Little Mix’s Jesy Nelson has revealed online abuse pushed her towards attempted suicide. Nelson became famous after auditioning for The X Factor as a solo act but she was then put into a group with Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Perrie Edwards and Jade Thirlwall.
Jesy Nelson / Editorial credit: Featureflash Photo Agency / Shutterstock.com
Nelson then became a target for online trolls and she has admitted that she became “obsessed” with reading negative comments about herself online.
She tells her story in the BBC Three documentary, Jesy Nelson: ‘Odd One Out’. In the documentary she shares that comments people were making about her appearance made her unhappy and she “just wanted to die”. Nelson recalls how she took an overdose after the comments were too much to beat.
Editorial credit: Featureflash Photo Agency / Shutterstock.com. Little Mix at
She told The Guardian: “It only got worse when I got Twitter. And that led to the Daily Mail, and reading the [below the line] comments – the worst you can read about yourself.
“It was like I purposely wanted to hurt myself.”
She added: “I had a routine of waking up, going on Twitter, searching for the worst things I could about myself,”
“I’d type in the search bar, ‘Jesy fat’, or ‘Jesy ugly’, and see what would come up. Sometimes I didn’t even need to do that, I’d just write ‘Jesy’ and then I’d see all the horrible things.
“Everyone told me to ignore it – but it was like an addiction.”
After Little Mix toured with Demi Lovato things started to change, some of Lovato’s dancers encouraged Nelson to delete her Twitter.
Commenting on this, Nelson said: “It was a long, hard process, because I didn’t want to help myself.
“But it wasn’t until I deleted Twitter that everything changed for me and I slowly started to feel normal again.”
“I just kept saying, ‘I just want to die. I just want to die.'”
Jesy Nelson: ‘Odd One Out’ is coming to iplayer and BBC One at 9pm on September 12th. #OddOneOut pic.twitter.com/PGsioYX6Nj
— BBC Three (@bbcthree) September 9, 2019
Nelson admits she still has bad days but she is able to deal with it in a much better way. Earlier this year she announced the documentary and said she wants to “make a change and a difference to other people’s lives”.
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