Where Are They Now? Here's What Jenna Marbles Has Been Up To Since She Quit YouTube In 2020

Jenna Marbles was one of YouTube's first massive stars, amassing a following of over 20 million people in her nearly decade-long YouTube career.

Her early comedy sketches, such as her "Three Looks" song, and vlog-style videos have gathered tens of millions of views over the years and show Jenna embodying the quintessential 2010s millennial, her blonde hair always a little messed up and frizzy, her tone often sardonic but ultimately optimistic.

In 2020, however, a wave of celebrity cancelations and subsequent apology videos swept the internet, resulting in Jenna Marbles herself getting caught up in the storm and becoming controversial in the eyes of many.

That year, numerous people dug up videos from the early 2010s in which Jenna Marbles could be seen wearing blackface and enacting contentious East-Asian caricatures — offensive jokes that many other early YouTubers like Shane Dawson found themselves answering for 10 years down the line.

Jenna Marbles ultimately quit YouTube after owning up to her faults. In fact, she quit all social media, leaving her fans to piece together what they can about her life through her friends and her then-fiancé, now-husband, Julien Solomita.

But her fans are still desperate for a crumb of information about her life over four years later, with some arguing her cancelation was justified while others felt she didn't deserve the backlash and hope she'll someday return.

Here's a look at how Jenna Marbles initially rose to internet fame, fell from grace, and what she's been up to since she left YouTube in 2020.

Who Is Jenna Marbles, And How Did She Become A YouTube Celebrity?

Jenna Marbles was born Jenna Mourey in Rochester, New York in 1986. She got a Master of Education in sports psychology at Boston University before moving to Massachusetts back in the summer of 2010, when she first made her YouTube account.

Sharing a three-bedroom house with her roommates, Marbles made ends meet by bartending, working at a tanning salon, vlogging and go-go dancing at nightclubs. That year, Marbles also began writing for Barstool's sister site, StoolLaLa.com.

Jenna's early videos were quintessential 2010 YouTube fodder. Her video titled "How to trick people into thinking you're good looking," shows her going from bare-faced to full glam, interspersed with lol random clips of her punching and thrusting the air. The video might not seem like much now, but it gathered over 70 million views in 14 years.

Marbles then quit her job with Barstool/StoolLaLa in 2011 and began to focus on YouTube full-time. She adopted the name "Jenna Marbles," named after her dog Marbles, instead of her real name "Jenna Mourey" because her mom was tired of her clogging up the Google Search hits for the family's last name.

Another well-known part of her online fame, she got her Italian greyhound "Kermit the Dog" in 2010 too. By 2011, Marbles was well on her way to YouTube stardom.

It's hard to overstate Jenna Marbles' popularity in the 2010s. At the height of her fame that decade, a Marbles cosign didn't just mean that your YouTube video could pop, it meant that seemingly anything on the internet with her name was bound to succeed.

This led to her making numerous cameos across the platform, like that time she ended up in an Epic Rap Battles of History segment in which she played Eve, or the time she made a cameo in Pitbull's "Fireball" music video.

Jenna Marbles was also the first YouTuber to get memorialized as a wax figure displayed at Madame Tussauds New York — a sure-shot sign that someone has made it to the big leagues.

Why Did Jenna Marbles Leave YouTube In 2020?

It's hard to imagine a reason why Jenna Marbles would ever end up leaving YouTube given how she played an essential role in shaping what it means to be a YouTuber during the site's heyday. But with heightened social tensions and increased awareness about issues like sexism and racism, as seen in movements like #MeToo and BLM, the online world saw a palpable shift around the turn of the decade.

Toward the start of her YouTube career, Jenna Marbles made some videos that gelled less with the wholesome public persona she had constructed for herself and more with the Barstool brand of humor that she used to work with.

Among these examples was one where she put on a thicker coat of self-tanner than usual and dressed up as rap star Nicki Minaj. Another clip showed her dressed as a caricature of an East-Asian person in the midst of a parody rap song, at one point in the video saying, "Wow, that was kind of racist, I don't know how to rap good."

As these old clips were dug up in 2020 by those who found them highly problematic, many around various parts of the web called Jenna Marbles out as a wave to cancel her began surging online.

Marbles then posted a video apologizing for her ill-informed and sometimes offensive early content, saying that she left the videos up to show how much she had grown as a person by 2020 while realizing that doing so was hurtful in itself.

In her tearful speech, Jenna said that she was eager to take accountability for her actions, but in a sharp shift from similar YouTuber apologies, she actually took steps to show that she means what she said.

"All right, so I get it," Marbles said during the opening of the video. "I feel like we're at a time where we are purging ourselves of anything and everything toxic and I'm being requested that I address things that I've done in my past."

After she released her statement, Jenna Marbles removed or privated several videos from her YouTube library and deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts as well. In fact, she went completely offline in the spring of 2020, announcing an "intermittent hiatus" that she seems unlikely to break away from anytime soon.

Jenna Marbles' decision to quit YouTube indefinitely left her fans in shambles, many of whom did not expect her to take a break from her channel entirely. The longer Jenna contained her "indefinite hiatus," the clearer it became to her fans that she was, in fact, done with her YouTube career for now.

What Had Jenna Marbles Been Up To Since She Quit Social Media?

When Jenna Marbles quit social media, a lot of her fans gravitated toward her then-boyfriend, now-husband Julien Solomita's YouTube.

Julien and Jenna met back in 2014 and began dating after they started a podcast together. The two currently live in Los Angeles with their two dogs, and Julien stuck by Jenna during her controversial cancelation.

It's become obvious in the years since Jenna Marbles quit YouTube that when she said she was distancing herself from social media, she actually meant it. To this effect, Marbles does not collaborate or participate in Julien's videos, aside from the odd cameo in a cooking vlog or two, since the two do live together.

But many of Marbles' fans are still starved for information about her, and they often comment on all of his Instagram posts asking for her. For this reason, Julien often turns off the comments on his Instagram posts. Still, fans can catch glimpses of Jenna's life when she poses for photos with the occasional fan.

Jenna Mourey married Julien Solomita in November 2022, with a few photos of the happy couple making their way to Solomita's Instagram page in December of that year. In a post-wedding stream, Solomita speaks with her followers and laughs about how surprised he was that his colleagues and family were able to keep the wedding under wraps for a whole month after it actually happened.

How Can You Keep Up With Jenna Marbles And Her Dogs Today?

To this day, Julien Solomita runs a fairly successful YouTube channel and Twitch channel still where he posts much-awaited updates on Marbles and Kermit, Jenna's beloved pets.

But ultimately, it seems like Jenna Marbles is not eager to be "kept up" with. Despite making brief appearances on her husband's streams, Marbles has made no efforts to return to the internet.

She and Solomita appear to live comfortable and relatively modest lives in LA, perhaps aided in part by 10 years' worth of Jenna Marble's well-invested earnings from her time as one of YouTube's biggest names and Solomita's own internet career he continues today.

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For the full history of Jenna Marbles, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.