JoJo Siwa is reflecting on her rocky relationship with Candace Cameron Bure.
Last summer, the YouTube star went viral with a TikTok video dubbing Bure the “rudest celebrity” she’d ever met. The “Fuller House” actress publicly apologized and the two made nice.
But bad blood was reignited last November, after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Bure about her faith-based channel Great American Family. Asked if the channel will feature LGBTQ storylines, Bure responded that programming will “keep traditional marriage” – meaning between a man and a woman – “at the core.”
Siwa, who identifies as queer, criticized Bure’s comments in an Instagram post at the time, writing, “This is rude and hurtful to a whole community of people.”
Now, Siwa is elaborating on her complicated feelings abut Bure. Speaking to reality star Nick Viall on his “The Viall Files” podcast in an episode posted Thursday, Siwa called out Bure for seemingly wanting to “put down” the LGBTQ community.
“She was specifically going to make movies that had no representation of LGBTQIA, which is fine,” Siwa told Viall. “Not everything needs to be gay, essentially. But when you’re doing it out of spite to say, ‘Too much is about LGBTQ right now, you guys suck and I want to make a movie about traditional marriage, and you’re not traditional,’ that got to me a little bit.”
Despite resolving their differences last year, Bure’s marriage remarks made Siwa realize that they’ll likely never see eye to eye.
“After that, it gave me a little sense of like, ‘OK, you and her are never going to agree, you and her are never going to be friends, you and her are never going to get along,'” Siwa said. “I’m never going to be able to change her, she’s not going to be able to change me. We can both just live life, we can both just have fun.
“I wish she was able to be a little more open, a little more accepting,” Siwa continued. “I’m OK with calling her out in the way that I did. For a while I regretted it, but after I found out that article about her not wanting anything to do with LGBTQIA, that’s my people. And I’ve got to stand up for my people, and that’s messed up.”
For her part, Bure addressed the controversy in a statement last November, calling herself a “devoted Christian” and blaming the “toxic climate in our culture right now.”
“All of you who know me, know beyond question that I have great love and affection for all people,” Bure wrote. “It absolutely breaks my heart that anyone would ever think I intentionally would want to offend and hurt anyone. It saddens me that the media is often seeking to divide us, even around a subject as comforting and merry as Christmas movies.”
