Who is Colleen Ballinger?
If you were frequently invested in the world of YouTube during lat summer, you are likely well aware of the infamous cancellation of Colleen Ballinger. If somehow you are unfamiliar, (and if so, you are quite lucky) Colleen Ballinger is a veteran YouTuber whose career began back in 2008 with the creation of the character Miranda Sings. The Miranda Sings character is an aspiring singer and performer who is grossly unaware of how untalented she actually is. It only took a few years for this persona to launch Ballinger to stardom, gaining her over 10 million subscribers on the Miranda Sings YouTube channel, as well as sold-out live shows, a Netflix show, and a loving fanbase made up mostly of children.
Back in 2020, a then 17-year-old Irish YouTuber named Adam McIntyre released a video entitled “Colleen Ballinger, stop lying,” in which he accused Ballinger of exploiting him for free labor on her Miranda Sings Twitter account, as well as mailing him a pair of lingerie when he was just 14 years old. This video was washed over, however, when Ballinger decided to make an apology video entitled “addressing everything,” which was largely received positively by her fanbase and the internet as a whole. It seemed like she might be able to get off scot-free.
However, in the spring of 2023, a YouTuber by the name of Kodee Tyler released a (now deleted) video in which she shared screenshots of Ballinger being inappropriate with her child fans in group chats. After this video came out, Adam spoke out again to confirm exactly what Ballinger had done to him, with screenshots and evidence in chronological order to back up his claims.
the dreaded ukulele
After Kodee’s and Adam’s videos were released, more of Colleen Ballinger’s former fans spoke out, alleging that she had also been inappropriate with them on certain occasions. Now, the pressure was on for her to speak out and address the countless allegations of grooming and exploitation of her young fans. On June 28, 2023, she finally released a response video. I hesitate to call it an apology because she did not apologize for anything once. She played a ukulele for 10 minutes, singing about how everything being said about her is lies made up for internet clout, but at the same time how she’s “taking accountability,” despite having claimed that she didn’t need to apologize for anything, as everything was false according to her. Unlike her 2020 video, this video was received very negatively and it seemed like she wouldn’t make a return to the internet anytime soon.
However, she made her return to her vlog channel in November of 2023, with a typical vlog like she had been posting since before her cancellation. But has much changed since then?
Spoiler: nothing has changed
While she hasn’t posted any content to her main channel for the past few years now, she is still very active on her vlog channel. It seems as though she’s struggling very hard to stay relevant, propping up her 3 children in front of the camera to make her seem like a good mother, when in reality a good mother wouldn’t be posting their children on the internet every single day, with no regards to their privacy or safety.
She remains dismissive about the entire situation and has yet to issue a proper apology to Adam or any of her other alleged victims. It remains evident that she refuses to acknowledge the proven harm she has done to her young fans and the danger she put them in. It seems as though she will never address the proven fact that she sent a 14-year-old Adam explicit photos of fellow YouTuber Trisha Paytas (which is quite literally a felony), or the incident at a live show where former fan Becky alleges that she spread her legs open on stage when she was just 16. Becky has stated that she felt incredibly violated and betrayed by somebody she once looked up to and idolized. It is simply heartbreaking to listen to. Regarding this incident, all we have from Colleen is a quote from her ukulele video where she dismisses it as simply “a fart joke.”
Her past and current behavior shows that she is simply unwilling to listen or change to make things right. She is unwilling to actually take accountability and acknowledge that she has allegedly done irreparable damage to her young fans and, in their words, has given them trauma that is still taking years of therapy and personal healing to deal with. She tries to ignore all of this by turning on the vlog camera, talking about rocks, and complaining about how everyone hated her last year like it’s some sort of hilarious, relatable hiccup in her life. Regardless of how much she wants to sweep this under the rug and act like nothing happened, her once-young fans (myself included) will never forget how betrayed they felt by her behavior and her dismissive attitude toward the hurt and damage that she caused them.
No matter how much she tries to redeem herself, we will never be able to ignore or forget everything that she’s done. She was very much aware that her audience was mainly children, and she used that to her advantage to get what she wanted. Knowing she never cared about her fans in the first place is heartbreaking, but not surprising. We’ll never let her forget that.