She has something to say. During the pilot episode of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl, the characters made a jab at Lori Loughlin’s college admissions scandal and the impact it had on daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli’s career as an influencer.
The influencer, 21, took to TikTok to share her honest reaction to the scene and point out the show writer’s incorrect assumption.
In the middle of the episode, Monet (Savannah Lee Smith), Luna (Zión Moreno) and Julian “JC” (Jordan Alexander) chat about JC’s influential status on their way to class at Constance Billard. As Monet tells the Queen Bee, “You as someone who loses is bad for business,” to which JC says she “didn’t lose anything” after scandalous photos surfaced on the new Gossip Girl page. In response, Luna busts out the Loughlin joke: “And everything will be fine so long as you win. Olivia Jade gained followers when her mom went to jail.”
@oliviajadeg no i didn’t
In a TikTok reaction video, the beauty YouTuber shakes her head while watching the clip and says, “No, I didn’t,” which is also used as the caption to the video.
The content creator had 1.9 million followers on YouTube on March 1, 2019, days before the college admissions scandal was revealed, archives on the Wayback Machine show. She currently has slightly less with 1.84 million subscribers.
Loughlin, 56, and her husband Massimo Giannulli were accused in March 2019 of paying $500,000 in bribes so their daughters — Olivia and Bella — would be accepted into the University of Southern California. After claiming innocence for much of the investigation, the couple eventually plead guilty to the felony charges in May 2020.
Following her parents’ court proceedings, Olivia Jade announced she was taking a break from social media. By January 2021, the influencer was ready to return to her platform.
“Olivia is finally is a great headspace,” a source exclusively told Us Weekly at the time. “She’s no longer worried about what the world will think when she puts herself out there.”
The insider noted that the social media maven “spent a lot of her time being nervous that she would only receive negative comments online, but she is past that and ready to start posting again.”
After returning to YouTube, Olivia spoke out about being “publicly shamed” as a result of the scandal months later during a conversation with a “very inspirational woman” that she recounted in a TikTok video.
“We were talking about being in the public and being publicly shamed, and I was like, ‘Well, my situation doesn’t even compare, I’m not even going to start to compare it to yours,’” the YouTube creator explained in the video. “And she looked at me, and she said, ‘Olivia, it doesn’t matter if I’m drowning in 60 feet of water and you’re drowning in 30, we’re both still drowning.’ I think about that quote every day because …. I think we’re all very quick to judge. I think we’re all very quick to put people down.”
The makeup vlogger expressed her desire to change her actions moving forward. “Just for my own mental sanity, I don’t want to keep rehashing things,” Olivia Jade continued in the video. “I just want to move on and do better and move forward and come back [and] do what I love, which is YouTube.”
