Good intentions? TikTok star Charli D’Amelio reacted to the controversy surrounding her and sister Dixie D’Amelio’s video with their personal chef, Aaron May, after the siblings drew ire for their treatment of him.
“All of this is happening because [of] a misunderstanding,” Charli, 16, said through tears in a Thursday, November 19, Instagram Live video. “I just feel like that’s not OK, and if this is the community that I’m in and the community that I put myself in, I don’t know if I wanna do that anymore.”
The influencer then called on other social media users to watch their words. “I know that this is gonna be a huge joke to whoever sees it, but like, at the end of the day, just, like, be nice,” she continued, referencing death threats she has received. “I feel like it’s not that hard, and you can say whatever. You can say I’m disrespectful, you can say I don’t have basic human decency, but at the end of the day, I’m still a person.”
Elsewhere in the video, Charli clarified that she does not want her followers “to think that I don’t care” about them as people or view them only as “numbers.” Her remark came after she playfully complained about not reaching 100 million TikTok followers by her one-year anniversary on the app.
Charli and Dixie, 19, made headlines earlier this week when they posted a YouTube video with fellow internet personality James Charles, in which May, 42, prepared dinner for the trio and the sisters’ parents, Marc D’Amelio and Heidi D’Amelio. The siblings gagged and made faces in front of the Food Network star after Dixie found a snail in her paella.
“It brings you good luck and good fortune to eat it,” May told the “Be Happy” singer before she eventually ran outside to throw up. Charli, for her part, joked that she would rather have “dino nuggets” for dinner. Commenters then accused the duo of being “so rude” as they lost hundreds of thousands of followers.
Dixie defended herself on Wednesday, November 18, denying in a TikTok video that she was “disrespectful” to May. “My team knows I throw up a lot. I throw up at the smell, the thought or the taste of anything,” she claimed. “So, when they saw the snails, they were like, ‘Oh, let’s get her and try to see if we can get a reaction out of her.’ … I love [our] chef, and I would never disrespect him in any way.”
Charles, 21, later clapped back at the naysayers. “This charli situation is NOT sitting right with me,” he tweeted on Thursday. “100M followers in one year & y’all expect her to know how to be a perfect role model? Death threats because she’s a picky eater & made a joke about a milestone? 30+ year olds dragging someone half their age?”
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