Olivia Jade Giannulli Breaks Silence On College Admissions Scandal, Says She's The 'Poster Child Of White Privilege'
She opened up about the scandal on 'Red Table Talk.'
DFree / Shutterstock Former Full House star Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, are currently serving their respective prison sentences for their involvement in the 2019 USC college admissions scandal.
Nearly a year-and-a-half after news of the scandal broke, their 21-year-old daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, finally broke her silence on the matter.
In an epsiode of Jada Pinkett-Smith's Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, Olivia Jade got candid about her involvement in the scandal, her reaction to her parents going to prison, and more.
Who is Olivia Jade Giannulli?
Olivia is an influencer who goes by the name Olivia Jade.
She has more than one million followers on IG and nearly two million subscribers to her YouTube channel.
Olivia Jade is Lori Loughlin's youngest daughter.
Olivia is the younger of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli's two daughters.
Loughlin and her husband were convicted of paying bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their daughters admitted to USC as recruits to the USC crew team, despite the fact that they never participated in crew either before or during college.
Olivia Jade's older sister, Isabella, was admitted to USC as a crew recruit and according to the FBI documents, Loughlin and Mossimo wanted the same treatment for Olivia Jade.
She is an Instagram model.
A quick perusal of Olivia Jade's social media shows she's primarily interested in hawking her makeup collab with Sephora to her 1.3 million followers.
In September of 2018, Olivia Jade posted two paid advertisements on Instagram that highlighted the fact she was a USC student.
In one of the paid posts, Olivia Jade She sitting on a bed, with the caption “Officially a college student! It’s been a few weeks since I moved into my dorm and I absolutely love it. I got everything I needed from Amazon with @primestudent and had it all shipped to me in just two days.”
Olivia Jade has a YouTube channel.
Olivia vlogs on her YouTube channel, posting videos of her makeup routine or of her getting ready for a party at USC.
Olivia tweeted: “YouTube will always be my #1 passion. I promise I’d way rather be filming 24/7 than sitting in 6 hours of classes straight but an education is also super important to me.”
In early September 2018, Olivia uploaded a college dorm tour video full of Amazon products (she claimed the video was not sponsored by Amazon, however she did note on an IG post on the same topic that it was a sponsored post).
She doesn't take school seriously.
In August 2018, Olivia Jade posted a video to YouTube in which she told her nearly two million followers that she didn't care about school and was only going to college to party.
“I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend...But I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all. But I do want the experience of like game days, partying…I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
She was largely bashed by her followers as being "privileged" and "spoiled."
She turned comments off on her Instagram after news of the scandal broke.
Between her parents allegedly bribing officials to get her into USC and her immature comments on her YouTube channel, the internet has about had it with her and took to her IG to let her know.
“How about you put some effort into using your brain instead? Maybe that way you could get into USC by your own merits. Or how about being happy with wherever you got to go to continue your education because that in itself is a privilege. Your family disgusts me,” one Instagram user wrote on Olivia Jade’s Instagram page.
She no longer has her comments disabled as of December 2020.
She accused her dad of faking his way through USC.
In an interview on the Zach Sang Show in March 2019, Olivia Jade said her dad was never enrolled at the University of Southern California.
“He has a really crazy story in college. He, like, built his whole entire brand and he wasn’t actually, like, ever … enrolled in college. But he, like, faked his way through it and then he started his whole business with tuition money that his parents thought was going to college. That’s, like, such a different time. I don’t know if I was supposed to say that, but it’s OK," she admitted.
Olivia Jade appeared on Red Table Talk to break her silence about the scandal.
In the highly anticipated interview with Jada Pinkett-Smith, Willow Smith, and Adrienne Banfield-Norris on Red Table Talk, Olivia Jade got candid about her parents' college admissions scandal, and she did not hold back.
"It's been hard," she began. "I think for anybody, no matter what the situation is, you don't want to see your parents go to prison, but also I think it's necessary for us to move on and move forward."
She says she "doesn't want pity" when it comes to dealing with her parents and the scandal.
"I'm not trying to victimize myself. I don't want pity — I don't deserve pity," she said, before admitting the family's faults.
"We messed up. I just want a second chance to be like, 'I recognize I messed up,'" she continued. "I never got to say, 'I'm really sorry that this happened,' or 'I really own that this was a big mess-up on everybody's part,' but I think everybody feels that way in my family right now."
Olivia Jade didn't return to school after news of the scandal broke.
She also spoke about how she relaized the scandal was unfolding in the media, right before her eyes.
"I was sitting with a group of friends and I knew any second everybody was going to know too, if they didn't already, and I remember just freezing and feeling so ashamed — I went home and hid myself for probably three or four months," Olivia Jade said, before admitting she "didn't really 100 percent understand what just had happened" but "knew it was wrong."
Olivia Jade revealed that she didn't return to USC, either.
"I never went back [to school]. I was too embarrassed. I shouldn't have been there in the first place, clearly, so there was no point in me trying to go back," she confessed.
Although Olivia Jade now realizes the severity of the situation, she didn't at first.
She went on to call herself the "poster child for white privilege" before realizing that her parents did something terribly wrong.
"I was like, 'Why is everybody complaining?'" she said.
"That's embarrassing within itself, that I walked around my whole 20 years of life not realizing, 'You have insane privilege. You're like the poster child of white privilege. You had no idea,'" she added.
Olivia Jade addressed her controversial YouTube video about partying, too.
While the social media influencer has had more than a year to reflect on her past behavior, it sounds like she regrets posting the aforementioned video of herself only going to college to party:
"That sits with me and makes me cringe and it's embarrassing that I ever said those types of things — and not only said them but edited it, uploaded it and then saw the response to realize it was wrong.
There was no malicious intent behind it. I was never trying to hurt anybody or say those things to brag about my life. I was oblivious. I sit here now and I'm like, 'How don't you realize stuff like that? That's embarrassing that that did fly over your head.'"
Olivia Jakiel is an editor and writer who covers celebrity and entertainment news. Follow her on Instagram and keep up with her zingers on Twitter.
Amy Lamare is a Los Angeles based freelance writer covering entertainment, pop culture, beauty, fashion, fitness, technology, and the intersection of technology, business, and philanthropy. She is deeply devoted to her chocolate Labrador and an avid long distance runner. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook.