After more than a year away from YouTube following the massive university admissions scandal that sent both of her parents to prison, Olivia Jade Giannulli has returned to the video-sharing platform. And the controversial influencer is taking a new approach to win back her followers: humility.
On January 20, Olivia shared a new video to her YouTube page, her first piece of content since December 2019. The vlog offered her almost two million subscribers a glimpse into her current life in quarantine: journaling, working out, hanging out with her dog, and working on her skin care routine. (No sightings of her sister Isabella or her recently released mom Lori Loughlin).
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The vibe of the vlog was noticeably low-key, which one might attribute to the fact that we're in an pandemic. But Olivia's energy also seemed vastly different from that of her past videos. From the beginning, she explained that her return to YouTube was based off a desire to connect with her followers and keep them updated on her life, but Olivia also made sure to address the elephant in the room.
The last time the world had seen her was during the highly anticipated episode of Red Table Talk, where she sat down with the women of the Pinkett Smith family to talk about Operation Varsity Blues. During her appearance on the popular Facebook Watch series, Olivia was seemingly apologetic for the role that her privilege had played in the massive scandal, explaining that her parents had been wrong to try and game the system the way that they did. What she claimed that she and her family wanted most was a shot at redeeming themselves.
Months later, Olivia is taking her tentative first steps of her redemption with this new vlog. With the scandal and the Red Table Talk conversation chat behind her, she's hoping that fans will see that she's trying to do better even if she doesn't talk about the controversy still swirling around her family more than a year later.
"Although I can't change the past, I can change how I act and what I do going forward," Olivia explained on camera. "Just for my own mental sanity I don't want to keep rehashing things. I just want to move on and do better and move forward and come back and do what I love, which is YouTube."
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The vlog has over 300,000 views, and the comments section is surprisingly supportive of the influencer's return to YouTube.
"You seem a lot more relatable and down to earth in this video," commented one viewer. "Sometimes things happen to us that are really shitty but necessary to grow."
"I actually find you to be way more relatable now than you were before," wrote another.
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