Exclusive
Olivia Jade broke her silence on her parents’ roles in the college admissions scandal on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch show, ‘Red Table Talk,’ and a source explains why.
More than a year after Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli were named in the U.S. college admissions scandal, their 21-year-old daughter Olivia Jade finally broke her silence on the Dec. 8 episode of Facebook Watch talk show Red Table Talk. It has been three days since Olivia got real about her “privilege” in the interview with Jada Pinkett Smith and Jada’s mom, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and Jada’s daughter Willow Smith, and she’s “feeling great” about coming on their show, a source close to Olivia EXCLUSIVELY tells HollywoodLife.
“It’s also a very balanced storyline segment on behalf of Jada asking questions that are fair game and are full circle and fruitful and passionate,” our source continues. Jada asked Olivia about her parents being in prison, the “repercussions” of her family’s actions after Lori and Mossimo paid $500,000 in bribes to have Olivia and her sister Isabella, 22, admitted as fake crew recruits into USC, and even more hard-hitting topics related to the controversy. “They [the Red Table Talk hosts] highlight backgrounds so people don’t have opinions,” our source adds. “They get all aspects of the lay of the land and the situation.”
Olivia “felt very comfortable” as she talked with Jada, Adrienne and Willow, our source adds. Going into the interview, the YouTube star was actually second-guessing herself. “She contemplated whether it was the right thing to do or not up until a day before, but ultimately, she felt the need to do it,” our source explains. “She told only a few of her closest family members. She rose to the occasion and it turned out for the greater good to admit to the wrongdoings and she felt it was the best way to move on. She felt Jada did a great job addressing it in general.”
“Now that she’s done the interview, she feels it’s a huge weight off her shoulders,” our source goes on, who adds that Olivia “doesn’t care about any backlash at all.” After the interview, Ana Navarro even called Olivia an “entitled brat” on The View. And in response to the overall criticism Olivia has been facing, our source says, “She felt like it was a low blow and not accurate to say those comments about her. She felt the interview was fairly represented.”
During the interview, Olivia said that she doesn’t “want” or “deserve” pity. “I think that what hasn’t been super public is that there is no justifying or excusing what happened, cause what happened was wrong and I think every single person in my family can be like, ‘That was messed up. That was a big mistake’,” Olivia admitted on Red Table Talk. Olivia even confessed that she thought what her parents did was “normal,” given the “bubble” she had grown up in. “But I didn’t realize, at the time, that’s privilege,” Olivia said. “I didn’t put those two together. I was like, ‘Well, this is what everybody does and my parents worked really hard, and I don’t understand.’ But that’s not, that’s not how it should be and unfortunately that’s how it was.”
Adrienne didn’t hide the fact that she fought “tooth and nail” to keep Olivia from being a guest on her family’s talk show. “I just found it really ironic that 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,” Jada’s 67-year-old mom explained. However, Jada and Adrienne were “glad” to know that Olivia is now aware of her platform and the “resources” she could use “to serve.”
