In an emotionally wrought vlog posted to her channel on Friday, Colleen Ballinger — the mind behind YouTube’s beloved singing sensation Miranda Sings — announced that she and her husband, fellow YouTube star Joshua Evans, are getting a divorce. While Ballinger explains that filming such a video is almost too painful to bear, she said she feels she owes it to fans who have followed their relationship over the course of eight years.
“You’ve watched us date, you’ve watched us get engaged, you’ve watched us get married,” she says. “We’ve shown you everything because we wanted to, and I don’t regret any of that. But we chose to not share with you the hard parts of our relationship. And there were a lot of hard parts of our relationship.”
At the same time that she opted to share such personal news, Ballinger plead with viewers not to let the announcement devolve into gossip or nasty comments — much in the same way that another high-profile creator couple, Jeana Smith and Jesse Wellens, asked for privacy and respect when they announced that they would be going their separate ways and taking a break from the Internet earlier this year.
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In his own video, Evans clarified that it was Ballinger who filed for divorce and said that neither one of them had been unfaithful. Evans will temporarily step away from his channel and social platforms, he said, and his little sister and some friends will furnish content while he takes time to heal.
Ballinger’s heartbreaking announcement arrives on the heels of some potentially career-defining news for the performer. In recent weeks, streaming giant Netflix has released the teaser trailer and some production stills for Haters Back Off, a hotly-anticipated comedy series that will delve into the legacy and home life of Ballinger’s Miranda Sings character. The show holds the distinction of being Netflix’s first original series to be headlined by a digital influencer.
