Former Little Mix singer Jesy Nelson claimed that she attempted suicide before leaving the band in 2020.
“I basically just sat everyone down, and I just explained how I was feeling,” Nelson, 34, said in her Prime Video docuseries, Life After Little Mix, revealing how she perceived bandmates Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall and Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s reactions to her overwhelming panic attacks and desire to quit performing. “I just felt like no one cared.”
Nelson claimed that one of her bandmates succinctly replied, “Are you done now? Is that it? Can I go now?”
Hearing her bandmate’s comment made Nelson feel especially alone.
“[I felt] like there’s just no point to this,” she tearfully said. “No one cares.”
Nelson’s mom, Janice White, also started noticing her daughter was feeling “down and really down” after the discussion.
“[She] was not talking much,” White said in the doc. “She wanted to be on her own quite a lot, and I just got a gut feeling that something wasn’t right. I kept ringing and ringing [her phone], and then I was getting no answer. She eventually answered the phone, but she was talking really slurry, and I could hear the phone drop and then I didn’t hear anything else. I knew she had done something.”
Nelson was subsequently hospitalized.
“I just was so sad, like, I was so down,” she recalled. “I knew from that moment of coming out of hospital that I mentally couldn’t [continue in the band], and before I could even have a discussion with the girls, I needed to figure out where I was legally in terms of ‘Could I even come out of it now?’”
Nelson said the band’s attorney “unfortunately” told the other singers about her plans to leave the group before she could say anything.
Little Mix performs during The BRIT Awards 2019 held at The O2 Arena on February 20, 2019 in London, England. Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
“I think they felt really hurt by that, and it should never have played out like that,” Nelson claimed. “I feel like that was taken away from me, and I didn’t get my opportunity to explain why I couldn’t do this anymore. I [had] mentally got myself ready and was, like, ‘I wanna sit down with the girls and I wanna chat to them and just tell them why I did what I did and how I’ve been feeling.’”
Nelson further claimed that Edwards, 32, Thirlwall, 33, and Pinnock, 34, wouldn’t agree to speak with her unless a therapist was present.
“I had just come out of hospital, this is when I need you the most,” Nelson recalled. “I just didn’t feel like they were my sisters. It’s been five years now and every time I think about it, I’m like, ‘Was it them or was it the management?’”
Nelson was ready to leave Little Mix in 2020 after struggling with her mental health.
“We [were] given the TV show The Search. Whoever the winner was, then would go be the support act for us on the last tour which, obviously, no one knew that it was the last tour either,” she recalled in the Prime Video docuseries. “Now because of [COVID] lockdown, the tour was not gonna be for another two years. I just remember being like, ‘I can’t do it. I physically can’t do it.’ I know I can’t last another two years with the way I’m feeling.”
According to Nelson, there were days she felt like “a really miserable bitch.”
“Little things eventually build up and build up and build up and, yeah, they do get to a boiling point at some point,” she said. “I’d been in lockdown, felt that happiness and now I’d been swarmed with this rush of anxiety and insecurities, which I didn’t have when I was at home and in lockdown and I felt safe. I started then having panic attacks again.”
Nelson continued, “When I went back to work and then I just had this fear of performing — for me to be terrified of performing was so abnormal, because when I was on stage, that was the place I felt the most confident. I didn’t like recording anymore.”
Little Mix announced Nelson’s departure in December 2020, one year before Edwards, Thirlwall and Pinnock went on an indefinite hiatus as a group.
Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix is currently streaming on Prime Video.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
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