What it means if Trisha Paytas is officially “cancelled”
I’ll openly admit that one of the few pieces of media that helped me “get through” this last year and a half of social, political, and emotional turmoil was the H3 podcast, Frenemies. It appears I’m far from alone. Throughout its eight-month run, the podcast–hosted by infamous Internet personalities, Ethan Klein and Trisha Paytas (referred to in this post with they/them pronouns though they publicly claim she/her pronouns as well and recently came out as gender fluid)–became one of the most popular on the Internet, raking in millions of views per episode on YouTube and occasionally being credited for the downfall of various Internet celebrities’ reputations (namely, James Charles, David Dobrik, and much of the Vlog Squad).
Unfortunately, after a semi-emotionally charged dispute (I say “semi” because the podcast has been the stage for even rougher arguments between the co-hosts in the past) during the last 12 minutes of the podcast’s June 8th episode, it was announced by Trisha that they would be “stepping down” from Frenemies amidst continued tension between themselves and the H3 production crew. Trisha has verbalized intentions to quit the podcast several times in the past only to return the next week, however, this departure appeared permanent following Trisha’s and Ethan’s responses on social media–both addressing the drama over the course of days on Twitter and both uploading videos to their YouTube channels explaining their sides. Ethan made one video, Trisha made eight.
What the dispute was originally about is almost irrelevant–Trisha was upset about the more-than-generous deal Ethan offered them to be on the podcast, there seemed to be internal conflict between Trisha and the H3 production crew (with Trisha apparently suggesting to hire a whole new crew just for Frenemies), and all the post-podcast drama quickly devolved into regarding petty differences between the hosts along with a few instances of miscommunication. Ethan has spent much of the last week acting on the defensive as Trisha continues perpetuating the drama on their personal social media accounts, being the first of the two involved to make a response video (then uploading seven more over the course of a week), posting screenshots of private text conversations online, and vehemently denying they said things that they absolutely did say.
Even with Frenemies’ undoubted popularity online, it was surprising to see the amount of media attention that followed the split. Drama/commentary YouTubers already intuned with Frenemies and their regular takedowns of other Internet personalities could run with the story for days, but the conversation went beyond any moderately-sized niches of the Internet, becoming about as mainstream of news as a podcast not hosted by Joe Rogan could hope to accomplish. Vulture, Slate, and Forbes are picking up the story, and even some of the Internet’s non-“tea”-centric creators are getting in on the action–like Kurtis Connor’s typically drama-free content or a podcast I listen to headed by two Britney Spears stans. It seems like everyone is talking about this breakup and much of the backlash has been lobbied against Trisha. That’s mostly fair considering Trisha’s output over the last week, but we’d be remiss to not acknowledge how the cards were already stacked against them.
Trisha Paytas has long been a controversial figure on the Internet. Their first viral moment came in 2012 with a video entitled “Why I’m Voting For Mitt Romney,” where reasons included 1) Mitt Romney is hot, 2) “Mitt” name rhymes with “tit,” and 3) Obama is going to take away their right to be Catholic. Trisha has spent much of their online career generating such controversies for attention: they did a sort of sequel to their 2012 Romney hit to show their 2016 support of Donald Trump (that video is now deleted), said the N-word a couple of times whilst singing and rapping to various songs, and to this day, regularly fetishize Jewish culture without a basic understanding of Jewish history, among other things. Trisha’s longstanding excuse is that they’re just an Internet “troll.”
Trolling or not, it’s obvious that Trisha has contributed real harm toward marginalized communities, bringing us to a question that many are now asking: why is Trisha being cancelled now for their part in Frenemies ending rather than years ago for every other fucked up thing they’ve done online?
It’s a fair question and one that I think deserves to be parsed, even if the supposition that Trisha Paytas is officially “cancelled” or even cancellable is a bit shortsighted (every new controversy Trisha has found themselves in for over a decade has never once brought about the end of their career and it’s not hard to imagine a future in which the Internet is back on Trisha’s side given the love-hate cycle of their persona). What I find most interesting about this question is its attempt to see Trisha’s past through an objective lens when Trisha’s career, and moreover the career of many vloggers like them, relies on the subjective experience of the parasocial relationship between fan and celebrity.
Before Frenemies, I was never a fan of Trisha Paytas for obvious reasons. As someone who made a living off courting controversy, almost every time Trisha’s existence was brought to my attention, it was to highlight what a shitty person they were. Occasionally they were expressing their love for Britney Spears and, of course, I could get down with them for that, but usually, seeing “Trisha” in the trending tab on Twitter meant they had done something racist, xenophobic, or just otherwise ignorant and insensitive.
When I tuned in to the first episode of Frenemies, it was only for curiosity’s sake, knowing that Trisha and Ethan already had a toxic relationship from previous YouTuber beef as well as internal drama concerning Ethan’s family (Trisha was dating and is now engaged to Ethan’s brother-in-law, Moses). I just wanted to get a good look at any ensuing gossip; I don’t think I even planned to watch the entire episode but after one, I was hooked.
