Some internet beef has a way of living in your mind rent-free. I was bullied in middle school and had access to the internet via a Kindle Fire, so, of course, I still wonder what happened between Trisha Paytas and Shane Dawson. If you’re unfamiliar with the lore, Paytas and Dawson were best friends and frequent collaborators in the mid to late 2010s. But following a public falling out, many netizens are still confused about the status of their relationship: Are Trisha Paytas and Shane Dawson still friends?
It’s been a question at the back of my mind. However, it came to the forefront after clips of Dawson on Kati Morton’s podcast, Ask Kati Anything, went viral on TikTok. The podcast, which was released on April 17, was a tell-all from Dawson about his cancellation, mental health, and friendships. After the podcast was released, fans were quick to clip a section where Dawson talks about a friendship in his life that went south, which fans assumed was Paytas, given their history. However, Dawson clears up in the podcast that the aforementioned story was not about any other content creator. “I always have to put a disclaimer, it’s not YouTubers, it’s not that,” Dawson said on the podcast. “There’s no drama, like, yeah — it was like, a personal life thing.”
This hasn’t stopped fans from wondering where Paytas’ and Dawson’s friendship stands, though. And with the podcast clips going viral on social media, I took the liberty of doing a deep dive on the two and their timeline, because I know all of my other former YouTube-obsessed folks are wondering the same thing.
What happened between Trisha Paytas and Shane Dawson?
As I previously mentioned, Dawson and Paytas frequently collaborated on YouTube, but they were also friends offline. However, their friendship seemed to fall apart after old videos of Dawson being inappropriate with underage fans, as well as his racially insensitive content, resurfaced in 2020. Dawson addressed the controversies in his YouTube video “Taking Accountability,” where he said, “At this point, realizing how many people I’ve hurt or how many people I’ve inspired to say awful things or do anything awful, to finally just own up to all of this and be accountable is worth losing everything to me”
While Paytas initially defended Dawson during the cancellation, their friendship took a turn for the worse after Paytas got into some drama with one of Dawson’s other close friends, Jeffree Star. In January 2021, Paytas uploaded a now-deleted video titled “why I’m scared of jeffree and hairbyjay,” where she said that Star and his friends were making fun of Paytas’s skin and weight, among other things, during a Vegas trip in 2020 — which was confirmed in a livestream by Jay. He has since apologized for the livestream, saying, “I apologize to Trisha for the things that I said about her, the way that I [addressed] myself to her wasn’t appropriate, nor was it right.”
A few days later, in a now-deleted episode of the Frenemies podcast, Paytas’s then co-host, Ethan Klein, called out Dawson and his partner, Ryland Adams, for being bad friends to Paytas and not defending her against Star. Paytas said that Dawson reached out to her but was “not listening” to what she had to say. After more back and forth between Paytas and Adams on their respective podcasts, Paytas uploaded a now-deleted video titled “Shane and Ryland are LITERAL SCUM OF THE EARTH,” which is exactly what you’d think it’d be about.
Are Trisha Paytas and Shane Dawson still friends?
Short answer, no. Since the drama, Trisha has gone on multiple podcasts to say that she and Dawson are no longer friends. However, Paytas recently opened up about whether or not she would rekindle her friendship with Dawson after all of the drama. “I really loved our friendship,” Paytas said in a January episode of Just Trish. “I just think everything I found out after [about him] like, I don’t know, like talking sh*t, and feeding drama channels and stuff. I don’t know, it kind of sucks.” Her Campus reached out to Dawson’s team about the claims that he was contacting drama channels about Paytas, but did not hear back at the time of publication.
Well, there you have it, folks.