What to do when an influencer you sponsor is in a scandal

Freeze what you control

Pause the posts they have scheduled for you.
Pause any ad that uses their face or their video, including ads you run from their own account, which the industry calls whitelisting.
Keep your other creators on their schedule, unless what they are about to post touches the story.
Take a post down only when your legal team says to. Once it's gone, nobody can check what it said.

Every link, and a screenshot of each post with the date it went up.
Your brief, your approvals and every message with the creator or their manager.
A creator can delete a post in seconds. Our own checklist for a creator incident puts saving the record second, right after the freeze.

Source: Our research report on running celebrity and creator partnerships, August 2026

It could be a claim in your post, a missing disclosure, a safety issue, something they did away from your brand, or a broken contract. Each one goes to a different person on your team.
When the sponsored post itself is the story, the creator's replies speak for you.
In January 2023, viewers accused beauty creator Mikayla Nogueira of wearing fake lashes in a TikTok review of a L'Oréal mascara, with "L'Oréal Paris Partner" on screen. She denied it.
In one reply she wrote that L'Oréal "would never allow that in a partnered post". By the end of that week, TIME counted over 24.6 million views on the video.
So agree with your creator what they will and won't say, before the next reply goes up.

Source: TIME

On the shelf of 13 daily supplement brands we track, 43.6% of their 6,524 sponsored YouTube videos sit on a channel that at least one of the other 12 has paid too.
So when a creator is in the news, the story can carry your rivals' names next to yours. See who else paid them, and what each of them is doing, before you speak.
If you checked every brand that paid them before you signed, you already hold that list. Our guide on vetting a creator shows how we build it.

Source: Our own count of sponsored videos whose own text says sponsored, 2026-10-29

With the facts in hand, you can pause, end or wait, and say only what you can stand behind.
On a call we go through it with you: what happened, what's still live, who else is involved, and what to say first.