It wasn’t like Frenemies fully repaired Trisha’s reputation or that on the podcast Trisha was all that well-behaved. You can find plenty of compilations of Trisha being ignorant or bigoted online and a good chunk of the clips are from the Frenemies podcast, but Frenemies as a whole gave its audience reason to root for Trisha’s supposed growth. Their depiction on Frenemies offered Trisha a unique persona, weighted by their compassion-worthy humanity as well as their entertaining cartoonishness. Trisha’s trauma was explored heavily throughout the podcast’s run, with Trisha revealing abuse they had received from authority figures early in their life as well as the toxic relationships they had entered with other prominent YouTubers (such as Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, and members of the Vlog Squad). Both Ethan and Trisha opened up about their struggles with mental illness, weight loss, and self-esteem. Two of the pair’s most explosive fights on-screen were followed by couples therapy mediated by celebrity therapist Dr. Drew, in which Trisha discussed their issues with splitting and how their behavior is influenced by their diagnosed borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia.
Trisha’s mental health doesn't negate the harm they’ve caused, but it can provide context for some of their most problematic actions. If you watch all of Frenemies and pay attention to what Trisha says about their mental health–their discussions about splitting, their slips into dissociative states, their experience hearing “voices,” etc.–it’s clear that Trisha’s sense of self is pliable, making their struggles with mental illness visible in much of their worst scandals.
One of the most revealing moments on the podcast came when Trisha discussed the backlash following a 2020 instance of them claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. After making a YouTube video trying to explore a disorder they believed they had, Trisha was widely criticized for misrepresenting the disorder in a quest for attention, prompting Trisha to upload a nasty follow-up in which they mockingly went into different “alters” to conform to criticism lobbied against them. Trisha told Dr. Drew on Frenemies:
“My scandal that everyone hated me for this year, and it’s still something that like triggers me in a really dark, deep way… is the disassociative identity disorder, which I’ve talked about before. I saw a video about it on YouTube so I made a reply being like ‘I think I might have traits of this, like this sounds like something that I do’ and everybody came for me. Like ‘Trisha just wants attention,’ ‘she’s making a mockery out of it,’ and the original initial video was really sincere and the minute people thought I was making a mockery of it, then I was like, ‘Ok let me make a mockery of this.’”
When Trisha erects a version of themselves online that is blatantly offensive, knowledge of their mental health struggles doesn’t excuse their actions, but it does make it harder to see much of their behavior as essential representations of their values. Viewers of Frenemies witness that Trisha is openly unsure of who they are outside of the identity they’ve created from other peoples’ perceptions.
Especially when much of the attention Trisha receives, on Frenemies and elsewhere, is rooted in their cartoonish antics, it’s difficult to define exactly when we should be mad at them. There are clear lines that they’ve crossed–like saying the n-word or supporting Trump (whether that was a troll, as Trisha’s claimed, or not)–and most of those incidents, Trisha has explicitly apologized for. I can’t tell you whether or not to accept those apologies, but I bring them up to highlight that Trisha has outwardly acknowledged that they’ve fucked up on certain things. On others, the line isn’t as clearly defined when you take into account all of Trisha’s public behavior and the difficult-to-parse awareness Trisha even seems to have of the world outside themselves. For instance, Trisha’s weird fetish for Jewish men and ignorance of their culture is plenty offensive, but it’s hard for the seriousness of their actions to not get undercut by their comical ignorance of… well, everything. On episode four of the podcast, Trisha admitted, despite having a Jewish boyfriend and occasionally trying to cosplay as Jewish themselves, that they were barely aware of the Holocaust during an interaction with Ethan:
Trisha: “I lowkey got really sad about the Holocaust this weekend. Moses explained to me what actually happened and I like started crying.”
Ethan: “You just found out about the Holocaust?”
T: “I had no idea… I got really sad when he said that, ‘cause we were watching The Producers and they had like ‘Spring Time for Hitler’ and I was like, ‘Oh that’s cute’… I was like, ‘What did Hitler do that was so bad?’”
E: “Oh my god.”
In the same episode, it was revealed that Trisha thought it was unnecessary for Isaac Newton to invent gravity and recently discovered that Egypt is a real place. I can’t help but think about a comment from a Vulture article about Lana Del Rey’s checkered past:
“Unlike [Taylor] Swift, who built her stardom on the notion that she was giving access to her true self, Del Rey’s heightened persona ensured that critiques never escalated into full-on controversy. You couldn’t stay mad at Lana Del Rey. It would have been like getting mad at Betty Boop.”
It’s not like I think Trisha has intentionally cultivated an ignorant persona, but it’s reasonable to assume that Trisha’s display of ignorance for the entirety of their career and the benefits which have come from it hasn’t been all that encouraging for them to seek enlightenment. If your identity revolves around you being a hot mess caricature online, why look into how problematic the stuff you say is if people think the problematic stuff you say is so fucking funny?
