Editorial: If Miranda Sings has zero haters, I’m dead
Collen Ballinger is a perverted YouTuber who used a fictional persona to get away with it.
I was once Fictional YouTube character Miranda Sings’ #1 fan. In Year 7, only the hottest girls knew how to pull off a Miranda Sings impression – me being one of them of course. We would galavant around school with one side of our mouths turned up and say, “aRe YOu SeWerIouS” and “wHat THe hEcK” to each other.
In 2014, a 12-year-old Sammy and her friends were driven by her my Mum from Rotorua to Wellington to see Miranda Sings live. We sat in the car for 7 hours with bright red lipstick overlining our lips, bobby pins giving us a receding hairline, red sweatpants with the words ‘HATERS BACK OFF’ sharpied on, and a striped shirt buttoned to the top – the classic Miranda Sings costume. My Mother endured us playing the hit song, WHERE MY BAES AT?, over and over. I meet Miranda after the show and got this photo. The quick interaction, for a young fan-girl, felt like the best moment ever.
As I grew older, my Miranda Sings phase died down, but I always thought fondly of that time. That was until June last year when fiction became fact.
Allegations started to pour in about Colleen, the first being from 20-year-old former fan, Adam McIntyre. He was in a group chat with Colleen and other teenage fans called “weenies”. He alleged that she would ask him about his sex life and trauma dump about her 2016 divorce with YouTuber Josh Evans. Colleen sent Adam a pair of underwear when he was 13-years-old. She later confirmed this in a video titled ‘addressing everything’, where she said it was simply a “joke” and nothing “creepy.”
Shortly after, a video of a young fan surfaced who was brought on stage for Miranda’s ‘yoga challenge’. The fan was lying on her back as Colleen spread her legs apart while a loud fart noise played. The fan was wearing a short loose romper with no pants.
Colleen obviously wasn’t paying her PR team overtime because her solution was to pick up her ukulele and write a song defending herself. She said that she was just a “loser” who wanted to “be besties” with everyone. Pick me girl alert. She said, “The only thing I’ve ever groomed is my two Persian cats.”
She made a mention of the yoga challenge incident, singing, “I’m not a predator, even though a lot of you think so because five years ago I made a fart joke.”
Colleen hid behind the mask of a fictional character to traumatise young people. But in July, the mask was well and truly ripped off when Miranda Sings’ entire tour was cancelled. Colleen had 11 shows left to perform in 2023, spanning from Idaho to North Carolina, but gave no official statement as to why they were cancelled.
The character of Miranda Sings being dimwitted made almost anything pass as a ‘joke’. But Colleen wasn’t on a movie set with a script her co-stars had read before the scene. She was pulling young people on stage who trusted her to make them have fun – not get assaulted.
I look back at my time watching Miranda Sings live and feel grateful that I wasn’t pulled on stage in front of young people like me who also would have had no idea if what was happening was funny or plain wrong. Her videos made for a lot of laughter between my tweenage friends, and I can still smile at that. But from my dark standpoint today, I am the hater Miranda Sings would tell to “BACK OFF”.
