and good, it is unclear if Paul has really changed. In the interview, he also talked about his brand, and referred to himself on multiple occasions in the third person.
Neistat also specifically asked about his “cultural insensitivity,” which Paul denied, even though over the past year, in addition to the forest incident, he jumped off a sacred bridge in Italy and ran around Japan wearing a kimono. After everything, it just seems that Paul doesn’t get it.
So, has Paul really changed? It’s hard to say. Viewers, and even Neistat, seem to agree that it is unlikely, and are not ready to give Paul the comeback he’s trying so hard for. There’s a real difference between apologizing for your mistakes and understanding them, and it seems that Paul has only done the first. Fortunately, the internet is not letting Paul get off easy, and is still revolting against his brand and videos.
To sum it up, during the interview Paul said, “I think America in general, they love redemption stories.” While, yes, this may be correct, I think America in general only loves redemption stories when the people in question have earned their reclamation.
