This is unreal. She’s been accused of years of grooming minors for those unaware. The allegations she’s facing as well as those around her is intense, with potential legal consequences in the making. Major content warning to those who seek out articles on the matter, of course. She’s had a pretty successful Netflix show, and I believe a Broadway show as well? She’s a pretty early OG youtuber.
So… she decided to whip out a ukelele and start playing a song for an apology after days of increasingly being under fire. I never thought that a worse Influencer apology would ever be made, but she did it.
Apologies if this isn’t a good community to post by the way, I just haven’t seen any discussion of this on here yet and I just need to bask in just how baffling it is.
Does anyone have an out of the loop like post of this whole thing on the lemmyverse? I don’t know who they are or what they did.
Colleen Ballinger used to play the character of Miranda Sings, a woman who wore excessive and ridiculously smeared make up, who spoke in a funny voice and would make often crude or immature jokes. The character was very popular and even got a TV series on Netflix, but it was very much a product of its time. It was all very twee.
In more recent years, Colleen has become a mommy vlogger, and makes content about her parenting now.
In the past month, it came to light that she has been in a groupchat with minors for years, where she has behaved inappropriately. She sent lingerie to a fan, she would ask (maybe jokingly, who knows), for them to send nudes, and she would say things like “I’m just another 13 year old like you guys” (she’s in her 30s). Apparently, there has been talk about this behavior for years, but for some reason the issue finally blew up last week. There are other grievances and accusations but this is the big one.
Then her bizarre apology video game out, where she sang and played ukulele for 10 minutes straight. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the apology itself was awful, deflecting blame, refusing to take responsibility, strawmanning. And her closing statements are along the lines of “people do bad things but that doesn’t make them bad people. But what do I know. Fuck me, right?” It was just a very inappropriate tone to take considering the severity of the accusations.
