No one is keeping up with Trisha Paytas, YouTube’s most frighteningly entertaining star.
Within seconds, Trisha Paytas has already managed to shock me. She’s in full L.A.-influencer drag: platinum-blonde extensions, baby-pink acrylics, with a cut-crease smoky eye and a stiff, plump beige pout. Seated in the kitchen of her still mostly empty five-bedroom, eight-bathroom new home in Ventura County—where everything is white and tan and has that California casual-chic look that has become standard-issue for the YouTube famous—she looks so … normal. And then she opens her mouth.
Paytas is recounting her current obsession with Adam Sandler, and not in a “I’m rewatching 50 First Dates” way. More along the lines of “I just spent thousands of dollars on at least a dozen of his actual movie costumes.” “He’s Jewish and funny and zhlubby and gets really attractive people in all his movies,” she explains. “So right now my phase is I want to be him. I’m sure in six months I’m going to be someone else.”
She is not kidding. This is, in fact, the essence of Trisha Paytas, who has spent the past decade and a half trying on different identities to see which ones will make her the most famous. Some have worked: In 2010, she attempted to beat the Guinness World Record for speed-talking and, despite failing to do so, still scored appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and America’s Got Talent. Throughout her career, she estimates, she has been on 30 reality-TV shows. She has written eight books and recorded ten albums (mostly dance pop, though she did recently come out with a mid-aughts-emo-inspired EP under the alias Sadboy2005), only one of which made the charts. Yet nothing has been more successful in getting Paytas attention than what she does best: pissing people off. She is among the handful of YouTubers, most of whom either hate one another or at least pretend to, who have necessitated the formation of an entire drama-channel cottage industry devoted to explaining their constantly fluctuating relationships. Of her divisive peers—Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, James Charles, Tana Mongeau, Nikita Dragun, the Paul brothers—Paytas, the enigmatic bigboobed bimbo in the most self-aware sense of the word, is by far the most compelling, having perfected a mode of influencerhood that inverts what the profession is.
If a typical influencer presents a consistent, idealized version of what 2010s internet culture taught us to desire, Paytas gives us the opposite: a chaotic and (mostly) unglamorous portrait of whatever or whomever she’s feeling that day. One of her favorite methods of addressing her fans is by talking directly to the camera while eating, say, the new Pizza Hut Triple Treat Box or chicken fries in her car. (Known as a mukbang, it’s a whole YouTube art form, and she’s a pro at it.) Recent stylistic phases have included emo bandleader, kawaii à la Care Bear, and Domino’s Pizza employee (though she has since moved on to Papa John’s). The result is camp in its purest form, crafted by someone who’s in on the joke but takes it perfectly seriously. “Whenever I dress up, I put a lot of time and money and effort into it,” she says. “Some people think I’m being ironic, but I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think I get it fully.”
For the best sense of how famous Paytas is, simply go find the nearest teenager and ask them. But if we’re talking numbers: She has a follower count of 6 million combined on her two YouTube channels, 5.1 million on TikTok, three-quarters of a million on Twitter, and more than 300,000 on Instagram, but only because her original account was banned “for repeatedly breaking our rules,” according to a Facebook spokesperson—mostly for nudity and sexual content. The fun of being Paytas’s follower lies in everything from what she is wearing that morning to whom she’s mad at that week or, frequently, the latest problematic thing she has said. And then watching drama and commentary channels explain it all in videos titled “everything
wrong with trisha paytas” and “Trisha Paytas being toxic and abusive for 10 minutes straight.” In the past year, Paytas has publicly feuded with Charli D’Amelio, the world’s most famous 16-year-old TikToker, broken up her decade-long friendships with the only people in the YouTubersphere whose résumés of scandal are as long as her own (Dawson and Star), and outraged more than one marginalized community. It is impossible to separate Paytas’s endless desire for attention from the things she has done to get it: She has been filmed rapping the N-word multiple times. She has been accused of making a mockery of gender identities and mental disorders. Her videos have, on many occasions, flagrantly crossed the line between satire and cruelty.
