At the beginning of January this year, Logan Paul went viral for all the wrong reasons after posting a video about the Aokigahara Forest in Japan. In the vlog, which was titled "We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest...", the 23-year-old recorded himself openly mocking a suicide victim, sparking massive backlash from both fans and critics.
At one point in the clip, which Paul later took down, the YouTuber could be heard yelling: "Yo, are you alive? Are you f**king with us?", which many people - understandably - considered to be highly insensitive and offensive.
After issuing a half-hearted "apology" (in which he claimed that he was merely trying to create a "positive ripple on the internet") and going on to create a suicide awareness video, Paul acted as if he had been absolved of his horrendous behaviour. However, given that he then went on to post more offensive content, a lot of people did not consider his remorse to be all that genuine.
And now, in a new interview with YouTuber Casey Neistat, Paul is back to shed a little more light on what went down six months ago, and also how he's planning to create a documentary about the whole incident.
Right from the offset, Paul appears to be talking about himself as a victim. He says that his documentary is questioning whether he can "recover" from what happened back in January. "Is it possible for Logan Paul to make a comeback?" he asks himself.
Neistat picks up on this, and asks Paul whether the documentary is simply an excuse for him to garner some sympathy from his audience.
"No, not at all," Paul says. "I don't think people should, can, or will sympathise with me. What I did - there's no distracting people [from that]. It's an unbiased, objective story that captures how something like that can happen, and what went wrong in my life that I thought that was a good idea."
He then went on to insist that "I am not the victim here. What I did was disgusting. It was wrong. It was an extreme lapse of judgement," but admitted that his document was an attempt at a "redemption story".
Neistat then pointed out that, for there to be a redemption story, Paul needs to do something to actually earn that redemption. "There hasn't been much that has demonstrated that you're a different person," Neistat said.
Throughout the interview, Paul still appears to be defending his actions, and says that everything he does is part of his "brand" - and viewers picked up on this.
What's more, he seems sorry about the way he is perceived, rather than what he actually did.
"The worst part about all of this is [me] being seen as culturally insensitive," he says at one point.
Aside from the fact that he still hasn't claimed full accountability for his actions, some people on Twitter were not particularly happy that Paul is still being given airtime.
Yet again, then, Paul has managed to offend people by turning an apology into another opportunity for self-promotion.
It's not as if he's beyond redemption, either. All he would have to do to earn forgiveness is to prove that he is a different person now, that he's changed for the better. But he can't. Everything he says just seems to be an excuse for his awful behaviour - which, by the way, he still profits from.
Maybe his upcoming documentary will prove that he is genuinely remorseful. Maybe it won't. Either way, there are enough people out there who support Paul enough to let him get away with being the way he is, and so it doesn't look like he'll be going anywhere anytime soon.
