Good for Jesy Nelson, no amount of fame and wealth makes you ‘fair game’

Jesy Nelson has left Little Mix. Stop sneering, it IS important news if you’re at all interested in the impact internet trolling can have on people. She’s a massive popstar (what do you mean you didn’t know that? Google “Little Mix: Shout Out To My Ex” immediately and dance around your kitchen), who was trolled so cruelly and relentlessly that she tried to kill herself.  

Most of us are aware now of trolling but few of us know what it feels like to have a total stranger online saying horrible things to us publicly and making judgements. Even underneath this column, there will no doubt be comments by people who have never met me, who will say things that they would never say if we were sitting next to each other at a mutual friend’s wedding.

Jesy Nelson was put together with three other women on The X Factor in 2011 to form the group Little Mix. They have had phenomenal success all over the world, which had not waned when Jesy made her announcement this week. Fans of Little Mix – Mixers – are notoriously, fiercely loyal (sometimes to the point of being somewhat terrifying) and were full of support for Jesy because out of the four group members, it has been she who has borne the brunt of the ugly side of fame.  

But along with devoted fans came the bitter trolls. Online messages, immediately after they won The X Factor, arrived telling her she was the “fat, ugly one” and that she “should die”, and all the other charming bulletins internet trolls are known for.  

Here in 2020, we are all so much more savvy about the impact of being trolled. Back in 2011, it wasn’t something much acknowledged and “just ignore it” was pretty much the only advice given if your timeline was awash with hatred.

That year, I performed on Live at the Apollo. I shouldn’t have done it, my mental state was fragile to say the least. I should have been in a quiet, white room listening to whale music, not on a huge TV show. One quick look on Twitter after it was aired taught me to never again look at comments immediately after I had been on television. It truly is a form of self harm. Twenty-year-old me would not have had the tools 38-year-old me had to deal with the trolling.

"Just ignore it” can mean nothing if you can’t ignore it. It’s no good saying “Be strong babe!’ to someone who is crumbling. So much of what journalists report now has to do with the reaction you are getting online, so vile comments and trolls are far more likely to be brought up in face-to-face interviews, or be written about in columns and articles (I say this with self awareness), so there is literally no escape.  

As an online society, we are moving forward with how we deal with hate. High profile trolls are not getting away with it like they used to. Katie Hopkins’ relentlessly vile tweets got her booted off Twitter eventually. Her comments about Jesy Nelson’s weight were singled out by Nelson on her award-winning BBC documentary Odd One Out, in which she talked of her suicide attempt. She described Hopkins’ comments as “the pinnacle point for me when I got severely depressed and it just spiralled out of control”.

Imagine being a young woman who has already been taking online batterings, then someone old enough to be your mum, who has hundreds of thousands of followers, mocks your appearance. I imagine it would really rock a belief that people were generally alright.  

Julie Burchill’s professional trolling career hit a big snag this week when her book was cancelled by her publisher. On Twitter, Ash Sarkar posted Rod Liddle’s Spectator column from 2012, in which he said: “One thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids.” Burchill leapt to Liddle’s defence, using Sarkar’s Muslim religion as a stick to beat her with. I’m no religious scholar but I know that a quick skim across the texts of all the great faiths will show you things a modern believer is not at one with. Burchill’s publishers showed her the door.

So, too, did King of the Trolls Milo Yiannopoulos’s publishers when an interview was unearthed where he suggested that some 13-year-olds are able to give consent to sex with an adult (what is it with these trolls and paedophilia?).  

Free speech is about not having punishment meted out to you by the law of the land. It does not mean you can be as ‘orrible and ignorant a human being as you fancy and expect people to still be forced to work with you, give you a platform on their commercial site, or invite you to their parties.  

I’m glad for Jesy that she’s decided, “Sod this crap, I want a nice life.” No amount of fame or wealth makes you “fair game” to trolls who feast on misery.