Cancel culture: What happened to the famous faces who were shunned?

In an age where people can make a career out of their online presence, there is an increasing threat of being ‘cancelled’ for saying something out-of-step with public opinion.

And while in many cases, people with large followings can bounce back, some are completely forced out of public discourse.

In seconds, influencers, political commentators and Hollywood actors see their reputations left in tatters as they face the consequences of their alleged actions, and before they know it, they have faded into obscurity. 

From allegations of sexual assault, to resurfaced instances of public figures wearing ‘blackface’ and tasteless jokes of paedophilia, there are some behaviours that even the biggest fans cannot forgive.

But where are these cancelled personalities now, and how have they continued to make a living following their downfalls? 

As once-huge personalities slip out of the public eye almost entirely, FEMAIL asks where the cancelled stars are now…

JENNA MARBLES 

Cancelled: 2020  

Mourey, who has been offline for three years, is married to Twitch star Julien Solomita (pictured together in 2015)

The offending videos included a clip from 2011 in which she did an impersonation of rapper Nicki Minaj, for which she donned a pink wig and darkened her skin

Jenna Mourey shot to fame on YouTube under the alias Jenna Marbles with her video ‘How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking’ in 2010.

The clip saw her applying several layers of foundation and poke fun at herself in a comical video which earnt her millions of fans.

Those fans soon turned into subscribers on her YouTube channel as she became one of the earliest stars on the platform.

However, Jenna’s star faded even more quickly than it rose in 2020, when videos of her doing ‘blackface’ resurfaced, as well as clips of her mocking Asian people for cheap jokes.

The offending videos included a clip from 2011 in which she did an impersonation of rapper Nicki Minaj, for which she donned a pink wig and darkened her skin. 

Following a wave of backlash over the resurfaced videos, the YouTube star made her final clip on the platform addressing her past content, apologising for it and announcing the end of her channel.

In a script which Forbes described as Jenna ‘cancelling herself’, she said it had never been her intention to perform ‘blackface’.

She said: ‘I think now it’s hard for that content to exist at all because I think people watch it and don’t bother to look at when it was posted or care about what path I took to get to where I am.’

She added that, if the content she had posted several years ago causes people offence in the present day, she no longer wanted it to exist online.

Jenna explained she was going to ‘move on’ from posting content on her YouTube channel but did not give any insight into how long her break would last. 

At the time, she said her intention was ‘just live and just be. That’s it’ – and three years later, she still has not returned to the internet.

While Jenna is no longer on any social media platforms, her fans do receive occasional updates on her life through the platforms of her husband, Julien Solomita.

The influencer, who has 1.3million followers on Instagram and is a huge star on gaming platform Twitch, announced in December 2022 that he and Jenna had tied the knot.

Posting black and white photos of himself with Jenna on their wedding day, he wrote: ‘Married otters.’

The snaps showed how Jenna’s beloved chihuahua (called Marbles) was a part of the ceremony as they posed with the ageing canine, who was in a carrier beside them.

CAROLINE CALLOWAY 

Cancelled:  2019 

Caroline Calloway (pictured) made her name as an American studying in Cambridge but was accused by an old friend of being a fraud in an op-ed in The Cut

Although Calloway defended herself in TV interviews and through her Instagram account, the controversy ultimately caused her to retreat from social media and delete her Instagram posts

New York-born Cambridge University student Caroline Calloway gained a huge Instagram following with her picturesque photos and wistful captions which supported a blog she began writing in 2012.

In 2015, her large Instagram following helped her secure a book deal worth six figures, with a working title And We Were Like. 

However, two years later Calloway announced on social media that the book was no longer in the works as she branded its premise ‘sexist’. 

Instead of publishing, she sold the first seven chapters on Etsy, admitting she was in debt of $100,000 to her publisher from the advance she had already been paid.

As Calloway’s downturn continued, 2019 brought a series of ‘creative workshops’ which cost $165 per session, but were widely considered a disaster as they promised things that never materialised including orchid crowns. 

The following year, the Guardian reported Calloway had refunded disappointed customers.

However, it was October 2019 when Calloway’s demise accelerated after a former friend Natalie Beach published an opinion piece in The Cut claiming she was responsible for the influencer’s success, and had been the person behind her famous Instagram captions.

Most shockingly, she alleged Calloway’s claim that she became Instagram famous from a snapshot of macarons is a massive lie.

