YouTube star Jake Paul says boxing career has caused memory loss and slurred speech

Jake Paul, a YouTuber who decided to embark on a boxing career a few years ago, revealed in an interview with journalist Graham Bensinger that he suffers from some serious side effects from taking repeated blows to his head.

“I notice it in conversations with like, with my girlfriend or friends, like, not remembering something that I should be able to remember that happened a couple days ago. Sometimes in my speech, where like every hundredth or two hundredth word, I’ll mess up or, like, slur. Which I didn’t do that before.”

Paul said it’s “really hard to say” how many concussions he’s had in his life, but he puts the number at between 20 and 30. A few are from his youth, he said, from playing football and taking “lots of hard hits,” but he estimates the lion’s share of them are from his nascent boxing career.

He also said, “of course,” he was scared by that number.

Paul, who made a name for himself on the now-defunct platform Vine, also played Dirk Mann on the show Bizaardvark on the Disney channel. In addition, he maintained a YouTube page featuring pranks and sexually-suggestive material, which led to him being fired from the show and charged with trespassing and unlawful assembly.

Paul also said that before he started boxing, he had his brain scanned, and it showed there were parts of his brain that lacked blood flow due to previous concussions. He came back for another scan a year later, and “it was worse,” he told the journalist.

Doctors have advised him to quit the sport.

“I think before, it was affecting me more at a rapid pace because I never took it easy. I was always thrown in there with people who were way, way better than me until I started to slowly get to their level.” 

Paul said he tried some unorthodox treatments to help, including toad venom.

“I’ve experimented with that, and it’s definitely helped out,” he said.

Earlier this year, TikTok star Justine Paradise accused Paul of sexual assault. She said he forced her to give him oral sex in 2019 and then made her sign a nondisclosure agreement, documenting the saga in a 20-minute video with screenshots of their conversations.

“I’m just assuming he always got what he wanted and never had to build social skills and talking to people, like girls just basically throw themselves at him,” she said. “He would go to his room with a different girl, multiple different girls every day.”

Following that allegation, actress Railey Lollie said Paul called her “jailbait” and groped her after filming a video together. She alleged that she told him to stop, and he ran out of the room.

Paul will face mixed martial arts fighter Tyron Woodley on Dec. 18, in a rematch of their previous fight where Woodley lost to Paul in a split decision.

If you know someone suffering from sexual violence, contact RAINN or the National Sexual Abuse Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.