Trisha Paytas has been a very enthralling character to watch on YouTube for over a decade. Paytas has posted numerous 7-eleven mukbangs, hour-long mental breakdowns, and has been in some pretty nasty scandals battling David Dobrik, Colleen Ballinger, and Ethan Klein. During the time they have been on YouTube, they have grown a following of 5.1 million subscribers. No matter who they’re beefing with, dating, or apporprating they have their subscribers wanting more. They’ve had a tricky history on their identity claiming to be transgender and DID(Dissociative identity disorder) in the past they now identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns.
They don’t mind the attention they’ve stated, “I never cared about being rich or anything and still don’t, maybe that’s a bad thing, maybe it’s not, but it’s how I thrive.”
Here’s a rundown of the most scandalous parts of a their career:
In Trisha’s earliest years on YouTube, they created a character called “Trishii” meaning to portray a Japanese pop star, Trisha made an entire music video which was later deleted due to backlash. The original video is still up on her page and has almost 800,000 views.
In 2015, Paytas began dating artist Sean van der Wilt, and then posted a video together titled “Showering with my Boyfriend”. Their whole relationship lasted until December of 2016. Their whole break up was very controversial, due to Paytas uploading a video titled “he cheated, I’m done.”
The whole thing was them crying on the kitchen floor going over why they had broken up. To add to the mess, she made another video titled “Sean van der Wilt is gay”. Where they reveal that he kissed another man in a club. Trisha received a lot of hate because they had just outed someone without their consent. They later made another video apologizing to Sean and saying sorry to him for ruining his life, but that they felt humiliated when he cheated on them with a man at a nightclub. After the whole situation, Paytas then claimed to be a chicken nugget. They were having an identity crisis but people claim that throughout the whole video, they were insensitive and dismissed people who were actually unsure about their identity. But in 2017 they uploaded a YouTube video titled “I’m no longer a person.” In this particular video they walk around in underwear with a plastic bag over their head and they no longer identify as a person or anything at all. They also claimed they were going to step away from Trisha and their problematic past. This again made people mad because as before they dismissed people who dealt with DID.
Then to follow the same path of them changing their identity, they uploaded another video titled “My ethnicity has changed”. This video got people fired up because they act like a stereotypical African American and black fishes.
In 2019, Trisha broke up with their boyfriend Jason Nash who introduced them to the vlog squad. Paytas had recurring screen time during their relationship with Nash. They became friends with Dobrik and fans became concerned after Dobrik called them slut and whore on various occasions. He went as far as talking about their sexual history because of his “jokes” and pranks; it eventually led to their friendship ending. When they broke up Trisha shared about their time with the vlog squad and claimed Nash left because Dobrik made him. They then made numerous videos speaking on it and talked about a situation in particular where Jeff Wittek, now an ex-vlog squad member, ignored her in a Starbucks. They shared how Dobrik would tell everyone in the squad not to talk about any drama. A lot of people viewed Paytas as the “boy who cried wolf”
Then in 2020, they uploaded a video titled “ I am transgender (female to male)” Now in this video, they claim to be a gay man and state this is their natural born gender. Patrick Star, a beauty guru then commented on this and said this isn’t a genuine video and it was just made to gain views. Trisha was then asked by Patrick to apologize to the LGBTQ+ community..
The same year Trisha began a podcast with Ethan Klein called Frenemies, in which they discussed numerous topics like personal experiences, pop culture, internet drama, and mental health. In the last episode they appear in,Trisha and Ethan argue due to Payatas calling a bit on the podcast“stupid” and “lazy.” Ethan then replies with “A lazy podcast, you don’t do anything for it” “You show up, we do all the work”. Trisha then accuses Ethan of gaslighting, which causes Paytas in the end to quit. Ethan later tweets “I am honestly gutted over this whole thing, Trisha’s video this morning was a total surprise to me. I don’t know what more I can say or do. I’m very sorry to all the fans of frenemies, I know how much it meant to everyone, I did everything I humanly could to save it.”
Now at the beginning of summer 2023, Paytas began a podcast with, at the time, their good friend, Colleen Ballinger,known for her persona Miranda Sings. Then just after 3 podcasts were released, it was canceled due to allegations toward Colleen of grooming underage kids. Proof then comes out about Colleen sending Trisha’s inappropriate pictures to underage kids. Trisha later comes out and says they never condoned this. Now Trisha has their own podcast called JUST TRISH PODCAST where they have many different guests such as Terri Joe, Jeff Wittek, Tana Mongoose, and Rosanna Pansino. They also have a husband and a baby girl named Malibu Barbie. It seems like Paytas has now found their peace and has gotten the help they needed. Although Trisha Paytas has managed to be a bad turkey throughout many years including this one. They will never get officially canceled because they’re so unfazed by it and continuously post content no matter the situation.