Influencer Olivia Jade has been in the headlines for several years now, but not for the best reasons. While the 21-year-old quickly rose to fame as a lifestyle and beauty YouTuber, her success hit a stumbling block when she became a prominent subject for the 2019 college admissions scandal.
Jade’s mother, Full House star Lori Loughlin, was imprisoned for charges related to fraud after offering bribes to get her two daughters admitted into the University of Southern California. This brought controversy to Jade’s budding career, more so than her publicized 2017 fumble where she was involved in a car crash while video blogging and driving.
Since all of this, the influencer has suffered through losing brand partners, including a major Sephora deal, and getting cyberbullied across her social media accounts. Most recently, she was the subject of a brief joke told in the HBO reboot of the notoriously sleazy teen drama Gossip Girl.
Gossip Girl joke
The HBO Gossip Girl reboot dominated this weekend, sparking hearty conversations from critics and views. The reboot had an iconic legacy to uphold, as the original series was on air for six seasons in the late-2000s.
In the premiere episode of the Gossip Girl reboot on July 8, two characters made comments about Jade’s college admissions scandal. Before letting rumors become further cemented in pop-culture history, Jade took to her TikTok channel to add some clarity.
In the series, the new character Luna La (Zión Moreno) tells queen bee Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander), “Everything will be fine, as long as you win. Olivia Jade gained followers when her mom went to jail.”
However, Jade sets things straight in her TikTok video as she is seen shaking her head at the scene. She says, “No, I didn’t.”
Show creator responds
Since being called out by Jade, the Gossip Girl show creator Joshua Safran has responded on Twitter.
He humbly wrote, “Ok my bad. Check out Olivia Jade’s video!” linking Jade’s video to his tweet.
While Jade’s friendly demeanor in her TikTok video insinuates that she’s gotten to the point where she can laugh about references to the major scandal, she’s still adamant about putting it behind her.
In her 2020 Red Table interview, she confessed to host Jada Pinkett Smith, “I remember thinking: How are people mad about this? A lot of kids in that bubble, their parents were donating to schools and doing stuff that, like, so many advantages. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it was happening. This was normal. But I didn’t realize at the time that was privilege.”
She goes on to say, “I don’t want pity. I don’t deserve pity. I just want a second chance to be like, I recognize I messed up.”
At the time of writing, Jade has 1.84 million subscribers on her YouTube channel and 1.3 million followers on Instagram.