As with many professionally charismatic people who have done bad things, those serious lapses of judgment are easy to forget when talking to the woman directly. Paytas, 32, is infectiously bubbly and at times insecure to the point of making you feel a little bit sorry for her; whether that’s her goal is a question that never really leaves your mind. She is remarkably forthcoming; it can feel like she’s confiding her secrets in you even though everyone already knows them. She talks about how she has grown since her “trolling” days within the notoriously toxic 2010s YouTube culture. She tells me about her plastic surgeries and liposuctions. She speaks soberly about the three times she was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. She tells me she wants to be remembered as a good person.
Paytas has become immune to cancellation in a way that only a handful of people are: Trump is one—and the rest are pretty much all on YouTube.
paytas has “blacked out” much of her life growing up, which was spent mostly outside Rockford, Illinois, with her mother and, occasionally, in Riverside, California, with
her father. “All I remember is I was kind of a loner. People weren’t necessarily mean to me, but I didn’t have any friends,” she says. When her mother wasn’t working one of many overlapping jobs—teaching aide, bus driver, bartender, postal worker—she was more friend than parent. “I said I wanted to be a stripper at 12, and she was like, ‘Okay.’”
In her late teens, Paytas started living with an older man who was formerly Alice Cooper’s personal assistant. When he began demanding rent money, she got a job at his friend’s strip club, Godfather, in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, despite the fact that she didn’t know how to dance. She met a woman there who encouraged her to start escorting. At first, she had fun— she’d sleep with famous people (or at least people who knew famous people) and wealthy businessmen from out of town. She tells a story about a celebrity-adjacent client who used to get off by pretending he was Elvis and shooting rounds over her head (“I stopped seeing him because I thought, Oh, maybe he wants to kill me”). Then, well, drugs happened—coke, heroin, whatever was around. “The [clients didn’t] want a girl that was already strung out coming to their house,” she says. “So I would end up on Santa Monica Boulevard and hook there for literally $5 or just a place to stay.”
Soon a platform would arrive where the money was just as good and you didn’t even have to leave your house. Paytas posted her first YouTube video (a 42-second clip of herself rapping “Ice Ice Baby”) in 2007 under the channel “blndsundoll4mj”—“blnd” for the hair color she’d always wanted, “sun doll” after her love of tanning, and “4mj” because of an obsession with Michael Jackson. The first few dozen videos were largely devoted to her love of a different famous person, Quentin Tarantino, which included impressions of the director and at least one video in which she simulates a graphic makeout session between herself and a pillow taped with a photo of his face. Then, of course, she moved on to other fixations.
She wouldn’t truly hit the YouTube jackpot until 2012, when she posted a video called “Why I’m Voting for Mitt Romney,” citing reasons such as “He is super-gorgeous and hot.” It was her first taste of professional trollhood, and it worked: The video got 3 million views. Thanks to YouTube’s thenlucrative AdSense program, through which top creators were earning upwards of six figures, it also netted her $8,000. It was more money than she’d made that whole year. “I thought, I’m not really talented, so maybe I just need to offend as many people as possible to get money.”
So she became known for collecting controversies: There was the phase in 2011, and again in 2012, when she dressed up as “Trishii,” a character she invented who was supposed to be a Japanese pop star but ended up being mostly just racist; there was the one video in 2013 where she wondered aloud whether dogs have brains. There was the time in October 2019 when she uploaded a video titled “i am transgender
(female to male)” in which she claimed to identify as a gay man. Considering she’d previously claimed to identify as a chicken nugget, the video was met with outrage and mistrust. She stands by it, at least in theory. Her reasoning is that she’s nonbinary, as she now identifies, but didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it at the time (her pronouns are both she/her and they/them). Of her use of the N-word on camera, Paytas gives a response that’s now typical for influencers: “Obviously it was gross and awful, and that’s so embarrassing I have that clip out there because I’m, like, so not that person.”
She managed to incense another community when, in March 2020, she claimed to have dissociative-identity disorder, the highly stigmatized diagnosis formerly known as multiple-personality disorder. YouTubers accused her of spreading misinformation and self-diagnosing rather than seeking help. Again, she insists, it wasn’t trolling. “I was like, This is so fucking crazy that people are doubting me.” So she made a video in which she pretended to switch personalities on-camera.
Okay, that one was trolling.
“I thought, I’m not really talented, so maybe I just need to offend as many people as possible to get money .”
