Hopefully you haven’t used up all of your celebrity sympathy cards for this year.

If you have a few condolences stashed away for a rainy day, you really must pity the plight of former LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne. It’s heartbreaking is all it is.

She’s had a rough go of it in recent weeks, it turns out.

So keep her in your thoughts.

Never mind that, on the surface it would appear that Dunne pretty well has life whipped at the ripe old age of 22.

She has celebrity well beyond being a former good but never quite great practitioner of the floor exercise and parallel bars while at LSU.

Yet, armed with just social media accounts Instagram and TikTok attracting a reported 13 million followers, she shattered all NCAA records for NIL earnings when it became legal.

LSU doesn’t yet award degrees in the budding profession of “On-line Influencer,” but she has set the bar high for any undergraduates interested in the career.

To that end, it certainly doesn’t hurt being a twotime Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, including a cover.

What more could a young woman want?

Oh, sorry, almost forgot. She also has another former Tiger, Paul Skenes of Major League Baseball renown, as a boyfriend and together they seem on the verge of overtaking Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift as America’s most famous power athletic couple.

Does life get any better?

Well, it turns out it’s not all sunshine and lollipops, even at the top end of the social media cash cow.

Never mind that rough patch Dunne had early in her influencing career when she had deal in place with Caktus. AI, one of those artificial intelligence outfits.

She put her sponsor through its artificial paces in a TikTok video, whereas Caktus. AI whipped out a school essay for her that she was due that night.

LSU’s academic stiff suits were forced to respond, as delicately as possible: “At LSU, our professors and students are empowered to use technology for learning and pursuing the highest standards of academic integrity. However, using AI to produce work that a student then represents as one’s own could result in a charge of academic misconduct.”

Nothing much came of that and the cash kept rolling in.

Seemingly, nothing could knock her off that pedestal.

Seemingly.

Do all the “influencing” you want, cheer on your boyfriend’s quest for run support in Pittsburgh with all due diligence.

It can make you a rich girl indeed, with the world at your fingertips.

Fly me to the moon …

But — downside alert! — apparently it won’t buy you Babe Ruth’s former apartment in New York City, probably somewhere
there in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Who’d have ever thunk it?

Wasn’t the introduction of NIL combined with social media supposed to address this kind of injustice?

If I’m reading this Los Angeles Times story correctly, Dunne had her heart set on moving into The Bambino’s old digs and thought it was a done deal.

She even brought in the famous baseball boyfriend, Skenes, for a look-see of where the Babe used to live — probably with a fair amount of carousing — from 1929-1940.

Never mind that Dunne lives in Los Angeles. It was going to be her first home purchase.

Dunne, who once received $500,000 for a single online media post, was even prepared to pay cash up front for the Babe’s old place, reportedly for $1.6 million.

But the dream all came crashing down when the building’s co-op board rejected her application.

No explanation, she posted on social media.

Wait a minute. This place could handle Babe Ruth’s rollicking antics, yet a petite little gymnast is a threat to the property?

Something’s not right here.

She’d even hired an interior designer — “I didn’t want to bring my college furniture to Babe Ruth’s apartment. That would be, like, criminal.

“I was literally supposed to get the keys the week they rejected me.”

So, sad to say, her apartment hunt continues, although a master influencer never misses an opportunity to stir things up.

“For all I know they could have been Alabama fans and I went to LSU,” she said (apparently in jest) of the co-op board. “I have no clue.”

She did, however, have some advice for her legions of followers should they be tempted to get into the cutthroat world of the New York City real estate market.

“Don’t try to live in a co-op,” she said. “You might get denied and won’t get Babe Ruth’s apartment.”

Maybe they just hate the Pirates.
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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com