Jenna Mourey said she was ending her channel, which has more than 20 million subscribers, because of videos from 2011 of her impersonating Nicki Minaj and rapping lyrics about Asians.
Jenna Mourey, a YouTube personality who became one of the platform’s first mainstream female stars as Jenna Marbles, said Thursday that she was going to stop her channel amid a backlash over old videos that she made in blackface and mocking Asian people.
Ms. Mourey, whose channel has more than 20 million subscribers, apologized in a video for the content, which she made in 2011 and 2012 when she had just established her channel. She said she was abandoning the platform to “hold myself accountable.”
“I am ashamed of things I have done and said in my past,” she said in a signoff video.
Unlike many other internet celebrities, Ms. Mourey has been making videos for over a decade and managed to remain successful on YouTube, a platform that can be hugely profitable to people making content for it. Ms. Mourey said in the 11-minute video that she wanted to address the videos because “We’re at a time where we are purging ourselves of anything and everything toxic.”
“I think now it’s hard for that content to exist at all because I think people watch it and don’t bother to look at when it was posted or care about what path I took to get to where I am,” Ms. Mourey said.