According to Natalie, Calloway told her that she took out ‘ads designed to look like posts to promote her account’ and ‘bought tens of thousands of followers’ to build a fan base to sell her unwritten memoir.

Although Calloway defended herself in TV interviews and through her Instagram account, the controversy ultimately caused her to retreat from social media and delete her Instagram posts. 

However, before wiping her account clean, she revealed in a lengthy post that she had made up most of the money she owed to her publisher through an OnlyFans account.

After going dark on Instagram for several years, she revived her account four weeks ago to reveal the cover of her new book, Scammer.

She captioned the photo of the book: ‘Babe wake up the new manic pixie dream book is dropping mid-May.’

BELLE GINSON

Cancelled: 2015  

Belle Gibson resurfaced in 2020 in a bizarre development when she claimed to have been adopted into the Ethiopian Oromo community, who later ‘banished her’

Wellness guru Belle Gibson gained a cult following on social media with her clean eating healthy lifestyle which she claimed was so powerful, it cured her cancer

Wellness guru Belle Gibson gained a cult following on social media with her clean eating healthy lifestyle which she claimed was so powerful, it cured her cancer.

The influencer built her success in the early 2010s on the entirely fabricated story that she was given four months to live following a brain cancer diagnosis – but after following a healthy diet, she managed to make the inoperable tumour disappear.

Before long, she had launched an app and a cookbook called The Whole Pantry. A line from her cookbook claimed: ‘I was empowering myself to save my own life through nutrition, patience, determination and love.’

However, things began to fall apart for Gibson in 2015 when an Australian publication revealed she had lied about donating a portion of her book and app sales to a charity.

When these reports emerged, some journalists began to question her authenticity even further and started digging into Gibson’s medical history. 

Soon, it came to light that she never had cancer in the first place, and she had made it all up to gain fame and profit.

In 2017, she was fined $410,000 (£240,000) after being found guilty of breaching consumer law, but in 2019 the Daily Mail Australia revealed she had not yet paid a penny of the fine and was ‘hiding out’ in her Melbourne home.

While the disgraced former influencer faded into relative obscurity for a few years following the scandal, she briefly re-emerged in 2020 with a new name and announced she had been welcomed into the Ethiopian Oromo community.

Gibson revealed she was going by the name Sobantu and had adopted a headscarf while out in public, while declaring her worship of Allah.

In a bizarre 11-minute video, Gibson spoke about Ethiopian politics and referred to the East African nation as ‘home’. 

She also discussed how she had raised money for the Oromo community – which rang alarm bells with many sceptics given her fraudster history.

The following year, the Daily Mail Australia reported Gibson had been ‘banished’ by the Oromo community.

Dr Tarekegn Chimdi, president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria, said: ‘She was was told not to come.

‘It was concerning when someone is using the community’s name who is not a member of that community.

‘She was coming across as more Oromo than Oromo people.’

He added: ‘She is not involved with us. She’s not coming to our place, no way, no time.’

Two years on from her second cancellation, it is unclear what Gibson is up to these days as she has slipped back under the radar.

JAMES CHARLES 

Cancelled: 2021 

James Charles (pictured at the Met Gala in 2019) survived several controversies before his star faded in 2021 when he admitted to sending sexually explicit messages to 16-year-old boys. He claimed he didn’t know how young they were when he began chatting to them

Make-up artist and YouTube star James Charles boasted a whopping 25.5 million subscribers on the video platform at the height of his fame, with 36 million followers on TikTok to boot.

The star, who counted the Kardashians among his friends, was considered a trailblazer in the world of beauty as a male make-up artist, and became CoverGirl’s first male ambassador. 

He brushed shoulders with Hollywood royalty and was often present on the red carpet at exclusive events including the Met Gala.

However, controversy was never far away for Charles as he often found himself embroiled in scandals.

He managed to bounce back from cancellation status several times before his career finally plunged off a cliff-edge, never to recover.

In 2017, during a catastrophic outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Charles tweeted a joke about being frightened he’d contract the deadly virus ahead of a trip to South Africa, a nation nearly 3,000 miles away. 

Despite facing backlash both for making light of the epidemic and referring to the continent of Africa as if it was one nation, Charles’s fans appeared to forgive him following a grovelling apology.

As more scandals piled up over the years, including accusations of transphobia when Charles said he wasn’t a ‘full gay’ because he was attracted to trans men, he somehow continued to maintain a loyal fanbase.

However, in 2021 allegations began to emerge that Charles had exchanged inappropriate sexual messages with 16-year-old boys.

