Jake Paul, the YouTuber-turned-pro-athlete, has made millions by transforming controversy into a career.
His contentious bid for boxing stardom is the subject of a new episode of Netflix’s sports documentary series UNTOLD, "Jake Paul the Problem Child." Through interviews with coaches, challengers, supporters, and Paul's own family, the doc paints a flattering portrait of Paul as a scrappy newcomer reviving the sport while challenging its old guard.
Those interviews also reveal new information about Paul's struggle to mediate his father's mental and physical abuse and, instead of confronting them, dangerously frames Paul's boxing obsession as a healthy way to channel his repressed trauma into a kind of productive — and lucrative — violence.
"Jake may throw around the word 'abusive,'" Logan Paul, Jake's older brother, says of their father's behavior towards them as children. "I prefer 'not quite legal.'" Logan, as you might recall, is also a YouTuber who rose to fame alongside his brother and made headlines in 2017 for a distasteful vlog that documented his discovery of a corpse in Japan's Aokigahara Forest.
The brothers are very much a package deal, bound by a dynamic of abuse that shaped their upbringing. "He was so hard and so tough on us," says Jake of their father, Greg, "that my brother and my imagination really started to flare up." They began making videos together as a form of escapism, eventually gaining popularity on short-form video platform Vine before becoming the most popular creators on YouTube by around 2016.
Logan describes their father as "a menace" and their childhood as "fucking torture." In his brief appearances in the episode, Greg does little to refute these claims. "I never laid hands on my kids," he says, before immediately changing tack. "And I did tell him, I said 'Jake, I did pick you up and throw you on the couch a couple times.' [Jake said] 'Yeah, but I was afraid of you.' I'm like, that's what the fuck dads are supposed to do," noting his approach is better than being "some fucking fairy whiny ass little bitch who's gonna sit there and talk about emotions."
Greg Paul, Pam Stepnick (mother to Jake and Logan), and Logan Paul watch Jake fight.
Credit: Netflix
The brothers remain ports in the storm for each other. "We were like this team [against]... my dad," says Jake, "It was always Logan and I against him."
It could be argued that Logan himself is the source of significant stress for Jake. As the two sparred for YouTube dominance, Logan claimed to have purposely wooed and slept with Jake's ex-girlfriend to upset him. He can also be overbearingly theatrical. In UNTOLD, Logan is interviewed while lounging in a bathtub, sipping his sports drink, Prime, from a martini glass. It's easy to imagine what it's like to live your life playing second string to that kind of domineering showmanship. Still, Jake says, "I love Logan more than anyone in this world."
It must be especially hurtful then, that Logan takes his father's side.
According to him, "Jake mentioned my dad abusing him as a child" at a family gathering. In the ensuing argument, "it hurt Jake so much that my dad refused to acknowledge the physical hardship that he put us through when we were young," Logan recalls, though he doesn't seem to care.
"Jake is still traumatized to this day about how my dad treated him," he continues. "Fucking get over it, Jake, I'm sorry. Look what has happened in your life! I have a hard time understanding why the trauma from Jake's childhood still affects him, knowing the monster that it created [and] what that monster is doing in his life."
Jake Paul, problem child.
Credit: Netflix
The "monster" Logan is referring to is Jake's ability to endure pain and exercise it on others for millions of dollars. But Logan also notes that, before Jake found boxing, he was afraid that Jake might take his own life. "He needed purpose." Logan says.
Logan and the filmmakers fail to both understand and explore the harms of reframing boxing as a suitable coping mechanism for abuse. For Jake, it would seem that boxing is simply a bandaid on an open wound.
UNTOLD's narrative serves a single purpose: to position sports as a kind of savior, as the ultimate redemption, as an acceptable form of unfettered violence between human beings. Essentially, the message is this: It doesn't matter if your dad beat you, as long as you can now make millions beating on other people.
That’s how the insidious cycle of trauma carries on.
A friend told me that she had also watched the doc and had a single takeaway: It made her sad. That's the takeaway for me, too.
Problem children act out for a reason; it's their way of asking for love.
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