Olivia Jade Fired Back At The Gossip Girl Reboot Over A Joke About Her

Gossip Girl is back, and the HBO reboot spared no time making snarky, topical references. But now that the show exists in the Tik Tok era, it’s easier than ever for the targets of the NYC teens’ jabs to clap back online. Case in point: Beauty influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli’s clapback to the new Gossip Girl’s joke about her college admissions scandal.

In the new series’ first episode, Constance Billard it-girl Julien’s (Jordan Alexander) reputation as a popular influencer is thrown into disarray when her half-sister Zoya enrolls in her class and seemingly gets cozy with Julien’s longtime boyfriend Obie (Eli Brown). Her friend Monet (Savannah Lee Smith) insists this gossip could be devastating for Julien’s brand, saying, “You as someone who loses is bad for business.” But their friend Luna La (Zión Moreno) replies, “And everything will be fine so long as you win. Olivia Jade gained followers when her mom went to jail.”

But that’s not how Giannulli sees it. Shortly after the show’s premiere, she shared the clip on her TikTok, green-screening her reaction to it as it played. Upon hearing Luna’s remark, she shook her head and said, “No I didn’t.”

In case you somehow missed the reference, Luna was referring to Olivia’s parents (Mossimo Giannulli and Full House star Lori Loughlin) allegedly paying $500,000 in bribes to get her and her older sister Isabella Giannulli into the University of Southern California as members of the crew team... even though neither of them are rowers. Although Loughlin only served around two months in prison for her involvement, Giannulli dropped out of the school and lost deals with major brands like Sephora and HP. Apparently being in the spotlight of a big celebrity scandal isn’t as useful as the Gossip Girl teens seem to believe, but Giannulli isn’t exactly suffering either — after all, she still has 1.8 million YouTube subscribers.

Through it all, the influencer seems to have stayed close to her mom. Back in March, she posted a TikTok opening up about her life after the scandal and sharing some advice a “very inspirational” woman gave her. "We were talking about being publicly shamed and I was like, 'Well, my situation doesn't even compare, I'm not even going to start to compare it to yours,'" Olivia said. "And she looked at me and said, ‘Olivia, it doesn't matter if I'm drowning in 60 feet of water and you're drowning in 30, we're both still drowning.’”

She added, “If your feelings are hurting [and] if they're valid to you, they're valid."