By Stacy Lee Kong

Content warning: this newsletter contains references to grooming.

Until this week, I didn’t really know who Colleen Ballinger was. I acknowledge that’s a bit surprising, because Ballinger, best known for her red lipstick-wearing character Miranda Sings, is quite famous. One of the OG YouTube comedians, she has 8.6 million followers on her personal YouTube channel and 10.7 on her Miranda Sings account, plus 15 million Instagram followers, 3.6 million Twitter followers and 22.8 million TikTok followers across both her personal and Miranda accounts. Even if that’s not Kardashian levels of fame, that’s impressive, especially considering her longevity.

I have this theory that social media algorithms are making our experience of the internet increasingly individualized, even though we still think of it as a collective social space, which is why someone can be extremely famous in one sector of the internet and basically unknown in others. If we’re being honest, though, I must have seen her signature overlined red lips at some point since she began posting in 2008. I just wasn’t pay attention, even when she began gaining mainstream recognition (like the time she was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon or scored a profile in the New York Times), largely because I’ve just never been super into YouTubers.

Now that I am paying attention, I genuinely wish I could go back to those simpler times. That’s because she’s recently been trending on Twitter for behaving inappropriately toward her young fans, and the evidence people are posting is super disturbing. But since I can’t unlearn these things, I’m taking the opposite approach and going down the Miranda Sings child exploitation rabbit hole, as well as thinking about what this whole situation says about the inner workings of online fame. And sorry not sorry, but I’m bringing you along for the ride.

Who is Colleen Ballinger and why am I suddenly aware of her existence?

For everyone who, like me, hasn’t really been paying attention, here’s the backstory: In 2008, Ballinger began posting satirical videos as Miranda Sings, a parody of a talentless but arrogant aspiring singer who believes posting to YouTube will make her famous. In the videos, Miranda sings off-key, dances poorly, offers glimpses of her daily routine and claps back at her critics, hence her catchphrase, “haters back off.” Where at first she mostly appealed to musical theatre fans, she soon exploded in popularity among teenagers and pre-teens, who responded to her brand, which I think could fairly be described as a precursor of the type of cringecore satire that Gen Z loves today (think, the aforementioned overlined red lips, plus her overactive eyebrows and frequent use of malapropisms, mondegreens and spoonerisms). Within a year, she was performing live shows. Within four years, she had appeared on the Nickelodeon TV series Victorious and had begun touring regularly. Since then, the Miranda Sings universe has only grown; she has written two books, released music and a game, had her own Netflix series for two seasons, collaborated with brands including Old Navy, Jack in the Box and Dunkin Donuts and made countless guest appearances on web series and TV shows.

She has also raked in accolades from the comedy world, including Jerry Seinfeld, who invited her to appear on an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee after watching some Miranda Sings videos with his daughter. At the time, he said he “started to see that there was a very well-developed character there, and a very talented performer. I became very interested in that it was just as funny to me as it was to my daughter, who is 13. Normally I’m not a big fan of the crap that they watch, but this was really making me laugh. I’ve been around a bit, and I can tell when someone’s really funny. This was on a different level comedically for me.”

But… her comedy actually has some super weird elements, in a should-kids-actually-be-watching-this kind of way. What’s more, allegations resurfaced this week about instances in the past where she communicated directly with her underage fans, who say she convinced them to work for her in an unpaid capacity, as well as asked them about their sex lives and bodies, told them about her own sex life and even mailed one young fan underwear.  

Ballinger’s ‘comedy’ has been problematic for years

Let’s start with the comedy itself. Admittedly, I don’t know if Ballinger’s shows have always included sexual innuendo. I fully admit that I’m basing my opinion of her work on past reviews, profiles and a quick perusal of her YouTube channels, as well as the specific video clips and screenshots her former fans have been posting, so while it’s clear that she has been slipping disturbing comments into her content and live shows for years now, it’s hard to tell exactly when that started. I can tell you it’s been happening since at least 2014, though, thanks to a review of Ballinger’s show at that year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

As then-Edinburgh Reporter film writer Douglas James Greenwood wrote in his glowing review, “her crowd is comprised of mostly young kids and teenagers, with some obligatory accompanying parents. A surprising array considering her humour is sometimes slightly risqué. Her act includes a section on combating ‘porn’ – a collective term given to all things sexually suggestive, as well as a number of incestuous jokes. Luckily, these are all done in a way that will have parents laughing and children oblivious.”