After the allegations emerged, Charles released a video admitting he had solicited nude images from the boys and ‘sexted’ them, but insisted he didn’t know they were under the age of 18.

He said: ‘Today’s video is going to be from the heart and I’m going to focus on what happened – all of the conclusions that I’ve come to – and most importantly holding myself accountable for my own actions.

‘First and foremost I need to say sorry. I owe a massive apology to anybody that I’ve hurt or anybody that I made uncomfortable with my actions.’

He then said he added both boys on Snapchat and ‘asked how old they were right away, was told that they were 18, believed them, engaged in flirty conversation and then later on found out that they were 16’.

Charles said he was ’embarrassed’ and immediately ‘blocked both people’.

Despite his apology, it seemed to be the final straw for fans and brands alike, who dropped Charles almost instantly. 

Following the allegations, YouTube announced it was demonetising Charles’s YouTube channel, which had already lost millions of subscribers.

These days, Charles is still active on social media, but his star appears to have faded as he is rarely spotted out and about with the A listers he once called friends.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS 

Cancelled: 2017  

Milo Yiannopoulos fell out of favour with the alt-right in 2017 when he made comments about how he believed some 13-year-old boys could be in consensual relationships with adult men

Yiannopoulos was escorted from Sproul Plaza at the Berkley campus after a speech in 2017

After a quiet start to his career in journalism, first writing for the Telegraph before co-founding The Kernel in 2011, Milo Yiannopoulos achieved notoriety in 2014 when he began writing for far-right publication Breitbart News.

Despite eventually being ‘cancelled’, Yiannopoulos’s career was plagued with controversy from the beginning, from allegations that staff were not being paid fairly at The Kernel, to the writer’s association with the misogynistic ‘Gamergate’ movement.

The movement is widely recognised as a right-wing online backlash against feminism and diversity in video game culture.

In 2016, following the release of the Ghostbusters reboot, a backlash against the all-female cast, in particular Leslie Jones who received a slew of racist insults, was linked back to tweets from Yiannopoulos – ultimately leading to his Twitter account being permanently suspended.

He was also being increasingly associated with Nazism and Nazi ideals – including a video filmed in 2016 when he performed karaoke and was pictured making Hitler salutes. 

However, Yiannopoulos’s alt-right fans continued to follow him adoringly despite the controversies – until 2017 when controversial comments the commentator had made in the previous two years were posted on YouTube.

He claimed that relationships between two 13-year-old boys ‘happen perfectly consensually’ because some 13-year-olds are mature enough to have sexual relationships.

He further said: ‘You’re misunderstanding what paedophilia means. Paedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature.’

Following the resurfacing of the comments, Yiannopoulos’s scheduled appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference was cancelled and many of his supporters began to turn against him.

The commentator later attempted to clarify his comments, claiming he was not defending child molestation, but before long he had resigned from his role at Breitbart.

These days, Yiannopoulos’s following is much smaller than it once was and his influence on the alt-right community has faded. However he is still associating himself with figures on the right.

Last summer, he announced he was working as an unpaid intern for Marjorie Taylor Green, a controversial Republican politician and conspiracy theorist known for her outrageous and bizarre views, and has been known to support conspiracy forum QAnon.

SHANE DAWSON 

Cancelled: 2020

Shane Dawson is an American YouTuber, actor, filmmaker, writer, and musician. He was one of the first people to rise to fame on YouTube and to he has 19.3 million subscribers on the platform

Shane Dawson is an American YouTuber, actor, filmmaker, writer, and musician.

He was one of the first people to rise to fame on YouTube and to he still has 19.3 million subscribers on the platform.

He began making videos in 2008 at the age of 19 and garnered over 500 million views during the next two years with a variety of content from parody videos to reaction clips.

He also gained a lot of traction with his wild conspiracy theory clips.

He hosted a podcast for four years until 2017 called Shane and Friends, where people later drew attention to clips of Dawson making questionable comments about sexualizing minors and pedophilia. 

In 2015, during a podcast episode that has since been deleted, Dawson tells a story about dry humping and ejaculating on his cat. He later denied the story was true and claimed he told the story for shock value.

Taking to Twitter he wrote: ‘So, I’m sorry for what I said about my cat, I’m sorry for what I said about anything or anyone that was offensive, and I’m sorry for being someone who thought being super offensive and shocking all the time was funny.

