Loughlin’s daughter wants ‘second chance’
During her first interview about her parents’ role in a college admission’s scandal, Olivia Jade Giannulli, the 21-year- old daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, acknowledged that she had long lived in a “bubble” of privilege and that her parents “messed up” and made “big mistakes” when they bribed her way into USC.
“I’m not trying to victimize myself. I don’t want pity — I don’t deserve pity,” Olivia Jade Giannulli said during Tuesday’s episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch show. “I just want a second chance to be like, ‘ I recognize I messed up.’ ”
In sitting down for a mostly friendly discussion on Pinkett Smith’s show, “Red Table Talk,” Giannulli also acknowledged that this realization didn’t happen right after her parents were arrested in the scandal in March 2019. She also sounded like she’s still coming to terms with the advantages she enjoyed growing up with “white privilege” in a wealthy Hollywood family.
For a while after her parents were charged, Giannulli admitted, “I was like, ‘ Why is everybody complaining?’ That’s embarrassing within itself, that I walked around my whole 20 years of life not realizing, ‘ You have insane privilege. You’re like the poster child of white privilege. You had no idea.’ ” Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli were accused of paying $500,000 in bribes to get Olivia Jade and her sister, Isaballa, 20, admitted to USC on the false pretense of being crew team recruits.
They finally took a plea deal and pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. Giannulli said she immediately felt embarrassed and ashamed when news broke of her parents’ arrest — and said she never went back to USC, which she said shouldn’t have been allowed to attend “in the first place.”
Giannulli’s interview comes as her mother, the star of TV’s beloved family sitcom “Full House,” finishes the final weeks of her two-month prison sentence in the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin.
Loughlin, 56, reported to the East Bay women’s prison on Oct. 30 and is expected to be out by Christmas. Mossimo Giannulli, 57, surrendered to the federal prison in Lompoc where he is serving out his five-month sentence.