… Were they oblivious though? Last week, a one-time Ballinger fan named Becky posted a photo of her 16-year-old self at a Miranda Sings show. In it, she’s laying on the floor, legs in the air and spread, with Ballinger standing between them with a hand on either ankle, seemingly pushing them further apart. “She encouraged her fans to wear revealing clothing so we would get called on stage. And then she exploited us and our bodies for her own gain. So yeah, I’m okay with calling her a predator,” Becky wrote. “I’m so sick of people being okay with calling Colleen out, but then stopping when it comes to using certain terminology. It’s okay to call her a groomer and a predator because that’s what she IS. Normal people don’t do what she does to children.” 

And that’s is only one example. Last week, Twitter user @lomlgraperry posted an extensive Twitter thread with clips and screenshots of:

Ballinger comparing leaky pipes in her house to a teenage girl’s vagina—a joke she had to restart multiple times because she was laughing too hard to finish her sentence 

YouTube thumbnails that seemed designed to appeal to pedophiles.

Ballinger inviting a little boy on stage at one of her live shows so they could role-play being on a date. (First of all, why???) At one point she reaches into her pants, where she’s storing a snack of puffed cheese balls, then invites him to do the same.

Ballinger inviting a little girl onstage at a live show to act out childbirth (again, why???), a skit that included Ballinger playing multiple characters, including Miranda’s uncle, who says he “likes little girls” (a recurring trope in Miranda Sings content, it seems) and a nurse, who says the girl “smells fertile.”

The thread also includes many more examples of Ballinger referencing pedophilia, incest, sexual assault, broken consent and sexualizing children, as well as using racist, homophobic and ableist language. I’m never very interested in debating what comedians can and cannot say, but I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be controversial to believe saying things like this to your audience of mostly underage fans is weird, you know?

But her private interactions with fans have been even worse

Now for Ballinger’s behaviour toward her (again, mostly underage) fans. Back in 2020, Ballinger received backlash for a queerbaiting video where she implied Miranda would be coming out as queer, only to have her ‘come out’ as a Meghan Trainor fan. Ballinger posted an apology tweet and deleted the post, but a few weeks later, a 17-year-old U.K. influencer named Adam McIntyre posted a video titled, “Colleen Ballinger, Stop Lying,” where he said he had actually ghostwritten the tweet and posted it with her approval—something he'd been doing for a while in an unpaid capacity. What’s more, he alleged that he first become friendly with Ballinger when he was 13 and she was in her early 30s… and she’d been sending inappropriate messages to him and other teens for years.

According to Insider, “Ballinger first took notice of him when he was 13 years old and tweeted during her livestream with friend Kory Desoto. In the livestream, which McIntyre showed clips of during his video, Desoto was wearing a matching bra and underwear set over his clothing. Ballinger read McIntyre's tweets aloud and said he was so ‘funny’ that she had to send him something. She and Desoto laughed at the idea that they should mail 13-year-old McIntyre the lingerie, and how his parents would respond to such a gift. Eventually, Mcintyre said, Ballinger mailed the lingerie set to his home address. His mother confiscated the package… From then on, McIntyre said, he and Ballinger would message on and off. Soon, she divulged private information about her divorce from Joshua David Evans... Then, McIntyre said Ballinger asked him to find gossip about her ex, Evans, on gossip websites and through social media.” 

By 2017, McIntyre said he and Ballinger had started discussing her fears that people weren’t as interested in Miranda Sings content anymore. He shared screenshots of their conversation, where Ballinger can be seen directly asking him for help. In response, he began sending her tweet ideas for both Miranda Sings and her own personal account. In March 2020, he says she gave him the password for the Miranda Sings account so he could post himself, as well as respond to fans. She didn’t pay him, but promised that if a trial period “went well,” she’d bring him on part-time with an hourly rate. But after the Trainor post, that opportunity no longer seemed to be on the table. In fact, McIntyre said Ballinger messaged him several times about how upset she was, which he said felt like she was trying to “guilt” him.

