As actress Lori Loughlin denies the charges she is facing in the college admissions scandal, her daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli has returned to YouTube, uploading her first video Sunday since she was engulfed in the controversy earlier this year.
Giannulli, 20, the daughter of Loughlin and designer Mossimo Giannulli, was a successful YouTube star with a slew of brand partnerships and more than 1 million subscribers before details of “Operation Varsity Blues” were made public in March.
Giannulli was a student at the University of Southern California, and prosecutors say her parents paid $500,000 to fraudulently get Olivia and her sister, Isabella Rose Giannulli, 21, admitted to the school. Her parents have both pleaded not guilty to the charges.
When the scandal broke, Giannulli took a long social media hiatus. She was under fire, in particular for once saying in a 2018 YouTube video: “I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend ... I do want the experience of like game days, partying ... I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
In the video uploaded Sunday and titled "hi again," Giannulli — who was no longer enrolled at USC as of October — said she is excited to return to vlogging.
“Obviously I've been gone for a very long time,” she said, adding she was debating for many months when to return and was “terrified” to upload a new video.
“I’m legally not allowed to speak on anything going on right now,” she said of her parents’ legal issues.
Still, Giannulli said she felt lost not being active on the video-sharing platform. “I actually really, really miss it,” she said of vlogging. “I feel like a huge part of me is just not the same.”
Giannulli had previously broken her social media silence in July, when she uploaded a picture to celebrate Loughlin’s birthday.
“Thank you so much for your patience or if you’ve stuck around for nine months just waiting,” she said. "I really appreciate it. This is the best I can do and I want to move on with my life.”
Giannulli said in the two-minute video that viewers should expect more content from her soon. “I’m really excited to start filming again and start uploading.”
CORRECTION (Dec. 2, 2019, 8:26 a.m.): A previous version of this article misstated the status of Olivia Jade's Instagram account. It has not been deleted. (Her sister, Bella, deleted her own Instagram account, not Olivia's.)
