Beauty YouTuber James Charles has responded to a viral video featuring clips from an old video he filmed with Maddie and Kenzie Ziegler, in which commenters claimed he was ‘bullying’ Kenzie.

James Charles is one of the biggest beauty channels on YouTube, with over 24 million subscribers to his name. He’s been posting videos online since 2015, and over the years has collaborated with some huge names from Charli D’Amelio to Kim Kardashian.

In 2018, Charles uploaded a video in which he had former ‘Dance Moms’ stars Maddie and Kenzie Ziegler do his makeup.

In recent months, the video has seen a surge of new attention, after a video started going viral on social media that showed James’ interactions with Kenzie edited together.

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Many commenters claimed that James was ‘bullying’ Kenzie in the video with how he was acting towards her. One person wrote: “She was so excited to do a video with him, and that is how he acted. I feel really bad for Kenzie,” another saying, “that is clearly bullying, and he did it on purpose.”

However, in a YouTube video uploaded on October 8, Charles hit back at the accusations.

“This person basically edited this together to make it look like I was bullying Kenzie the entire video, which did not happen,” he said.

“I’m gonna tell you guys, I have been getting literal death threats and hate comments from this video going re-viral for several months now, to the point where we literally had to take down the original YouTube video from 2018 because people were being so, so beyond negative, and we just couldn’t deal with it anymore.”

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He explained that the moment in the viral video where he says “you’re never going to win,” was taken out of context, as in the original video he actually said “you’re never going to win with that attitude.”

James even went on to show a DM he received from Kenzie after he reached out to her before filming the video in which she says: “You seriously don’t have to apologize, that is not how I saw it! First of all, I was literally so much younger than you guys and I wasn’t as close to you so seriously don’t worry about that.”

Although he’s taken the original YouTube video down from his channel, the edit of him and Kenzie continues to do the rounds on social media, with one of the uploads to TikTok at over 7 million likes.

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