TikTok’s most-followed user Charli Grace D'Amelio, 16, lost 1 million followers just in few days after her fame-pumped family posted a “mystery guest” dinner video featuring celebrity chef Aaron May.
In the clip, which was announced to be the first in a series called ‘Dinner with the D’Amelios’, Charlie, her parents and her 19-year-old sister Dixie, who also has a substantial 43.8-million fanbase on the platform, were joined by fellow TikToker James Charles to be served traditional Spanish paella by May.
However, after the video was posted on the family’s YouTube channel this week, it immediately went viral, and not with a positive vibe.
Both girls were slammed for their “rude”, “disrespectful” behaviour and “snobbery” towards Chef May throughout the dinner, with Dixie even running out from the table to “throw up” at one point after trying out snails, all accompanied by her sister’s vivid facial expressions and a comment whether she could eat “dino nuggets” instead.
Charlie is also heard in the video complaining to James Charles about having only 95 million followers at the time the video was filmed and not an “even number” of 100 million.
The girls, and their parents’ apparent inaction, have received a strong backlash from fans, who left Carlie’s TikTok page in droves. Thus, Charlie went from having 99.5 million followers on Wednesday to having 98.5 million on Friday, according to the New York Post’s estimates.
“i watched the d’amelio dinner video and charli and dixie were literally being so rude. be grateful for the food you have. you literally had a personal chef [sic],” one user wrote on Twitter.
Dancing star Charlie tried to play down the drama by posting a sobbing clip on Thursday night, where she accused her critics of attacking her personally, saying “messed up stuff” to her and even sending death threats. The second-highest earning TikToker then suggested that she could even leave the platform over the toxic response she had met on the net.
Dixie also weighed in on the controversy by explaining her “spoiled” behaviour by the fact that she simply throws up “a lot.”
“My family and I have been working with Chef Aaron May for a couple of months now, working on content for our channel and working on content for his channel, and [we’ve] made an amazing friendship,” Dixie commented.
Both James Charles and Chef May rushed to defend the sisters.
“this charli situation is NOT sitting right with me… 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?” Charles wrote on Twitter.
“Those girls are the greatest, I love them. It was all fun and games. Not at all, not at all [were my feelings hurt]. I don’t expect her to love the snails. Like I said, somebody thought it would be funny to feed them snails, and they reacted the way they reacted. It’s all good,” Aaron May told The Hollywood Fix, when commenting on the backlash.
So far, Charlie D'Amelio still remains one of the most-followed up creators on TikTok and has over 7.7 billion “likes” after started actively posting on the platform in 2019.