{"id":1573,"date":"2016-04-13T15:09:21","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T15:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/?p=1573"},"modified":"2016-04-15T21:27:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-15T21:27:17","slug":"what-actually-happened-to-nikki-webster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/what-actually-happened-to-nikki-webster\/","title":{"rendered":"What Actually Happened To Nikki Webster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia has gone through its share of pop culture punchlines. The joke du jour is currently Shannon Noll<\/a>, who\u2019s become the subject of countless memes and tongue-in-cheek campaigns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fun. We centre on a target seemingly arbitrarily \u2014 usually some disposable piece of Australian cultural detritus \u2014 and have a collective chuckle before discarding the subject entirely.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it\u2019s pretty easy to forget there\u2019s an actual person behind the memes and jabs. Sure, Nollsy seems to be in on the joke, but it\u2019s harder for a teenage girl to take things in stride.<\/p>\n

Nikki Webster experienced this phenomenon first hand. The Sydney native was catapulted into national attention at the tender age of 13 when she performed at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.<\/p>\n

Dressed in a summer dress, with pink ribbons tying back her strawberry blonde locks, the entire world\u2019s attention was on Nikki as she flew high above the Olympic stadium crowd.<\/p>\n

It was an apt metaphor for the young singer, who was chosen out of 500 other young girls to perform at the Olympics. Webster capitalised on her Olympics stardom with a debut single.<\/p>\n

\u2018Strawberry Kisses\u2019 entered the charts at number two and stayed there for seven weeks. Meanwhile, Webster\u2019s profile as Australia\u2019s sweetheart rose and she became a household name.<\/p>\n

But the child star, who\u2019s now 28 years old, recently revealed that her post-\u2018Strawberry Kisses\u2019 life was a \u201cdark\u201d period that left her confused and wanting to escape Australia altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the punch line of everyone\u2019s joke and I was just a kid,\u201d Webster told The Daily Telegraph<\/a><\/em>. The singer moved to LA to escape harassers and negative attention in her homeland.<\/p>\n