Breaking her silence. In her first interview ever, Olivia Jade Giannulli opened up about the college admissions scandal that landed her parents, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, in jail and apologized in a Red Table Talk interview on Tuesday, December 8.
“We had the means to do something and we completely took it and ran with it. It was something that it was wrong,” the YouTube star said. “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.”
The Fuller House alum, 56, and the designer, 57, were arrested in March 2019 after being accused of paying $500,000 in bribes to the University of Southern California in order for their daughters, Olivia Jade, 21, and Bella Giannulli, 20, into the school as members of the crew team.
The pair pleaded guilty to fraud charges in May. Loughlin began her two months in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, on October 30. Mossimo started his five-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc, on November 19. They were also fined $400,000.
Olivia Jade explained to Adrienne Banfield-Jones, Jada Pinkett Smith and Willow Smith that in the community she lived in, it was “not out of the ordinary” to do what her parents did but she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know about it.
However, Banfield-Jones, 67, wasn’t fully OK with her coming on the show to speak out for the first time.
“She chose three black women to reach out to for her redemption story. I feel like, here we are, [a] white woman coming to back women for support when we don’t get the same from them,” she told her daughter and granddaughter before Olivia came out on stage. “It’s just bothersome to me on so many levels. Her being here is the epitome of white privilege to me.”
During the segment, she was honest and compared the Black community’s fight for equality and equity to what Olivia had gone through.
“I’m exhausted with everything that we 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, because your parents are gonna go in and they’re going to do their 60 days and they’re going to pay their fine,” the actress told Olivia. “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.”
Scroll through the gallery below for more revelations from the interview.