When 13-year-old “Bhad Bhabie” Danielle Bregoli appeared on Dr. Phil in 2016 and uttered the lines ‘Cash me outside – how ’bout dat,” her life changed forever. At only 20 years old she’s worth an estimated $20 million, and now she’s revealing how her “narcissistic” mother’s obsession with getting her on Dr. Phil led her on the path to fame and fortune.
Danielle explained the situation on Emily Ratajkowski’s podcast High Low with EmRata, which was published in audio form in April 2023 and recently released in video format on Emily’s YouTube channel.
On Danielle’s 19th birthday, she found out that her mother, Barbara Ann Bregoli, had been emailing the Dr. Phil show since Danielle was only two years old.
When Emily asked what her mother wrote that got her on the show, she didn’t know. She did say that her manager was the one who discovered that her mother had been emailing Dr. Phil since Danielle was a baby.
“I barely walked,” Danielle noted. “What the f**k was a I doing that was bad?”
Why did Danielle’s mother want her to go on the Dr. Phil show?
Danielle reasons that her mother’s desire to go on the show stems from what Danielle considers to be narcissistic traits. “My mom is a very narcissistic person and, you know, narcissists, they like a crowd figuratively and literally they like a crowd,” Danielle said.
She said that she welcomed the idea of having an audience to convince of her particular narrative.
“Because they feel like, ‘Well I can’t convince the people who really know me, so I can convince others of whatever narrative I want to play.'”
Of course, the world’s audience was more interested in Danielle’s stage presence, even as they judged her for her attitude. It wasn’t her mother, but the studio audience she was addressed when she said “Cash me outside.”
“Catch you outside?” Dr. Phil asked Danielle. “What does that mean?”
“Catch her outside,” her mother explained. “Means she’ll go outside and do what she has to do.”
The infamous episode was titled “I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime” and aired in October 2016.
Danielle says she was instructed to do whatever she needed to do during taping to make good TV. They reportedly told her to do whatever she needed to do: punch, kick, or spit.
She says that at only 13 years old, she was smoking cigarettes and had to spit when she smoked them. Danielle thought the producers saw that and assumed that she would spit out of aggression, when really she was spitting because “this f**king Newport tastes like the bottom of somebody’s foot.”
After the episode was filmed in September 2016, Danielle was sent to the Turn-About Ranch in Escalante, UT, and didn’t have access to the media or the Internet until she returned home in February 2017.
When she came home, she was a hugely popular meme and, over the years, has capitalized on that in various ways: a music career, OnlyFans, and a hugely successful NFT drop.
In February 2017, she immediately appeared on a follow-up episode where she told Dr. Phil that she and Oprah had “made him.”
In 2021, Danielle spoke out against Turn About Ranch, accusing the facilities of traumatizing the teens who are sent there for help.
<h3>Danielle has changed</h3>
Danielle says that when she was young, she was extremely confrontational, not just to her mom and Dr. Phil’s studio audience but also online. Now, she says she’s anything but confrontational and is constantly telling her boyfriend to chill.
Danielle doesn’t like always being compared to her 13-year-old self, both in behavior and looks. At this point, the only plastic surgery she’s had done is lip fillers, but people are constantly putting up before-and-after photos of her, claiming that she’s had a lot of work done, when she says any changes besides the lips are solely do to the natural process of growing up and getting older.
