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JoJo Siwa is nothing if not incredible at being on reality television. She rose to fame on Dance Moms and parlayed that success into a multimillion-dollar hair-bow empire. There was that time she carried Tom Sandoval like a sack of potatoes on a show where they were pretending to be in the military. And now she’s gone and created excellent TV again on Celebrity Big Brother, where she fostered such a strong connection with former Love Island contestant Chris Hughes that she seems to have broken up with her partner, Kath Ebbs. All of this happened in three weeks, and we haven’t even touched on Mickey Rourke’s role. Here’s what’s going on.
Who is involved here?
There are three main players in this saga: JoJo Siwa (21), Chris Hughes (32), and Kath Ebbs (27). Siwa is the name you’re probably most familiar with. She’s very famous among Gen Alpha and has recently been trying to cross over to a more adult audience via very horny music videos. She has been dating Kath Ebbs, an Australian DJ and podcaster, since late last year.
Chris Hughes is one of those guys who is on TV a lot in the U.K. and is famous for just sort of being around. After appearing on Love Island’s third season in 2017, Hughes released a pretty successful rap single with his castmate Kem Cetinay, dated Jesy Nelson of Little Mix, and has done all kinds of reality TV.
What happened with JoJo Siwa and Chris Hughes in the Celebrity Big Brother house?
If Hughes’s name sounds sort of familiar in the context of CBB, it’s because he is the guy who defended Siwa from Mickey Rourke’s homophobic comments in the first episode of the season. After that incident — where Rourke used a homophobic slur toward Siwa and said he was going to “vote the lesbian off real quick” — Siwa and Hughes got very close very quickly. (Rourke was eventually kicked off the show after getting into a verbal spat with Hughes.)
While in the Big Brother house, Siwa and Hughes developed a friendship that got handsy almost immediately. In one episode, Siwa crawled into Hughes’s bed to hug him and he told her he missed her while he was sleeping, to which Siwa replied, “Why didn’t you have a dream about me then?”
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That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Elsewhere in the season, the pair were caught spooning in bed together and sharing forehead kisses. At one point, Hughes sobbed to the cameras because “people have made me feel like I can’t have a friendship with JoJo.”
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At the end of their time together on the show (he came in sixth, she came in fourth) they shared a very tearful good-bye. “I feel very grateful. I feel very confused. I feel very happy,” Siwa told Hughes, adding, “I feel guilty for how happy I’ve been.”
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On top of all of this, early in the show’s run, Siwa told one of her fellow housemates, RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant Danny Beard, that she was no longer identifying solely as a lesbian. “I feel, like, so queer, do you know what I mean?” Siwa said. “I’ve always told myself I’m a lesbian, and I think being here I’ve realized: Oh, I’m not a lesbian, I’m queer. And I think that’s really cool.” She then excitedly declared that she was “switching letters,” shouting, “Fuck the L, I’m going to the Q!”
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What has Kath Ebbs said about all of this?
Okay, so now imagine that you are Siwa’s partner and you’re watching all of this happen. It’s probably not the best feeling, which is basically what Ebbs said in a lengthy Instagram Reel posted Saturday. In the video, Ebbs shared that Siwa “dumped” them at the CBB wrap party and that they were in “a complete state of shock.”
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“I honestly feel so numbed out right now and so disorientated [sic] that I feel like the only thing I have to do to place this situation is to finally address it after two weeks of sitting back, watching certain things unfold and not being able to get any clarity from the person that it involved,” Ebbs said, adding that their relationship with Siwa was serious enough that the singer had already asked to marry them. According to Ebbs, what the audience saw on the show between Siwa and Hughes was “laced in a lot of truth” and the experience of watching it was “unsettling” and they felt “betrayed” by Siwa.
“I was told that there are confused feelings there,” Ebbs said of Siwa, “And that they had realized in the house that I wasn’t the person that they wanted to spend the foreseeable future with.” This has to be one of the top-five worst ways to be broken up with, probably just below the “I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.” Post-It.
What’s up with Siwa and Hughes now?
On Monday morning, Siwa and Hughes appeared on the British show This Morning to talk about their time on the show. They maintained that their bond was “platonic” but intense. “Our friendship is, it’s hard to explain,” Hughes said. “It’s just a really strong bond. A strong friendship. You can have a soulmate friendship. I think that’s a thing.”
Siwa also confirmed that she broke up with Ebbs at the show’s wrap party, but that wasn’t her plan for the night. “Initially, I was told that the wrap party was something they didn’t want to attend and then about an hour into the wrap party they decided they wanted to,” Siwa explained. At the party, Siwa says, Ebbs asked her if she was happy, and she admitted she wasn’t. “One thing led to another, and that conversation did take place there,” Siwa said.
What’s next for Siwa and Hughes? They aren’t sure. On This Morning, Siwa said, “I don’t know any future of anything, but I am really grateful for our dynamic that we have, the bond that we have, and whatever life does, life will do.” Spoken like a true 21-year-old.
