The Most Shocking Influencer Scandals of the Bloggers Unveiled Era: A Retrospective

In August of 2018, Bloggers Unveiled, the controversial Instagram account which had been set up with the stated goal of acting as the “unofficial watchdog” of the Irish influencer and content creator scene, posted its last update – and then disappeared entirely. Depending on whether you counted yourself among the influencers or the influenced, the end of BU was a relief, or a shame; while there was no doubting there was a nasty, gleeful, undertone to its “takedowns” of Irish fashion and beauty influencers (largely young women accused of such egregious crimes as Photoshopping their selfies and lying about their clothing sizes), it was also a great time – perhaps the greatest in living memory?! – for gossip. There was barely a day that went by without a new “scandal” being “reported on” (inverted commas to signify that the “scandals” in question were not all that scandalous and that BU’s posts could hardly be considered journalism, although now that @houseinhabit is apparently a citizen journalist, maybe I’m wrong?!), and for those of us who thrive on those message threads that ensue after you’ve asked your friends, “any goss?” it was truly a golden era of LOLs.Timing-wise, too, the demise of BU – which disappeared after a rather fraught campaign wherein some of those influencers who had been targeted by the account tried to “out” the culprit, eventually settling on an unlikely candidate: a beauty therapist from Tullamore who then made the… unexpected decision to speak to the Sunday Times about how, actually, it wasn’t her – was terrible. We didn’t know it then, but with the pandemic coming, we were about to need gossip more than ever before. Regardless of who was behind the account – which lasted a tragically short time, shutting down after eight months, in which it had amassed more than 220,000 followers – there’s no arguing with the fact that it managed to highlight some frankly delicious stories about bad blogger behaviour that will never, ever be forgotten. By me, anyway. PR executive Rob Kenny caught rapid smoking at Dublin Airport, midway through his paid stop smoking campaign with Boots There’s something gross, I’ll admit, about paparazzi photographs of celebrities, especially when they’re just going about their business, having lunch or picking up their shopping or whatever it is celebrities do with their time when they’re not having buccal fat removal procedures or (over) whitening their teeth. I would happily get rid of all paparazzi, and the celeb gossip magazines their work fuels. HOWEVER. When the person in question is not a celebrity, but is, in fact, a burgeoning Irish influencer who’s been caught rapid reneging on a brand campaign they’ve just started – I’d say all bets are off. Rob Kenny had just begun a campaign with Boots Ireland, giving interviews to “news sites” (LOL) like goss.ie about the heartbreaking reason he’d decided to quit smoking, when he was papped outside Dublin Airport having a sneaky fag en route to some foreign idyll or other. “I’m not in a position to comment on any of this,” Kenny, who was subsequently dropped by Boots, told The Irish Mail on Sunday.(FWIW, I think it’s stupid – and borderline predatory – of brands to use influencers or celebrities to promote anti-addiction campaigns, especially when those people are mid-addiction. As someone who smoked for more than 10 years, I know how hard it is to give up. Truly no amount of money could have parted me from my Marlboro Menthols, although I’m sure I, too, would have been tempted.)Anyway, speaking of citizen journalism…Joanne “I don’t use sunbeds” Larby snapped on her way in to a sneaky sunbed seshI’m no stranger to the odd sunbed, something we covered on the podcast a few months back, so please don’t take this as a holier-than-thou anti-sunbed diatribe. (But also: sunbeds are objectively, no-arguments-about-it, bad – it’s just that we’re all human and we all make mistakes, amirite?!)Joanne Larby, a then-makeup and beauty influencer – although now she’s following a well-trodden path from consumerism to homesteading vis-a-vis chicken ownership and #countrylife – was, however, vehemently anti-sunbed, stating, time and time again, that she neither used sunbeds nor wore fake tan, crediting her sallow skin to a “foreign” dad who gifted her with an uncanny ability to go from peachy to chestnut brown over the course of an afternoon in her back garden in Malahide. So when a discerning follower caught Larby – if I recall correctly, wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap, a very leave-me-alone A-lister look – walking through the lobby of a Dublin sunbed salon… WELL. Well, well, well. It wasn’t long before the photograph was on BU and the proverbial cat was out of the bag. While this incident was, truly, amazingly amusing, BU would go on to target Larby fairly relentlessly over its eight months in “business”, posting