The great thing about Frenemies, however, is the fact that Trisha could be this outrageously ignorant caricature of themselves for entertainment whilst being increasingly humanized. Not only did Trisha openly discuss their mental health and how it affects their behavior, they were also sitting beside someone eager and willing to call Trisha out when appropriate. For example, when Trisha asserted their ideas of Jewish purity:
T: “Jason [Trisha’s ex] is half a Jew. I don’t know if that matters, probably not.”
E: “I mean he got bullied for being a Jew, so whatever… Dude you gotta stop the Jewish gatekeeping… You want Jewish purity.”
T: “I mean yeah. That’s what I’m trying to get.”
E: “You gotta stop bro.”
T: “Why?”
E: “‘Cause it’s weird. It’s weird how you fetishize Jewish people.”
T: “It’s not fetishizing.”
E: “It totally is.”
T: “It’s wanting to be in the uper-echelon of the world.”
E: “That’s not okay, dude.”
The narrative many Frenemies viewers inferred was that Ethan was helping Trisha become a better person.
Even with its disastrous ending, it’s hard to look back at Frenemies as a whole and say that Trisha Paytas didn’t develop. Put aside the parasocial mindfuck of claiming that Trisha *the person* evolved within those eight months, it’s still clear that Trisha the Internet character and Frenemies co-host was adapting since joining the H3 team. Their Jewish fetishization was bad, but it’s much harder to find examples of Trisha being problematic toward other ethnicities and races post-Frenemies than it was before–a small step, but an important one. Often Trisha and Ethan used their platform as a duo to call out other content creators for instances of racism, online predation, and more, eventually emerging at the forefront of exposing the Vlog Squad’s complicity in one woman’s sexual assault.
Maybe more important to the audience, rightly or wrongly, was how the dynamic between Trisha and Ethan improved. Watching the first episode, the two seem doomed to live up to the toxic implications of the podcast’s name. As each episode uploaded, however, it appeared both co-hosts were learning to extend more compassion to the other. Fights erupted and twice (before this latest debacle) Trisha walked off the set with the threat of quitting, but upon returning, both were willing to open healthier lines of communication. Ethan and Trisha went from “frenemies” to affectionately referring to each other as “best friends” and “family.” Much of that development was credited to Trisha’s growth into becoming a less toxic person.
Fast forward to today, the newest backlash against Trisha has been intense, and many are attributing their current cancellation to them being a shitty co-worker and friend despite their wide range of worse offenses throughout their career. It’s a fair criticism as much of the reaction from Frenemies’ audience is intrinsically linked to the feeling that Trisha betrayed Ethan’s trust. That parasocial bond to the co-hosts and the value viewers placed on their growing friendship was an important aspect of Frenemies appeal; but that value infected what viewers thought about Trisha Paytas as a person, which isn’t irrelevant to their perspectives on Trisha’s problematic past.
Trisha Paytas was given a redemption arc by H3 productions. The podcast along with H3’s apparent affection for Trisha helped humanize them to the point that acknowledgment for Trisha’s “growth” created an amalgamation of Trisha the troll with Trisha the person struggling to create connections with other people. As Trisha’s and Ethan’s relationship improved, it was noticeable that Trisha’s ability to take accountability for themselves improved with it. Pre-podcast, Trisha’s modus operandi to deal with toxic relationships was to sit on their kitchen floor creating multiple response videos out of defensive rage, but when Trisha was given the opportunity to burn bridges on Frenemies, they began doing so with an awareness of their own triggers and an intent to not slip into a dissociative state of hostility. During a clip which shows Trisha discussing the dissolution of their friendship with Shane Dawson, Trisha is outwardly attempting to remain calm. Comments notice:
If you accept that Trisha’s difficulty upkeeping interpersonal relationships due to their struggles with mental health had something to do with their persistent “trolling” and creation of offensive content, it stands to reason that many now view Trisha’s behavior toward Ethan and the H3 crew as a monumental regression for their online presence.
Trisha’s fans have narrativized their supposed newfound maturity, many crediting Ethan specifically with being the positive force Trisha needed to develop a less problematic public persona. Now Trisha and Ethan are done, dominantly by Trisha’s doing, and Trisha has uploaded eight videos slamming Ethan and H3, occasionally calling Ethan a “piece of shit” in the process.
Again, I don’t know that Trisha Paytas will ever really be “cancelled.” Trisha’s online presence has always been marked by a sad cycle of Trisha as rising-YouTube-star to Trisha as horrendous-Internet-trainwreck. If this H3 drama does the trick, though, I don’t think it will necessarily be because Trisha’s audience cares more about them being a decent co-worker than they do about them being a problematic, racist troll. It’s hard to see someone’s humanity the way that the Frenemies viewers saw Trisha’s and not root for them to become a better person. The fact that Trisha knowingly threw a wrench into their own redemption arc is about as much disappointment as a dedicated audience can take, and it doesn’t leave much hope for a future in which Trisha Paytas continues taking accountability for the entirety of their actions.
If we want to criticize Ethan Klein for anything (and we should, not just in how he handled this situation but also with his own checkered past of problematic behavior), maybe the bulk of that criticism should rest on the fact that he gave Trisha Paytas such a forgiving platform to begin with.
The podcast was still pretty fucking fun though.