Influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli has talked publicly about being at the centre of a US college admissions scandal in an episode of Red Table Talk.
The young influencer made the news after her parents, Hollywood actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were among those jailed for being part of a multi-million dollar scheme to get their kids into prestigious Ivy league schools like Yale and Stanford.
Giannulli said she was nervous but ready to address things publicly for the first time on the show, hosted on Facebook Watch by Jada Pinkett-Smith, Pinkett-Smith's mother Adrienne Banfield-Jones and daughter Willow.
"This has been an really eye opening experience for me and... although there's a lot of mistakes and wrongdoings it's led me to have a completely different outlook," Giannulli told the panel.
Before the interview Adrienne Banfield-Jones told her daughter and grand-daughter she was against having Giannulli as a guest.
"I fought it tooth and nail. I found it really ironic she chose three black women to reach out to for her redemption story. I feel like here we are - a white woman coming to Black women for support, when we don't get the same from them," said Adrienne Banfield-Jones.
"It's bothersome to me on so many levels. Her being here is the epitome of white privilege....It's not our responsibility to raise her consciousness."
Pinkett-Smith said as a celebrity mother, she felt a sense of compassion for Giannulli.
"I never want to be the thing that was done to me, by white women. I never want to be that. I also believe these are the kind of attitudes that feed the same thing we are fighting. People look at us they say, 'you are Black and female' and they automatically put us in a category. Looking at her as being white, young and privileged and then putting her in a category, it's the same thing. I just see it as this cycle.
"This is a practice of compassion."
Gianulli, 21, told the panel she had been completely unaware of her privilege. “I wanna apologise to contributing to social inequalities without realising it at the time,” she said, calling herself "the poster child for white privilege."
Gianulli also admitted it took a little while to realise the error of her parent's actions. “A huge part of privilege is not knowing you have privilege,” she said. “In the bubble that I grew up in, I didn't know what was wrong with this."
The young influencer retreated from the limelight after a YouTube video she made, where she said she didn’t “really care about school" came to light after the scandal.
“That sits with me and makes me cringe and it’s embarrassing that I ever said those types of things, and not only said them but edited it, uploaded it and then saw the response to realise it was wrong,” she told the hosts.
“That’s embarrassing within itself, that I walked around my whole 20 years of life not realising, ‘You have insane privilege'.
“I want to move forward and I totally, totally understand if people aren’t ready to jump on board with me, but I’m here because I want to leave it on the table....I don’t want to keep dragging this throughout my life.”
