Liz Lee is getting some closure on a confusing period in her life.
The artist, 34, who was at the center of the 2010 MTV series My Life as Liz, has recently talked about her brief time in reality TV on TikTok. In doing so, she’s reconnected with some of her other classmates who appeared on the show, revealing she’s even “squashed beef” with formal rival Cori Cooper.
“I cannot relay to you guys how healing this has been. Without all of this renewed interest, I wouldn’t have found her TikTok, where she started making TikToks about her experience. And it seems pretty awful, what she went through. I just felt so much empathy for her because we were both collateral damage from this machine.”
After Lee “slid into her DMs,” she shared the two had “a really good talk” and encouraged fans to listen to her side of things.
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On Cooper’s TikTok, she opened up about how, much like Lee didn’t know she’d be at the center of the show, Cooper didn’t know she’d be portrayed as a “villain.”
“It was very staged. It’s not necessarily, it wasn’t scripted, but I was told, ‘Hey, say this,’ ‘Hey, do that,’ ‘Hey, be meaner.’ It was just a lot of weird situations to be put in as a child by an adult,” she shared.
“Yes, I was 18. I signed my own contract. I didn’t have to have my parents’ permission. I have a lot of people that were, ‘I can’t believe your parents let you act that way and let you do that.’ They didn’t let me act any certain way, or do any certain thing. I was told that this was a show about high school life and what it’s like to be in high school. And it was not.”
Cooper said that she didn’t see the show until the rest of the world did, and she was “just as shocked” by how she was presented, adding “a lot of the stuff I filmed was never used.”
When commenters accused her of not taking accountability for her behavior, Cooper replied, “I actually never said that I didn’t own it. I never said that I wasn’t a bully. I just said that it wasn’t… the show was very one-sided. There was stuff that went on, on both parties. I received a lot of backlash and again, I was never told, ‘Hey, you’re going to go be a bully,’ or ‘You’re going to be made out to be the bad guy.’ “
Cooper says that she has “grown” from the experience, adding that at 34, she feels she doesn’t deserve some of the backlash she gets.
It appears that Lee’s friends have also been thinking about the show since her TikToks have gone viral. In a video on July 22, Lee revealed that as part of her plan to watch and react to the series live on Twitch, members of “the nerd herd” would be joining her in an upcoming stream.
“I reached out to Sully, Troy, Zona, Miles… those who were once affectionately referred to as ‘the nerd herd,’ the proud, the few. They are going to join me for live commentary on My Life is Liz on Twitch.”
The pseudo-cast reunion is likely on the slate for next week. In the meantime, Lee is working on getting Taylor Terry to also join in. “Even Cori said she’d be down, so stay tuned, ” she concluded.
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