At the time, some internet commenters characterized this behaviour as grooming, though McIntyre didn’t use that word himself. But for the most part, McIntyre’s allegations didn’t really make an impact outside of Ballinger’s fanbase, who attacked him for criticizing their fave. She did respond to his video with one of her own, which downplayed their relationship—and the access he had to her accounts.

“Over the years, I loved asking my fans for advice on what I should post for Miranda videos, Miranda tweets, things like that,” she said, claiming that it was McIntyre who asked her if he could help out with her social media, which she said was “really sweet but most of the time, I did not engage in those conversations.” Still, she admitted that she’d “overshared” with some fans, but that the underwear incident was a “silly, stupid mistake that is being blown way out of proportion.”

And that would be that, if not for another former Ballinger fan, KodeeRants, who posted a video earlier this month not only corroborating McIntyre’s claims, but expanding on them. That video has now been deleted and Kodee seems to have gone offline, but their video sparked a huge discourse around Ballinger, including a slew of new, more detailed videos from McIntyre. One super disturbing revelation: there was a Ballinger fan group chat that included 20+ people, many of them minors, where conversations regularly involved sexually explicit topics, or at the very least, sexual innuendo. Proof:

Ballinger forced a faux closeness with her underage fans to help build her platform

I could probably talk about the receipts former fans have been posting for another thousand words, and that doesn’t even take into account the rest of the Ballinger universe, including her relatives, ex-husband and current husband, all of whom participated in the creation of her content. But I actually want to zoom out a little bit instead, because I think this entire situation says something really interesting about the nature of online fame. We often talk about parasocial relationships from the fan perspective, and often as if there’s something embarrassing about people who think about celebrities as if they know them in real life. But we have to acknowledge that some celebrities exploit this phenomenon in super scary ways. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to understand that authenticity and connection is a key part of building your ‘personal brand’ online, whether you’re a journalist, small-scale content creator or mega-influencer, so in some ways, it’s not at all surprising that Ballinger took the time to build relationships with fans. And honestly, it’s not even surprising that her ‘relationships’ with these 14- to 16-year-olds were exploitative, from both a labour and sexual perspective. First of all, women can exploit unequal power dynamics just as creepily as men. What’s more, she’s far from the only one. What is surprising to me, though, is how bold and indiscreet Ballinger was in her behaviour. Clearly, she never expected these children, who were once delighted and enthralled by the attention they received from someone they admired and respected, to one day grow up and realize how inappropriate it actually was.

Maybe that makes sense too, though. After all, she was making incest and pedophilia jokes at live shows that parents attended, and every video I’ve seen so far seems to depict a happy audience who’s laughing along. (This is not a new thought, but as an aside, it is WILD to see right-wing outrage about protecting the children from drag brunches and trans kids who just want to play a fucking sport, which isn’t in any way grooming, when Ballinger gets exactly zero criticism. But I think that’s actually because conservatives don’t actually have a problem with joking about sexualizing children, or actually sexualizing children, as long as it’s upholding traditional notions of gender and sexuality.)

Unlike the last time McIntyre spoke out about Ballinger, the conversation isn’t being swept under the rug, though he is still being attacked by her fans. More and more people are speaking out about their own problematic interactions with the comedian, and throwing their support behind those who she exploited. And I think that’s noteworthy, too, because if Ballinger’s exploitation of children was a natural byproduct of her quest for fame, then this might be the natural end to an influencer’s life cycle—betrayed by the very people she exploited to get where she is.

Ironically, fans have been begging her to respond to the most recent allegations in the comments section of her most recent video, but she’s gone silent. For once, she seems to have nothing to say.

And Did You Hear About…

The Cut’s truly brilliant ranking of Fast and Furious movies, which also doubles as an argument that this franchise is really just a soap opera with slightly more exploding cars.

My favourite TikTok of the week.

This excellent article by journalist Nicholas Hune-Brown about the role libraries have been forced into filling in our society—“the last public space,” as many people described it to him—and why that’s not a good thing.

The true crime-obsessed internet sleuths who took over a small city in Idaho after a brutal murder last year, leaving its residents as traumatized as the crime itself.

This Twitter thread of the movies people irrationally hate.

Bonus: critterposting.

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