‘I’m sorry for my past. But I’m really to make it right and I feel like without my past I wouldn’t be who I am today and I wouldn’t be able to grow & spend my energy on things that actually mean something. 

‘This has been the best 2 years of my life and it’s because I’ve been able to drop the act and be myself. And I’m sorry for not doing it sooner.’ 

However, clips surfaced of him making pedophilia jokes and donning blackface, which have rightfully put Dawson’s brand in a negative light and sparked cancellation campaigns. 

His demise came in 2020 when people called Dawson out for racist, inappropriate videos he had made, leading him to formally apologize in a 20 minute video.

JEFFREE STAR

Cancelled: 2020  

Jeffree Star started out on MySpace as a musician and performed at Vans Warped Tour in 2008 and 2009 (pictured at Skin Launch Party, Harriet’s Rooftop in 2022)

Allegations against Star (left) included accusations of manipulation from Tati Westbrook and claims that both Dawson (right) and Star made racist comments

Jeffree Star started out on MySpace as a musician, before launching a YouTube channel in 2006 where he’d post makeup tutorials. 

He was once friends with a group of makeup YouTubers that included Manny MUA, Gabriel Zamora, Laura Lee, and Nikita Dragun, but had a public falling out with them, in a controversy known as ‘Dramageddon.’

Allegations against Star included accusations of manipulation from Tati Westbrook and claims that both Dawson and Star made racist comments.

However things came crashing down in 2020, when Insider published an investigation into claims of sexual assault, physical violence, and hush money offered to his accusers.

The article looked into allegations that Star had drugged men, acted violently toward men who rejected his romantic advances and went into detail about videos of Star making racist comments, and more. 

Star’s attorney denied the claims of physical and sexual violence to Insider, calling them ‘false and defamatory.’ 

He responded to his cancellation by posting a video titled: ‘I got CANCELLED again…so I had a $200,000 shopping spree!’ 

The video description, wrote: ‘Hey everyone! Welcome BACK to my channel… Instead of talking about the millionth false rumor to hit the internet, I’m exciting to unveil my custom one of a kind PINK Louis Vuitton monogram shoe trunk!!!!!!! Contrary to popular belief and slander, I don’t money shame anyone and we all know I’ve come from literally NOTHING. I created glitter from dirt and will always be grateful for how far I’ve come.’

In 2020, members of the YouTube drama community noticed that the Shane X Jeffree Conspiracy Collection had disappeared from Morphe’s website.

The makeup brand previously collaborated with Dawson and Star to market the collection and sell it in their stores.

In an email to a customer, Morphe wrote it did ‘not condone or agree with the actions and behavior of Shane Dawson, and they do not in any way reflect Morphe’s beliefs,’ writing that it no longer carried the Conspiracy collection.

‘Jeffree Star has acknowledged mistakes made in the past and has apologized, taken accountability, and worked hard to make amends within the community,’ the email added.

In August 2021, Jeffree moved out of Los Angeles and bought a yak farm in Wyoming, where he currently lives. 

But despite moving out of the big city for a countryside retreat, that hasn’t stopped the influencer getting involved in highly controversial drama.

In February he faced more backlash on social media following comments he made about gender neutral pronouns on the Bussin’ With The Boys podcast where he sat down for a chat with the Tennessee Titans’ Taylor Lewan.

Jeffree made some negative comments regarding they/them pronouns, saying that he’s: ‘not into all the other bulls***. The ‘they’ and ‘them.’ 

‘And all that extra sh** that we added during the pandemic because everyone was so bored in their f***ing houses.

‘They just started to make up more sh**,’ he continued. ‘That’s why the conservatives like me, because I’m just real,’ he continued. 

‘You’re not they and them. You’re trans — you’re male, or you’re female. And people get so mad when I say that. How are you a ‘they?’ What the f***k does that mean? It’s stupid!’ 

After being slammed for his comments, Jeffree took to his Instagram Story to address the response.

He said he is ‘old school’ and doesn’t agree with ‘all these f**king 30 terms.’

‘So to anyone that is trying to make it seem like I said that non-binary don’t exist, I never said that…Never said it, you’re putting words in my mouth.’ 

Earlier this year, he caused controversy by posting a snap of his new ‘NFL boo’ on a private jet – sparking an internet meltdown – and then a second of the pair together in a bathroom of his $2million 70-acre ranch in Casper, Wyoming.

It left many fans guessing as to which NFL star could be romantically involved with the makeup guru.