Jeffree Star is one of the most infamous and controversial beauty guru on Youtube with a growing subscriber count of 9.8 million people. He is also known for being ex-best friends with other popular influencers in the beauty community such as Manny MUA, Laura Lee and Nikita Dragun. No one really knows what happened between the five of them or why they parted ways.
It wasn’t until in early August when Shane Dawson, another well known Youtuber, dropped his YouTube documentary on Jeffree Star. The documentary showed the more vulnerable and softer side of Jeffree instead of the typical wall he usually puts up around people. He was able to be more open and real about his ex-best friends and about what really went on in the beauty community, and his life. "With my ex-friends, people still don't really know what went on. Why do I feel like they need to know? Because there's so many versions of things that never happened out there,” he said, “Half of the people still think I'm the bad guy, when I only loved and cared about all these people, boosted them up, and gave them all my connections, but I'm still the f**king bad guy." Millions of people tuned in and watched the documentary. A few days after it dropped, YouTuber Gabriel Zamora Tweeted a picture of himself, Laura Lee, Nikita Dragun, and Manny MUA with the caption: "B*tch is bitter because without him we're doing better.” Immediately fans called out Gabriel for trying to attack Jeffree, and started tweeting back in Jeffree’s defense. That's when Gabriel responded: "Imagine stanning a racist? I could never," referring to Jeffree's racist comments from 10 years ago when he called a group of white girls the n-word for throwing offensive slurs regarding his sexuality. That was the tweet that added fuel to the fire. Jeffree fans started to dig deep and discovered old racist and offensive posts from Gabriel, Nikita, Manny, and Laura Lee from a few years back. One tweet in particular from Laura Lee upsetted a bunch of fans. In 2012, Laura tweeted: "Tip for all black people if you pull your pants up you can run from the police faster.." Laura Lee posted an apology on twitter and posted a tearful video on her YouTube channel. In her apology video, she stated how sorry she was to fans for letting them down and even apologized to Jeffree for all of the fuss. The video caused her even more backlash because not only did she take a while to actually apologize, people also felt like she made so many excuses and was blaming her actions on different things. Ironically, none of her “bffs” stood up for her, even Manny MUA, her closest friend of the group. Nikita, Manny, and Gabriel all issued separate apologies that fans just weren’t buying either. Gabriel dropped a big video announcing that he is now Team Jeffree and will be cutting "toxic" Manny out of his life for good. |