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Little Mix’s Jesy Nelson speaks about suicide attempt following online trolling

By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 10 September 2019

Little Mix’s Jesy Nelson will front a BBC One documentary later this week discussing how online trolling led her to attempt suicide.

In the programme, she describes how bullying through social media began almost as soon as she appeared on ‘X Factor’ for the first time in 2011, where she was teamed up with other competitors to form Little Mix.

“It became the worst time of my life,” she says in the film. “I wasn’t just known as one of the singers in Little Mix, I was known as ‘the fat, ugly one'”.

She says that when the group returned to ‘X Factor’ in 2013 she had “lost quite a bit of weight” and “starved [herself] for a week” before the appearance. “All I cared about was people seeing me and saying ‘Oh, she looks good'”, she adds. But the negative comments continued and her mental health “spiralled out of control”.

Feeling that the trolling was “never going to go away”, she says that she became severely depressed and attempted to take her own life.

Now “mentally a lot happier”, she says she wants to speak out to make people realise the cost of negative comments online, adding: “I think this is important because social media is such a huge part of everyone’s lives. You can say one nasty comment and think they’re not going to see it, it doesn’t mean anything to you. But it does, it affects people massively”.

‘Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out’ will air on BBC One at 9pm on 12 Sep, as well as being available on the BBC iPlayer.