JoJo Siwa says she "basically got blackballed" by Nickelodeon after coming out

Demi Lovato is soon to make her (co-)directorial debut with Child Star, which features former kid performers from multiple generations, including Drew Barrymore, Kenan Thompson, Christina Ricci, Raven-Symoné, Alyson Stoner, and JoJo Siwa. Siwa, who came up on the controversial Dance Moms (a reality series about a dance teacher emotionally abusing a group of young girls), reportedly perceives her child star experience as a positive one. “Though there was some bad things that happened,” Siwa says (per a new profile from The Hollywood Reporter), “some advantages that got taken.”

Siwa is one of, if not the, most famous performers to have come out of Dance Moms, and she built her own individual brand in partnership with Nickelodeon. However, when she came out as gay in 2021, it altered her relationship with the kids’ network, she says in the doc (via THR):

[The]  morning after the “Karma” singer shared a video of her coming out as queer on social media in 2021, she received a call from the president of Nickelodeon, who, while not explicitly named, was Brian Robbins. “What are we going to tell the kids?” she recalls him asking, to which she, at 17, replied, “That I’m happy?” His response, per Siwa: “Well, you need to have a call with every retailer [that sells JoJo Siwa merch] and tell them that you’re not going crazy.” So, she got on the phone with every retailer, from Target to Walmart to Claire’s, but she claims her relationship with Nickelodeon was never the same: “I basically got blackballed from the company.” 

Siwa told a version of this story on TikTok in 2023, though with less detail and without identifying the company president who’d said such things. Brian Robbins, who came up at Nickelodeon working with Dan Schneider on All That and its spin-offs, is now the interim co-CEO of Paramount Global. 

Nickelodeon has denied blackballing Siwa (“We have valued and supported JoJo throughout our incredibly successful partnership, which included a JoJo-themed Pride collection at a major national retailer, among our many collaborations together”), both now and in the past when she’s alluded to her schism with Nick. Siwa publicly complained when she wasn’t invited to the network’s Kids Choice Awards in 2022. That same year, she told Today of her relationship to Nick, “I’m a loyal human, and I like to be a good person. It’s hard when somebody does not nice things and doesn’t treat you the way that you deserve and the way that a human should be treated. However, everything is OK.” She added, “Things come up. Things go down. Right now, I’m OK, they’re OK. We’re working. We’re good. Nobody wants to be mad, continue to fight, to be sad. Everyone wants to get along and that’s kind of the policy that I live by and that I choose to live by.”

Interestingly, the now 21-year-old Siwa says she’d be way more intimidated by that kind of pressure now than she was as a teenager. “If the president of my music label called me now and was like, ‘Yo, what the fuck?’ like the president of my network did then, I would lose my mind,” she admits to THR. “Honestly, I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Yes, I’ll go back in the closet. Or I’ll delete it. I’ll say it was a prank. I’ll get a boyfriend.’ But back then, I was like, ‘I’m in love and I’m happy. Shut up.’”