Adrienne Banfield-Norris opened up about why she was so opposed to Olivia Jade being on 'Red Table Talk,' saying in a new interview that she was 'frustrated' by the whole experience.
Two weeks after Olivia Jade Giannulli‘s controversial episode of Red Table Talk aired, Adrienne Banfield-Norris (aka “Gammy”) is elaborating on why she was so “frustrated” to see her there. Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli‘s daughter, 21, was on the Facebook Watch show to discuss her role in the college admissions scandal with Adrienne, daughter Jada Pinkett-Smith, and granddaughter Willow Smith — and she wasn’t really buying her remorse.
“It was frustrating, but at the end of the day, I felt like people understood how I felt,” Adrienne, 67, said on the December 23 episode of the Keep It podcast. While she felt like Olivia “handled the situation well,” the beauty vlogger could have been more sensitive to other people’s views, especially those who got hurt during the scandal. “There were some things about it that were a little frustrating,” she explained. “I felt like, as a 21-year-old young adult, that she needed to be way more aware of what’s going on in the world, and that was a little frustrating.”
“I heard people make comments, like, ‘Well, kids don’t watch the news,'” Adrienne said. “Please. The news on TV is not the only place where you understand what’s going on with the world, and if you think that, then you’re old! Because young people are not relying on the news — my generation is not relying on the news. I’m on my phone, on social media all the time.”
Adrienne very vocally opposed Olivia being featured on Red Table Talk for a “redemption story.” She even said during the interview that she “fought tooth and nail” against inviting her to the show. “Her being here is the epitome of white privilege,” Adrienne told Jada and Willow. Olivia was there to break her silence about her parents’ prison sentences; Lori is currently doing two months, and Mossimo five months, for paying $500,000 in bribes to get both her and older sister Isabella Giannulli into USC as members of the crew team (neither daughter ever rowed).
Olivia said that she wasn’t exactly aware of what was going on. However, she posed for photos on a rowing machine and submitted them to the college. She explained on Red Table Talk that she didn’t understand that what her parents were doing was wrong; she believed they were just donating to the university, and argued that she worked her “ass off” in high school to get into USC. She has dropped out, however, since it’s now clear that she “didn’t belong there.”
“There’s just a lot of education [Olivia] needs to do for herself,” Adrienne said on Keep It. “But I understand that that’s the world they’re in. Her life experiences have not put her in the space where she needs to be concerned about those kinds of things, really. I don’t really know how to address that because it is about how you’re raised and what you’re exposed to.”
