Olivia Rodrigo Copped To Her “Very Embarrassing” Instagram “Stalking” Blunder

Olivia Rodrigo sings about how she “made it weird” in “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” and it doesn’t sound like she’s exaggerating her propensity for social slip-ups. One “very embarrassing encounter” played out very publicly last year, and she finally explained what happened while appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Dec. 7.

The awkwardness occurred on social media, as is so often the case. Rodrigo was on Instagram, checking up on an ex, when she made a dreaded mistake: “I had this very embarrassing encounter once where I was stalking my ex, as one does. Sue me, sorry,” she told Fallon. “And I accidentally followed him because I was stalking him.”

The Follow Seen ’Round The World

For Rodrigo, this was a uniquely big problem. “I try to follow zero people because it helps me be off of my phone, you know, off of social media,” she explained. That meant that it was “super obvious” when she started following her ex. “My friend ran into my room and was like, ‘Oh, my God! Did you mean to follow him? Like, unfollow him!’” she added.

And she would have done so immediately — if she could have. “I went and I grabbed my phone, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shoot! Oh, my God!’” she said. “And I went to open the Instagram app, and the second that I opened the app, my phone died.”

Rodrigo’s awkward situation got worse. She “couldn’t find the charger,” she recalled, so she couldn’t correct her mistake. “So I was just following my ex for a while,” she said.

The Cover-Up

Fallon asked Rodrigo if people caught on to what had happened, and she said people thought she’d been hacked. It was an excuse she was all too happy to use as cover. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, you guys. Be safe. … Get your two-factor authentication, you guys,’” she said.

Embarrassed as she may have been at the time, Rodrigo’s takeaway was not to stop social media stalking her exes. Instead, she created a finsta so she could be “safe,” as she put it. “So you can just lurk and be curious,” she told Fallon after suggesting he create his own fake Instagram account.

The Ex In Question

During her story, Rodrigo never named her former flame. However, many fans immediately recalled the time she followed then unfollowed her rumored ex Joshua Bassett in early July 2022. (Though they’ve never confirmed they were dating, the two were romantically linked in 2020 when they starred together in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.) “not olivia rodrigo admitting she was hasnt [sic] hacked at the time. bc she stalking her ex, aka joshua bassett & accidentally followed him,” one fan tweeted.

Many fans did buy that she was hacked when it all went down. “i fear olivia rodrigo has been hacked,” one wrote on X (then still Twitter) on July 2, 2022. They included a screenshot of Rodrigo’s Instagram, which showed her following Bassett and Bassett alone. Another tweeted, “olivia rodrigo hacked on insta ??,” and a like-minded fan wrote, “@oliviarodrigo liv baby ur ig was hacked.”

Still, some people weren’t fooled. “olivia rodrigo lurking on joshua’s ig and accidentally following him and her team trying to cover up as she was hacked,” one person tweeted, adding three emojis showing how funny they found it. Thanks to Rodrigo, they’ve finally been vindicated.