Colleen Ballinger performs Beyoncé track in dark face paint in resurfaced video
A video of Colleen Ballinger – the YouTube star best known for her alter ego Miranda Sings – wearing dark face paint while performing a Beyoncé song has surfaced online.
Last month Ballinger was accused in an Huffington Post UK investigation of sending sexually explicit messages to young fans, which she denied last week through song in a video posted to her Colleen Vlogs YouTube account.
Now, the musician, actress and comedian has made headlines again for what could well be regarded as her wearing blackface. In the clip she’s seen performing ‘Single Ladies’ with dark paint on her face, backed by two dancers who aren’t wearing any face paint.
The video shared to her Miranda Sings YouTube channel in February 2018 is unlisted but is still viewable. Outlets including Entertainment Weekly reported on it resurfacing.
It comes after Ballinger was accused recently of engaging in racially insensitive behaviour on the set of her 2016 Netflix series, Haters Back Off. April Korto Quioh, a former employee on the show, wrote about her experience in the writers room where she claims to have witnessed Ballinger’s racial insensitivity firsthand.
“I recall overhearing her once brag that a creator was being ‘cancelled’ for saying the n-word, (and if you think she went with ‘n-word’ instead of hitting that hard ‘r’ then you haven’t been paying attention) and that she would never be stupid enough to get caught doing something like that,” Quioh wrote in her blog.
Ballinger has yet to have responded to Quioh’s claims.
The American comedian has been a YouTube content creator since 2008 and originally gained notoriety as Miranda Sings, a childish character who wears poorly applied red lipstick and performs purposely bad covers of popular pop songs.
In Ballinger’s defence video on YouTube, she said: “Some people are saying things about me that just aren’t true. Even though my team has strongly advised me not to say what I’m going to say, I realised they never said I couldn’t sing about what I want to say.”
She added: “I used to message my fans – but not in a creepy way, like a lot of you are trying to suggest. It was more of a loser kind of way. I was just trying to be besties with everybody.”
Though admitting “there were times in DMs when I would overshare” she added that she “changed my behaviour and took accountability”.
NME has reached out to representatives for Ballinger for comment over the grooming allegations.
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Charlotte Krol
NME
