James Charles Learns Privilege the Hard Way

Sometimes the internet moves faster than someone’s own conscience. That’s what happened to James Charles when he decided to publicly roast a Spirit Airlines employee who slid into his DMs asking for financial help.

The backstory is straightforward enough. A woman who’d been laid off reached out to the makeup influencer on Friday looking for assistance. Instead of a quiet decline or silence, Charles posted a video response telling her to get a job rather than copy-paste money requests to multiple celebrities. He added the kicker that since she didn’t follow him, he had no obligation to follow her back with support. It was sharp, it was cold, and it landed like a slap.

The blowback was immediate and fierce. And Charles clearly felt it.

In his follow-up, the influencer struck a completely different tone. He admitted that he doesn’t actually understand why that particular message set him off so hard. But he does understand something bigger: he got lucky. His makeup tutorials exploded, and that stroke of fortune gave him freedoms and options that most people—including that woman who reached out—will never have. He acknowledged using his privilege as a cudgel against someone asking for help, which isn’t the flex he thought it was.

There’s real reflection here too. Charles pointed out that he knows people actively job-hunting right now who are struggling. By dismissing the idea that finding work is tough, he’d essentially told her that her desperation was unreasonable—which wasn’t fair and wasn’t true. He even tried to track down the woman to apologize directly, though he couldn’t locate her original message.

What’s interesting isn’t that he messed up—plenty of people with massive platforms do and never acknowledge it. What matters is that he actually sat with the criticism, examined why he’d reacted so harshly, and came back with something that felt genuine rather than damage control. That’s the kind of growth moment that doesn’t happen every time a celebrity gets called out. Whether that translates into real behavior change is another question entirely.