YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul was accused of sexual assault this month, and now more people who lived at his Team 10 house have come forward with allegations of exploitation, harassment, and bullying in an extensive report from the New York Times.
Among those to detail their experiences at the Team 10 house—a rented mansion in Los Angeles where creators would live together—was musician AJ Mitchell, who moved in at just 14. The house became something of a “blueprint” for similiar collab houses in the influencer sphere, with Paul and his team inviting young creatives to live there for free if they agreed to produce content on a regular basis.
Mitchell said he arrived in Los Angeles in 2016 after receiving an invite from Jake Paul and painstakingly convincing his parents to allow it to happen. For multiple weeks, Mitchell wasn’t given a bedroom, he said, and recalled a time he went to record music on his keyboard only to be told it was thrown in a pool for a YouTube video. In the 14 months he stayed there, he was never paid directly by Team 10 but did get money from two brand deals.
“If you got tagged in one of Jake’s YouTube videos, you could get 50,000 followers,” said Mitchell, now 19. “Jake would use that to manipulate everyone. If anyone didn’t do what Jake wanted, he’d tell everyone else in the house not to tag them. Jake had a monopoly, and he decided who got famous.” Mitchell said he was often “sleeping on the floor” and rarely if ever provided with food.
“He was the boss,” he said of Paul, who would host parties where alcohol and weed was readily available to minors. The festivities would often see guests in their 20s and 30s interacting with teens, which Mitchell said led to him getting into a sexual relationship with a woman almost a decade older.
“I was a baby. I had a baby face,” Mitchell said, realizing recently it was not a consensual relationship. “I feel like that’s just weird now.”
He’s far from the only former Jake Paul collaborator to detail their experiences at the Team 10 house. Actress and model Railey Lollie said she worked with Paul when she was 17, and he would frequently call he “jailbait” and make other inappropriate remarks about her appearances. One time in 2017, he allegedly groped her; she told him to stop and he ran away.
Shortly after, Lollie quit. “I was with Jake for months, and I saw what kind of person he was behind the scenes and what kind of person he put out to the rest of the world,” she said.
In other detailed incidents, Paul electrically shocked his collaborators without warning and pressured others to jump off the roof into his pool.
The report comes not long after TikToker Justine Paradise alleged earlier this month that she was sexually assaulted by Paul in 2019.
“In a situation like that, there was nothing I could do,” Paradise shared. “I was physically restricted, and I felt emotionally restricted afterwards to even say anything about it.”
Paul denied the allegations in an April 13 statement he shared on Twitter, although he has yet to respond to the New York Times exposé.
