After a day of news that could’ve fueled its own “We Didn’t Start The Fire” reboot, Twitter timelines everywhere suddenly flooded with one last absurdity: Colleen Ballinger reaching for a ukulele. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a time capsule from 2009, when the twee aesthetic reigned and Ballinger’s Miranda Sings character was one of YouTube’s first bonafide celebrities. But this is a video from 2023, and Ballinger is attempting to apologize for serious accusations of grooming her fans by breaking into song.
To understand what’s going on, we have to rewind to 2020, when a YouTuber named Adam McIntyre shared the negative experiences he had with Ballinger as a longtime Miranda Sings fan. He became a fan when he was nine years old, eventually running a Twitter fan account and subsequently joining an “inner circle” of stans with whom Ballinger would communicate directly. McIntyre accused Ballinger of sending him inappropriately sexualized messages (like asking his favorite sex position) while he was a teenager, and even mailing him a set of underwear (bra and panties) after telling fans she wanted to get rid of “ugly” unused clothes, per HuffPost U.K. In response, Ballinger denied accusations of grooming, but admitted to sending the underwear, saying it was a “stupid” thing for her to do.
Ballinger’s fans turned on McIntyre after he came forward with his accusations (which also included Ballinger exploiting him for the free labor of posting on her social media accounts). Otherwise, the controversy died down until June 2023, when another fan came forward to corroborate McIntyre’s story. Since then, the floodgates have opened and many fans have chimed in with their own negative stories of being bullied or manipulated by Ballinger and her friends and family.
Per a Rolling Stone report, these issues range from body shaming to being sexualized on stage. Some of her inner circle fans (members of a group chat called “Colleenies Weenies”) felt Ballinger tacitly encouraged them to attack her detractors online, including her ex-husband. Multiple fans, who were high schoolers at the time, shared that Ballinger would unload on them about her ex Joshua Evans’ “emotionally abusive” ways and the devastation of their breakup. At least one fan, Johnny Silvestri, spoke of being hired in a professional capacity (to work on Ballinger’s Miranda Sings tour), where he was exploited, verbally abused, and drawn into a toxic parasocial dynamic (one that Evans, at least, has acknowledged and apologized for).
Ballinger broke her silence on this deluge of accusations on Wednesday in the most baffling manner, literally evoking a classic Ariana Grande Victorious meme: “Even though my team has strongly advised me to not say what I want to say, I recently realized that they never said that I couldn’t sing what I want to say,” she vocalized while strumming that ukulele. Her ten-minute musical response video turns the blame on the “toxic gossip train,” arguing that “I’m not a groomer, just a loser.” She acknowledges transgressing boundaries with fans, “but not in a creepy way like a lot of you are trying to suggest.” Further, Miranda Sings—a character leveraged into the short-lived Netflix series Haters Back Off in 2016—was always a PG-13 enterprise, she says (or sings).
The non-apology apology video would already be raising eyebrows for the embittered way Ballinger insists that she already has taken accountability, “but that’s not the point of your mob mentality, is it?” To do so in song has only served to make the controversy even more viral than it already is. Miranda Sings was a very specific product of its time—down to the problematic early 2000s racial stereotyping—and now it seems we’re witnessing the sun finally set on the character, as well as, perhaps, an entire era of YouTube.
