Yahoo News Lawyer For Colleen Ballinger Denies YouTuber Wore Blackface In Resurfaced 'Single Ladies' Video [UPDATED]
A resurfaced video circulating online this week appears to show YouTuber Colleen Ballinger wearing blackface while performing a rendition of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” but a debate soon arose on social media about what viewers were actually seeing.
On Thursday, Ballinger’s lawyer Andrew Brettler told TheWrap that Ballinger was wearing green paint on her face from an earlier performance.
“What you don’t see in the clip that was posted online is that Colleen was performing a song from ‘Wicked’ with Oliver Tompsett, a star from the show,” Brettler said in a statement accompanying a video of the performance. “She painted her face green like the witch [Elphaba].”
The video, which is available on Ballinger’s YouTube account from a 2018 upload, shows her performing the song as her character Miranda Sings during a live event. Though the date is unclear, Ballinger regularly performed “Single Ladies” around 2010 during her early stage career.
Multiple videos on YouTube show her doing a similar dance with the same outfit at different locations, but the others don’t show her in dark face paint. In later performances, like those from 2011, Ballinger performed “Run the World” — another song by Beyoncé, who is Black — without face paint.
Some people online have speculated that Ballinger was wearing the face paint for another song just before “Single Ladies.” Several social media posts pointed out that she often performed as Elphaba from “Wicked” before the “Single Ladies” skit and that it was likely remnants of green makeup, not “blackface.”
Social media users began sharing the clip following a HuffPost investigation late last month in which several of Ballinger’s former fans said they had inappropriate relationships with her. On Monday, two former fans also came forward and said Ballinger sent them nude photos of influencer Trisha Paytas to make fun of Paytas.
On Friday, April Quioh, who was a writers assistant on Ballinger’s Netflix show, “Haters Back Off,” wrote online that Ballinger wanted a limit on people of color acting in the background of the series, saying that Ballinger called it “distracting.”
This isn’t the first time Ballinger has been accused of racism. In 2020, Ballinger addressed a 2006 video in which she and her sister used racial stereotypes to portray Latina characters. She said the video was “not funny” and “completely hurtful.”
“I am so ashamed and embarrassed that I ever thought this was OK,” she said at the time. “I was a sheltered teenager who was stupid and ignorant and clearly extremely culturally insensitive.”
Ballinger did not return HuffPost’s request for comment.
This article has been updated with a comment from Colleen Ballinger’s lawyer, Andrew Brettler.
