JoJo Siwa on Feud with Candace Cameron Bure: 'Okay with Calling her Out'

JoJo Siwa addressed the feud that flared up between her and Candace Cameron Bure last year, saying, "We can both just live life," but also saying she's "okay with calling her out in the way that I did."

Entertainment Tonight detailed that Siwa was on podcast the Viall Files when she talked about the on-again off-again feud, which first flared up a year ago, when Siwa, now 20, named Bure the "rudest celebrity" she had met while doing a TikTok challenge.

That proclamation led Bure to reach out to Siwa to find out why the teen pop star, who is openly LGBTQ+, had dissed her. Upon finding out that Siwa had felt hurt when, at age 11, she was disappointed that Bure declined to take a photo with her even though she was taking photos with others. Bure offered her apologies, and Siwa accepted them.

By then, though, two camps had formed. "She has a very Christian audience," Siwa said, ET reported. "I think a lot of times too LGBTQ people [and] Christian people, some of them are great with each other, other times it's like, 'Let's go to war.'"

Siwa recalled to the Viall Files that "Everyone started coming after her. Everyone started coming after me. We were both getting hit."

Added the "Dancing with the Stars" sensation: "She didn't need that. I didn't need that. Let's learn the lesson for next time."

Except that when the "next time" came around was when Bure left Hallmark Channel – right around the time Hallmark started including LGBTQ+ leading characters and main plot lines to its Christmas movies – and Bure took a job as chief creative officer at Great American Family, a channel aimed at a conservative Christian audience. Bure lost no time in saying that she had made the switch because Great American Family would "keep traditional marriage at the core" of their programming.

That statement only reinforced Siwa's perception of Bure. The teen star called the cable channel exec's apparent dismissal of inclusive programming "rude and hurtful to a whole community of people."

In a post at the time, Siwa wrote, "honestly, I can't believe after everything that went down just a few months ago, that she would not only create a movie with [the] intention of excluding LGBTQIA+ [people], but then also talk about it in the press."

Bure denied that she had a specific intention of excluding LGBTQ+ stories from the channel's lineup of Christmas movies.

Looking back, Siwa told The Viall Files podcast that what troubled her wasn't the idea of not doing movies with LGBTQ+ themes, but rather the idea of a cable channel going out of its way to avoid representation.

"[W]hen you're doing it out of spite to say that, 'Too much is about LGBTQ, you guys suck, and I want to make a movie about traditional marriage and you're not traditional,' that got to me a little bit," the pop star explained.

"I'm never going to be able to change her," Siwa said of Bure. "She's not gonna be able to change me. We can both just live life. We can both just have fun," Siwa said. "But I wish she was able to be a little more open, a little more accepting."

Meanwhile, Siwa proclaimed herself "OK with calling her out in the way that I did," ET noted.

"For a while I regretted it," Siwa added, "but after I found out that article about her not wanting anything to do with LGBTQIA, that's my people."

Added the pop star: "I've got to stand up for my people. That's messed up."