dozens of photographs of the blogger, usually in an attempt to highlight the “Instagram vs reality” of it all, with highly posed and well-lit selfies juxtaposed with candid shots of her looking, well, totally normal, a contrast that I’m sure we’ve all experienced when we look in the mirror vs when we look at the photograph our partner just took of us. It’s borderline barbaric.So Seagull MeThis is slightly outside of today’s remit, because this particular influencer scandal happened pre-Bloggers Unveiled, but it warrants inclusion because it was just so… weird. In October of 2017, Irish blogger Suzanne Jackson was discovered to be editing her photographs in a rather bizarre manner: inserting a flock of seagulls into otherwise totally normal photographs. The problem was, she did it to several photographs, and used the exact same flock of seagulls, which made the trick of the eye quite, er, obvious to anyone paying attention which, thankfully, a Facebook page called The Chicken Fillet Roll review (also an unlikely culprit) was.As scandals go, this one was incredibly low stakes: who was this decision hurting? Maybe the seagull union, sick of having their images used without credit or payment… but no one else. And yet, the sheer ridiculousness of it made it the perfect type of influencer scandal, one I wish we could have more of in 2024. (It’s quite dark to me that the only current influencer scandals I can think of are the question of whether or not Ballerina Farm was coerced by her husband to give birth without epidural, over and over again, and the case of YouTuber Ruby Franke, currently serving time for torturing her own children.) Terrie McEvoy’s blatant competition riggingAnother off-topic one – in this case, the calling out was done by a different Instagram account that popped up around the same time as Bloggers Unveiled, @bullshitcallerouter – is the scandal that surrounded influencer Terrie McEvoy, who was found to have “randomly” chosen two of her closest friends as winners of competitions she ran in conjunction with Dublin’s Tower Jewellers. McEvoy later addressed the “scandal”, saying that she was “only new to blogging at the time”, presumably so new that she had no idea how competitions worked and thought that they were simply a method by which to get free goodies for your mates.When I asked Instagram followers for their best blogging scandal recollections a few weeks back, McEvoy came up for two other incidents: at one stage, it was alleged that she had done a paid collaboration with an Australian nursing agency, with whom she was working – at the time she lived in Sydney – promoting the company while encouraging newly qualified Irish nurses to move to Oz to work with them, too. What followers told me was that, when they arrived Down Under, there were no such jobs – and McEvoy left the agency shortly thereafter. However, I got no first-hand accounts – who are all these “dozens” of Irish nurses who landed in Australia with nowhere to go?! – and no one could give any further details of McEvoy’s own fault in this (a brand collaboration to promote a product or service that then ceases to exist is not a great look, but more for the brand / agency in question than for the individual, in my opinion). The second incident was a collaboration she did with ReproMed, an Irish fertility clinic, in March of 2021, which involved McEvoy “opening up” about her own “fertility journey” to various Irish media outlets. By May of that same year, however, McEvoy shared news of her pregnancy. It turned out that, at the time of the collaboration, she was already pregnant, and had not needed to pursue any fertility-related services or interventions in the process. Again, though, this feels like a ReproMed problem; why not partner with someone who has had fertility issues, rather than opting to collaborate with an influencer who hasn’t got any first-hand experience of the process? (Or, better yet, honestly, come up with some ways to promote your service that doesn’t involve paying women to share the most intimate details of their personal lives with strangers?) I have to say… it’s been a cold, lonely couple of years since Bloggers Unveiled, especially during the long months of lockdown, when some influencer-related gossip would have been most welcome. Sure, we’ve seen some wild Photoshopping in the intervening years, and the fake eyelashes have truly gone in an absolutely deranged direction, but where are the fake seagulls? Where are the gotcha! moments exposing influencer subterfuge in the airport smoking area?!If I’m missing anything truly hilarious, please, sound off in the comments – and if you were duped into flying to Australia for the promise of a lucrative (ahem) job in nursing, TELL ME EVERYTHING: email me [email protected] and let’s get to the bottom of this, the truly modern version of Watergate. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rosemarymaccabe.substack.com/subscribe