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Cheryl Cole says X-Factor USA sacking was “right”

By | Published on Friday 4 July 2014

Cheryl Cole

Cheryl Cole has given a fairly unflinching interview this week in which she reveals what it felt like to be fired from ‘The X-Factor USA’ back in 2011. Basically and unsurprisingly, it sucked.

Telling it straight via Elle Magazine, Chez claims she “wasn’t well in the head” at the time of her brief time working on the show, adding that Simon Cowell was “right to get rid of me”.

She says: “I can talk about this because I’m OK about it now. But I went through hell and it literally drove me mad. I became so desensitised, you could say terrible things to me and I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d read awful stuff about myself and [didn’t] blink. I shut down because I didn’t know what else to do”.

She continues: “I wasn’t well in the head when that was going on, so it wasn’t going to work. But he wasn’t right not to tell me to my face. It only hit me at the beginning of 2013 that I’d completely lost myself. I’d look in a mirror and think: ‘Who the hell is she?’ I didn’t know what I thought or felt about anything, couldn’t make decisions – I didn’t even know what to eat or drink. Something was seriously wrong: it felt like a nervous breakdown”.

“I had to stop” she adds, “get out of my life I’d been living and find myself again. The consequences if I didn’t were just too frightening”.

As previously reported, Cole was wiped from ‘X-Factor USA’ after filming only one episode, apparently because the show’s makers were afraid her accent wasn’t making sense to American viewers. Years down the line, her all-new accepting stance over the incident may relate to the fact that she reached an out-of-court settlement with ‘X US’ producer Blue Orbit in late 2013, having sued the company for lost earnings and expenses earlier that year.

That, and the additional point that she’s now ‘riding high’ again, with a new LP on its way, a chiseled French lover who brings her roses, and her prime place back at the British ‘X-Factor’ table. Plus, she doesn’t “give a fuck what people think any more”. Which always helps.



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