Source: Addison Rae on Twitter
Some job opportunities can slip away from our grasp as quickly as they arrive, a lesson that TikTok celebrity Addison Rae learned following a controversial tweet just days ago.
Addison Rae rose to fame when she joined the TikTok community and pursued a career as an online celebrity. Before becoming a TikTok influencer, Rae was dancing competitively, taking part in competitions throughout the country. She also studied at Louisiana State University in 2019, where she was learning about sports broadcasting. However, Rae joined TikTok and started gaining traction for videos of her dancing with her mother.
Following a sudden surge in her followers’ count, Rae decided to drop out and fly to Los Angeles to pursue a new career. By January 2020, the dancer signed with talent agency WME. Eight months down the line, she became one of the most followed users on the app, accumulating over 81.8 million followers. Rae revealed that she first got into the app when she saw that the middle-schoolers she babysat were using it, prompting her to join the fad.
Since then, her popularity has only grown. Addison Rae has risen quickly thanks to her platform, and she is set to feature in the film He’s All That and has appeared in Keeping Up with the Kardashians, being extremely close with Kourtney. While life had been looking up for the young dancer, Rae was faced with some controversies.
Earlier this year, Rae was invited to appear for a segment on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. During her appearance, she taught the veteran host how to perform some popular TikTok dances, sparking an online uproar as the segment failed to credit many of the black creators of the dance. Addison Rae later got into the hot seat following an incident where she opted to use a handheld face shield over a face mask while meeting some fans. After filming her segment on The Tonight Show, the celebrity was spotted in New York with a plastic shield in place of a mask, sparking another backlash from the online community for choosing her vanity over safety amid the pandemic.
Much like many topics on the internet these days, the issue died down instantly. However, Rae once again made the headlines on July 10 when she tweeted, “I studied broadcast journalism in college for 3 whole months to prepare for this moment,” with pictures of her in front of a UFC backdrop. The photos were taken when Rae reported on a preliminary event for UFC 264. Her captions alluded to her short stint in Louisiana State University and were initially a joke. However, the online community called her out for having “zero self-awareness” and taking the job away from more qualified professional journalists. Rae’s fans quickly jumped to her defense but were unable to put out the fire. She later claimed that she was fired, tweeting, “nvm y’all got me fired.”
Despite her announcement, a source close to the situation declared that Addison Rae was not an official employee. She was merely invited to interview Dustin Poirier for a social media post as they came from the same city in Louisiana.
