Lori Loughlin’s daughter has issued a public apology for her family’s role in America’s college admissions scandal, insisting her parents’ prison time was “necessary” because they “messed up”.
Full House actress Loughlin and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, are currently serving time behind bars after pleading guilty to offering up bribes to help their two daughters score places at the University of Southern California (USC).
On Tuesday (December 8, 2020), their youngest, Olivia Jade Giannulli, addressed the controversy in detail for the first time in a candid interview on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk series.
The social media influencer kicked off the episode by acknowledging her family’s mistakes, stating, “It’s been hard. 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.”
“I’m not trying to victimize myself. I don’t want pity – I don’t deserve pity. We messed up,” Olivia 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.”
Olivia went on to admit her parents’ actions weren’t completely “out of the ordinary” for the wealthy Los Angeles community they lived in, but she was “ashamed and embarrassed” she didn’t understand the full extent of the scheme: “We had the means to do something and we completely took it and ran with it,” she continued. “It was something that was wrong. It really can’t be excused.
“On paper, it’s bad – it’s really bad. But I think what a lot of people don’t know is my parents came from a place of just, ‘I love my kids, I just want to help my kids – whatever is best for them. I worked my whole life to provide for my family’. I think they thought it was normal.”
“A huge part of having privilege is not knowing you have privilege, so when it was happening it didn’t feel wrong,” she shared. “It didn’t feel like, ‘That’s not fair. A lot of people don’t have that…’ I was in my own little bubble. Focusing on my comfortable world.”
Olivia also faced a grilling from Pinkett Smith’s mother and co-host, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, who took issue with her using their Facebook Watch show, which is also presented by Jada’s daughter, Willow Smith, to make her public apology, noting the 21-year-old also benefited from white privilege.
“I’m exhausted with everything that we (black people) have to deal with as a community, and I just don’t have the energy to put into the fact that you lost your endorsements or you’re not in school right now because, at the end of the day, you’re gonna be OK…,” Banfield-Norris told her.
“You guys will go on and you’ll be OK, and you will live your life. There’s so many of us that it is not going to be that situation. It makes it very difficult right now for me to care.”
