Colleen Ballinger: Comedian goes quiet on social media after accusations of grooming a minor resurface
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: YouTuber and comedian Colleen Ballinger, popularly known as Miranda Sings, has been accused of grooming minor fans. After these allegations, Ballinger seems to have gone silent on Instagram and TikTok.
The content creator was accused of grooming another YouTuber, Adam McIntyre, 20, back when he was a young teenager. Ballinger has been absent from her rather active social media accounts for more than a week, further fuelling suspicions as she is yet to comment on the accusations.
Who is Adam McIntyre?
McIntyre is a Irish YouTuber who first started his channel 13 years ago. He has been making content on celebrities and pop culture for a while now. The grooming accusations against Ballinger are not new and first emerged three years ago in 2020 when McIntyre posted a video titled ‘colleen ballinger, stop lying’ on his channel, tracing his relationship with the comedian.
The video also shared a live stream and a reference to an older video of the young YouTuber revealing that the two had known each other when he was 13 and Ballinger was 30. McIntyre alleged that Ballinger sent him a lingerie set when he was 15. “My parents were furious. They were so angry and they took it away,” the young YouTuber said in the video. He also went on to show the package and the lingerie set, which was the same as the one Ballinger had shown in her livestream. He made other allegations, including that he was manipulated as a young fan to help find content to post on her official accounts, making him do free labor.
Ballinger later responded to his video with another one of her own, titled ‘addressing everything’, in which she alleged that what McIntyre had shared was not the complete truth. "In this situation, context is everything. I was giving away clothes that I had just bought, were brand new, and I did not want," she said. She also said that she responded to the accusations weeks after they first arose, stating, “It has gotten to a point where there are so many rumors and lies and speculations around that I feel like I need to address it.”
Grooming accusations resurface three years later
While the accusations made in McIntyre’s video eventually subsided and the conversations surrounding it died down eventually, they resurfaced after McIntyre posted another video recently. The video, titled ‘my relationship with colleen ballinger’, has already garnered almost 400,000 views.
McIntyre went on to make even more shocking claims against Ballinger, revealing a group chat that the YouTuber had with her named "the weenies." The group chat comprised Ballinger and many of her young fans, McIntyre being one of them. She allegedly asked them inappropriate questions like “fav positions” and asked the girls in the chat when they had gotten their periods.
McIntyre also shared how as the fans were all young, they all talked “stupidly” and Ballinger took advantage of that. While referring to the texts in the chat, he said, “I have never felt so embarrassed and so…disturbed and creeped out.” Ballinger is yet to comment on these accusations while netizens are not sure which side to pick.