It’s astonishing what the world of celebrity can keep secret from outsiders. For almost eight years, no-one knew that Jesy Nelson – one quarter of the girl band Little Mix – had
attempted suicide due to an onslaught of horrific online abuse. No-one knew that she used to starve herself to lose weight ahead of a performance. And every time she was too ill to join her band mates for a public appearance, no-one thought that illness was depression. Almost everyone, though, saw the abuse.
Anyone with a Twitter account in 2011 was aware of Jesy from Little Mix, whether they watched
The X Factor or not, though, as Nelson recalls in her new BBC documentary
Odd One Out, they probably saw her referred to as ‘the fat one’ or ‘the ugly one’.
“The whole world had an opinion on me,” she says at the beginning of the film, “and they weren’t good ones.” It’s heartbreaking to hear that when the band won the talent show, Nelson just wanted to go back to her normal life as a barmaid. Her mother, Janice, still feels that way.
As well as the trolls who stalk the internet,
Odd One Out is a damning denouncement of social media itself. Nelson says that the moment she created her social media accounts at the behest of management, her whole world changed from an obliviously happy one to one in which she was fat, ugly and apparently worthy of death. “I feel like I lost Jess to social media,” says her mother