Everything You Need to Know About the Gabbie Hanna Controversy

For the past few days, social media influencer Gabbie Hanna has been documenting what seems to be a major manic episode on TikTok.

On Monday, August 23rd, Gabbie, who originally found fame on the now defunct app Vine, started posting strange videos to her TikTok account. She posted a total of 100 videos on Tuesday alone.

In these videos, Gabbie talks about a number of concerning things, and they only get more and more manic as each post goes on. One even included Gabbie doing what can only be described as an interpretive dance to the Hail Mary prayer.

Throughout her videos, Gabbie goes through a lot of different phases from claiming to be Mother Mary to Archangel Gabriel to the second coming of Jesus. In all of this, worried fans and bystanders are begging her to get some kind of help.

In one of her videos, she decided to talk to her trans babies.

“Love yourself, love what God gave you. You are safe, and you are confused.”

In a live, Gabbie also shared her opinion on black women and their closeness to the divine. She said,

“It’s like they’re dependent on God… when the father leaves.”

gabbie hanna is on tiktok having a proper mental snap, & starts going on about black people and native american indians… we are not indians..
why am i surprised she is being racist ??

girl, in all seriousness get some help. @GabbieHanna pic.twitter.com/qNwMPu5OHr

— 방찬’s pammieᵕ̈ 🍬 (@wabihyune) August 23, 2022

Gabbie later cried about how she was bullied by black girls in her hometown and was friends with them. She also didn’t like being called racist in college for calling her hair nappy (nor did she understand why).

One of the scariest moments of all of this, however, is Gabbie letting a stranger by the name of Nicholas into her house. Nicholas decided that it was on him to get Gabbie to safety. He knocked on her door, saying he needed to use the bathroom. He continued to live stream from his own phone, showing off the house of a clearly mentally unstable person. By doing so, he put both himself and Gabbie in danger.

While Gabbie Hanna was filming her tik-tok videos of her having a mental episode, a total stranger, found out where she lived & pretended to not know who she is, going into her house stating he needed to use the “bathroom”

This could have been an incredibly dangerous situation pic.twitter.com/f7Q7vARGfw

— Quasar 2.0 (@2_quasar) August 25, 2022

Gabbie has never had a meltdown to this extent. She has always had a fluctuating relationship with social media, posting rants about being banned when her views were down. She even had the police called for a wellness check after admitting to her Patrons that she was struggling to find a reason to live. That being said, all of her issues normally are short-lived.

BRO WHAT, GABBIE HANNA IS OFF THE RAILS pic.twitter.com/ssRTg13sBj

— Hootie (@Hootie7052) August 24, 2022

Since Monday’s incident, the video of Gabbie calling trans people “confused” has been taken down. The bad take caused many people to become upset at Gabbie rightfully. People rushed to her defense, saying that since she is clearly going through something, the words shouldn’t be taken to heart. Others stand firm that mental health does not give excuse to transphobic comments.

While we must acknowledge that Gabbie is clearly going through something, mental health is often used as a scapegoat to say some very harmful things towards marginalized groups, especially black communities.

And while Gabbie is going through some manic episodes, the underlying racism has always been there. The mania is just once again bringing it out.

In fact, Gabbie even previously apologized for her old racist content on her deleted, short-lived expose of a “YouTube Has-Been“. The humor that she used to get famous was tinged with anti-blackness. The videos happened a while ago and you’d probably have to do a deep dive to find them. She acknowledged she shouldn’t have done it, that it was wrong, and it was only her white privilege that got her famous for such jokes.

In her ravings, she is disrespectful to the trans and black communities. While we have to be mindful of mental illness, we also need to understand that there is no excuse for the words that came out of Gabbie’s mouth.

It’s disheartening to see someone say such vile things and still be shielded because of white privilege disguised as mental health concerns. We here at Femestella wish that Gabbie gets the help she needs for mental health and the prejudice that she still seems to carry.