Jojo Siwa Claims Nickelodeon 'Blackballed' Her After She Came Out

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | August 15, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | August 15, 2024 |

I did so much stupid s*** when I was in my late teens into early twenties. Good lord. I went to a theater conservatory, was done in a year and a half, and lived with six other people in Brooklyn when I was barely twenty. The bodega across the street didn’t card and I found out Colt 45 only cost a dollar so I was drinking them like water. Every opinion I had was genius and everyone needed to hear it at all times. I did stand-up as well, so the mess of a human being I just described was figuring out who he was on stage. But there is almost no evidence of what I just described aside from the paragraph you just read.

There are some Facebook photos from that time. Any video of me holding a microphone and saying deeply personal or wrongheaded things has been scrubbed from the internet, leaving only a DVD from 2010 that I keep in a slipcase inside a vault lest my children ever see the horrors of their dad comparing sex to riding a bike. Camera phones that were capable of taking good video were not omnipresent when I was figuring things out. My life was not being broadcast everywhere 24/7 and trust me, if 20-year-old Andrew had the means, that’s exactly what would have happened. All this is to say, I try to go easy on Jojo Siwa.

I was passingly familiar with Jojo Siwa when she was a child star. My then-younger niece went through a bit of a phase and was given Jojo’s bows as a gift on several occasions as a result. I didn’t watch Dance Moms and no longer keep up with the goings on at Nickelodeon. It wasn’t until Jojo Siwa started going through her own phase that I took notice. I am well past the age of watching people’s video celebrations of their 21st birthdays, but I have seen Jojo Siwa’s. She’s outgoing, loud, living life, and yes, a bit cringe, but she’s 21. That’s when you’re supposed to be cringe.

So, I felt for Siwa when she recently revealed via a Demi Lovato documentary that she no longer has a working relationship with the network that helped make her a huge deal to my niece. Siwa came out as queer on social media in 2021. Shortly after, she says she received a phone call from the president of Nickelodeon, Brian Robbins, who asked her “What are we going to tell the kids?” The then 17-year-old Siwa says she responded, “That I’m happy?” A pretty badass response, by the way. The president of Nickelodeon did not think so.

Siwa claims the president then said to her, “Well, you need to have a call with every retailer [that sells JoJo Siwa merch] and tell them that you’re not going crazy.” That is not a badass response. Regardless, Siwa did just that. She made calls to all of the retailers she worked with. It wasn’t enough. “I basically got blackballed from the company,” Jojo explained.

All in all, Jojo handled the situation the best she could. Surprisingly, she thinks she’d be less equipped to do so now. “If the president of my music label called me now and was like, ‘Yo, what the f***?’ like the president of my network did then, I would lose my mind,” Siwa told The Hollywood Reporter. “Honestly, I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Yes, I’ll go back in the closet. Or I’ll delete it. I’ll say it was a prank. I’ll get a boyfriend.’ But back then, I was like, ‘I’m in love and I’m happy. Shut up.’”

Jojo Siwa may be putting too much of herself out there right now. She’s doing crazy dances, making wild claims, and putting her substance use out there for the world to see. But, hopefully, she’s still as happy as she was when she was 17 and telling the president of a major network to go screw. If so, that’s a pretty good tradeoff.