Olivia Jade Giannulli agrees that her family ”messed up” by paying bribes to get her into college as part of the admissions scandal that broke last year.
The 21-year-old daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, who are both currently doing prison time for their roles in the scandal implicating dozens of wealthy parents that investigators dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues,” granted her first-ever interview to Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk” on Tuesday, where she faced tough questions from Jada Pinkett Smith and co-hosts including Pinkett Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and daughter, Willow Smith.
But Olivia Jade managed to win them over during the roughly 20-minute interview posted to Facebook
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“I’m not trying to victimize myself. I don’t want pity — I don’t deserve pity. We messed up,” Olivia Jade said. “I just want a second chance to be like, ‘I recognize I messed up,’ 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.”
Loughlin, better known as “Full House’s” Aunt Becky, and her fashion designer husband Giannulli pleaded guilty to paying $500,000 in bribes to get Olivia and her older sister, Isabella Rose, into the University of Southern California. Loughlin is serving a two-month sentence, and Giannulli is serving five months.
And Olivia Jade quickly became the poster child of the scandal — in part because her parents’ fame put a spotlight on their case in particular, but also because Olivia Jade was a YouTube
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That clip has come back to haunt her, and also killed her business partnerships with Sephora and TRESemmé.
“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,” she said on Tuesday. “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.’”
“ “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.’” ”
Olivia Jade revealed that she withdrew from USC because she was too embarrassed to go back. “I shouldn’t have been there in the first place, clearly, so there was no point in me trying to go back,” she said.
She’s currently living with her older sister and doing some self-reflection, and recently did some volunteer work with young, at-risk students in Los Angeles that she said has shifted her whole mentality. She said that she hasn’t spoken to her parents recently, but she thinks the jail time will be “a blessing in the end” now that her parents have had time to reflect on what they did wrong.
The interview drew more than 15,000 reactions on Facebook, and 4,500 comments by Tuesday afternoon, with some viewers struggling to feel much sympathy for the young woman or her family, noting they will land on their feet just fine. Indeed, Pinkett Smith held a spirited debate with her mother in the first 10 minutes of the episode arguing whether having Olivia Jade on the show was a good idea or not. And this led the interview to trend on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, as well.
Olivia Jade said that she gets the mixed feelings. “I want to move forward, and I totally, totally understand if people aren’t ready to jump on board with me, but I’m here because I want to leave it on the table. I don’t want to keep dragging this throughout my life,” she said.
“Although it took a crazy experience for me and my family to realize it, I’m happy that we do know that’ll never happen [again],” she said. “When I have kids, that’ll never happen. I just hope people can see that.”
Watch the entire interview here.