Paytas’s mental-health struggles are not a joke. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at age 31, having previously received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at age 12 and again at 18. Her mood shifts when we land on the topic of the three times she was committed to a mental facility in 2019. Back then, Paytas was part of a group of YouTubers called the Vlog Squad, best known for performing stunts and pulling pranks of varying degrees of ethicality on each other in enormous L.A. mansions. It was led by David Dobrik, who, until recently, was one of the few YouTubers to enjoy, by industry standards, an unsoiled reputation. But over the past few weeks, multiple former Vlog Squad members have accused him of fostering toxic work and creative environments; one alleged that a supposed “prank” was sexual assault.
Paytas started dating Vlog Squad member Jason Nash in 2017, and their two-year relationship was a common arrangement for the world of YouTube, where terms like boyfriend and girlfriend have different meanings on-camera and off; a video might be titled “girlfriend picks my outfit,” but both parties understand this is mostly a label of storytelling convenience rather than a signifier of any sort of commitment. Whatever type of relationship Paytas and Nash had ended when she ceased to be useful for the Vlog Squad, she says. “Jason was like, ‘I gotta break up with you because of David.’ That’s when I spiraled.”
In February 2019, while Paytas was getting ready for a party, Jason sent her a breakup text. She’d already been drinking, and upon receiving it, she took a Xanax and a Vicodin. She woke up in Cedars-Sinai in L.A. “Jason and David come while I’m lying on the stretcher, and I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out!’ I get off the gurney, I take off my gown, I start running out of the hospital, and security people shoot Ativan in my thigh and strap me down.” (Dobrik and Nash did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) “I have more PTSD from David and Jason than I do from hooking on Santa Monica Boulevard,” she says.
Paytas was admitted for a second time a few months later, during a period when she says she was addicted to painkillers. “May [2019] was a brutal month for me,” she says. “A lot of hate videos were being made.” She doesn’t remember what happened, but according to the police filing, when the officers came by her home for a wellness check, there were “pills and piss everywhere.” The third time, later that year, came when she was high on Instagram Live—she suspects it was a viewer who called the authorities.
Paytas seems to be doing well now. She’s in therapy and says she’s mostly handling her BPD. She’s engaged to a man from Israel named Moses (hence the obsession with Judaism and Adam Sandler); they’re planning three separate weddings (one in L.A., one in Israel, and one in Maui) for the end of this year. She has a new house to decorate and a popular podcast she cohosts with YouTuber Ethan Klein. She’s also the wealthiest she has ever been. Along with most YouTubers, her ad revenue has drastically declined from its peak in the mid-2010s—at one point, she says, she was making $200,000 a year off YouTube ads alone. She now estimates 70 percent of her income comes from her OnlyFans, a platform best known for being used by sex workers, where creators can paywall their content. Her subscriber count there fluctuates, but at around 22,000 to 32,000 per month, she’s in the top 0.01 percent of creators. (OnlyFans does not comment on the metrics of individual creators.) Even minus the 20 percent commission OnlyFans charges, she’s still making $1 million a year. “Everyone assumed I’d always done porn, but I never thought I would,” says Paytas, who joined last year. “But at 32, I was like, Who cares? My image is already tarnished.” She emphasizes that this is also the first time in her life that she’s proud of the content she puts online, now that she’s happier and more stable and, crucially, no longer considers herself a troll.
Is it possible to take Trisha at her word— that she’s changed and she’s trying and she’s sorry? It would be unreasonable to demand perfect consistency of thought from someone who has documented an abnormally large portion of her life for more than a decade. But Paytas wouldn’t be herself if she weren’t constantly altering who “herself” is. The cynical part of her knows her audience will indulge her whims and make excuses for her more despicable behaviors on the grounds that she lets us ride along on the roller coaster of her mind. It is a privilege reserved for people gifted with undeniable magnetism who are also willing to expose the ugliest parts of themselves—or, to use a phrase closely associated with Trump, to say the quiet parts out loud. It’s the same part of her that knows people on the internet don’t care if you say outrageous things so long as you’re keeping them entertained.
Besides, there’s something about Paytas that just feels beyond the internet. You start to get the sense that this is a woman who, no matter what period of history you dropped her into, would find a way to become famous—or at least make enough trouble to get people talking.