Do we like Casey Neistat?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Clean on harm, a track record of fundraising, and one awkward call over a shelved documentary.
Casey Neistat started in New York's underground arts scene, then landed an HBO series with his brother Van, The Neistat Bros, which ran eight episodes in 2010. He began uploading to YouTube the same year, and his first upload was a documentary about subway emergency brakes. So he's been the scrappy do-it-yourself filmmaker from day one.
In 2015 he started a daily vlog that ran for 534 consecutive days and basically wrote the template for the format. He sold his app Beme to CNN in 2016 for a reported $25 million, then said it was “not winning the lottery”. He later left Beme and started a Manhattan creator space called 368.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up. In January 2017 he headed to JFK airport after dozens of immigrants were detained and made a vlog about the people protesting Trump's executive order, spending less time on camera and more on the stories around him. We found nothing from him, good or bad, on trans rights or climate, so that's a gap rather than a pass with flying colours.
The messiest chapter is the David Dobrik documentary, Under the Influence, which premiered at SXSW in 2022. It covers sexual assault allegations against a former Dobrik collaborator and the injuries a Vlog Squad member suffered in a stunt. The film has never been publicly released. Former Vlog Squad member Jeff Wittek accused Neistat in 2024 of “protecting” Dobrik by holding it back, and Dexerto reports Neistat has said he feels protective of Dobrik.
The good stuff is real. After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting he launched a fundraiser that pulled in about $199,000 in roughly 20 hours, and he put in $10,000 himself. That same year he raised $77,000 for Red Nose Day's child poverty campaign, with the Gates Foundation set to double it.
We found no court cases or lawsuits against him, and nothing from the last few months that counts as a controversy. Aside from the shelved film, it's a clean sheet.