Jake Paul has always been something of a villain. His internet fame exploded after he and his brother, Logan Paul, amassed millions of followers posting prank videos and parodies. Eventually the now 26-year-old would become one of the highest paid YouTube stars in the world.
“I remember when they made the word influencer,” Paul says in Episode 1 of Netflix’s documentary anthology series UNTOLD. Titled Jake Paul the Problem Child, the film documents his transition from YouTuber to professional boxer. “That was us. They were talking about us.”
UNTOLD pulls back the curtain on some of sports’ most infamous events, specifically highlighting athletes who face mounting shame and public scrutiny in the midst of competition, and Paul’s story certainly fits the bill. Today, he’s causing a stir in the boxing world as “The Problem Child,” and has quickly become an influential, yet polarizing, fighter. The latest installment of UNTOLD focuses on Paul’s story, unpacking his early YouTube stardom and various controversies, including tensions with his neighbors and his brother, Logan, and the ways he’s used his controversial image to propel his boxing career.
“That’s where the Problem Child came from. I’ve always had that shit-talking nature,” Jake says in the film. Jake Paul the Problem Child includes interviews with his family, including his brother, as well as with multiple sports media personalities and famous fighters, all of whom explain why — love him or hate him — they think Jake Paul should be taken seriously in the sport. Below, check out a comprehensive timeline of Jake Paul’s career up until this point — and what he’s up to now.
In Jake Paul the Problem Child, brothers Jake and Logan Paul describe their father as authoritarian and their upbringing difficult. To cope, they tapped into their imaginations and started filming content, and in 2013, they started a YouTube channel. They weren’t exactly beginners: Before they became influential on YouTube, both Jake and Logan were big stars on the social video site, Vine, where Jake amassed 5.3 million followers before the site shut down. Over time, the boys realized that in order to make money off their YouTube content, they’d need to start using actors and props to expand their reach and build a larger following.
Jake dropped out of high school in 2014 and moved to LA with Logan. They lived in the same apartment complex as other famous YouTubers, hoping to make it big in Hollywood. The internet stars who lived there created content together regularly and, as Jake says in Jake Paul the Problem Child, they were all going viral multiple times each day at the time.
Jake Paul landed a starring role in 2016 in the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark, alongside future pop star Olivia Rodrigo. The show was about two best friends who make video blogs and write songs for their online channel, much like Jake’s real life.
By 2017, as the two brothers gained popularity from their respective online content, Jake and Logan began competing against each other to be the biggest YouTube star. Jake says the YouTube rivalry grew quickly once they realized the best way to continuously go viral and gain a greater following was to make crazier and crazier beef videos. Each brother began taunting the other on diss tracks, amongst other stunts. When all was said and done, those videos accumulated nearly 1 billion views, according to the British tabloid The Mirror.
In the summer of 2017, Jake’s West Hollywood neighbors became fed up with his YouTube antics, which included starting a fire in his backyard, burning a mattress and other furniture in an empty swimming pool, and filming dirt bike stunts up and down his block. Jake also made his home address public, which led to large groups of fans showing up to his house. His neighbors complained about him to the media. “We used to be a really nice, quiet street and now we’re just this, like, war zone,” a neighbor told KTLA at the time. After his neighbors looked into filing a class action lawsuit against the YouTuber, Jake’s landlord eventually sued him for $2.5 million, according to Forbes. Jake was also dropped by Disney.
In early 2018, Logan’s YouTube video of a visit to the Japanese forest Aokigahara, nicknamed “suicide forest” due to the large number of suicides that occur there, made international headlines when he showed the body of a suicide victim on camera. At the time, Logan lost the ability to make advertising money on his YouTube videos and was removed from Google Preferred, an advertising partnership with content creators, NBC News reported. He recorded an apology for his YouTube channel, and called his decision to post the original video a “severe and continuous lapse in my judgment.”
In February 2018, UK YouTuber KSI called out Jake and Logan Paul and challenged them to fight him and his brother, Deji. The brothers had their first boxing match in August 2018, which Jake claims was the biggest amateur fight in the history of the sport. Jake won the fight against Deji. Jake says that getting into boxing felt easy. When he was controversial in the YouTube world, sponsors didn’t want to work with him and his videos were demonetized. But, as Jake says in Jake Paul the Problem Child, “In the world of boxing, being the villain is the best thing.”
On Jan. 30, 2020, Jake made his professional boxing debut with a fight against YouTuber AnEsonGib. Jake won the fight in the first round with a technical knockout. Following the win, sports media personalities and boxing purists criticized Jake and other YouTubers for ruining the sport of boxing. In November 2020, Jake took his boxing to the next level and defeated former professional athlete Nate Robinson in a fight in under two rounds. By that time, Nakisa Bidarian, former CFO of UFC, had seen a unique opportunity with Jake to disrupt fight sports and become his manager and business partner. “He had 45 million people that consume his content, so if we go and turn this into a fighter, wow what a competitive advantage versus any other fighter that’s out there,” Bidarian says in the series.
In August 2020, the FBI executed a search warrant of Jake’s Calabasas home, where they seized several firearms. According to TMZ, which first reported the news, the FBI raid was allegedly connected to Jake’s arrest in Scottsdale, Arizona, in connection with trespassing at Scottsdale Fashion Square during the protests in response to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. (The Arizona charges against him were eventually dropped and federal charges never materialized.) In April 2021, TikTok star Justine Paradise, who has more than 500,000 TikTok followers, came forward with sexual assault accusations. Jake denied the accusations in a Twitter statement.
On April 17, 2021, Jake defeated former MMA athlete Ben Askren. Ahead of the fight, Jake taunted Askren in videos, telling him, “I promise to make you go down in history as the world’s worst UFC fighter.” Later that year, on Dec. 18, in a rematch fight against MMA fighter Tyron Woodley, Jake defeated him with a knockout in the sixth round. “As a result of that knockout, Jake became kind of an overnight sensation,” Bidarian says in Jake Paul the Problem Child. Jake’s professional boxing record was 5-0.
In January 2022, Jake was publicly feuding with UFC president Dana White and taunted him on YouTube with a diss track, claiming the UFC underpaid and failed to provide adequate health care for fighters. According to The Guardian, the feud began after Jake offered to retire from boxing if the UFC president agreed to better pay and health care provisions. Jake later told ESPN he planned to start a fighters’ union. Later that year, on Oct. 29, 2022, Jake defeated Anderson Silva, described as one of the greatest UFC athletes of all time, taking his professional boxing record to 6–0.
On Feb. 26, 2023, Jake fought professional boxer and former Love Island star Tommy Fury in Saudi Arabia. Despite his undefeated fighting record, sports personalities and fighters said they wouldn’t respect Jake until he fought a real boxer. The fight garnered more than 800,000 PPV buys globally, according to Bidarian. After a close and tense fight, Fury took the win by a split decision, serving Jake his first loss. “You’re not the man that I thought you were,” he told Jake. “You’re a tough man, you’ll go a long way.”
Jake and Logan Paul now live in Puerto Rico, where Jake trains every day. “In the YouTube world, not only was I not making progress, I was hurting myself,” he says in Jake Paul the Problem Child. “When I got into something where I could slowly start to make progress, it brought back happiness in my life. And boxing gave me that again.” Jake’s most recent professional fight took place on Aug. 5, 2023, in Dallas, Texas, against professional mixed martial artist Nate Diaz, who recently dissed Jake and said he was going to “whoop his ass.” Jake apparently did the whooping, however, defeating Diaz in a unanimous decision and improving his record to 7-1.
Watch Jake Paul the Problem Child on Netflix now.
