Madison De La Garza suffered from an eating disorder at the age of seven after being bombarded with cruel comments about her appearance.
Madison De La Garza says body-shaming trolls made her life hell when she was a child star
The 21-year-old actress - who is the younger half-sister of pop star Demi Lovato - shot to fame as a child star on TV show 'Desperate Housewives' playing Eva Longoria's onscreen daughter Juanita Solis and she's now revealed hurtful remarks from body-shaming trolls affected her mental health.
Speaking on the 'Heart of the Matter' podcast, recalled her "first memories of trying to starve myself" at the age of seven after reading comments from trolls. She went on to say: "The reactions that I got to my character on 'Desperate Housewives', it was just shocking. A lot of people came at it in a way that they were 'concerned for my health. And I personally believe that that's just not true, that that was a cover-up so that they could just judge a six year old.
Madison insisted she wasn't allowed to use a computer without supervision when she was a child, but she remembers spending hours online reading comments on YouTube videos and on TMZ.com.
She added: "I would just spend a crazy amount of time reading through these comments, and most all of them were just atrocious. They said things like they wanted me to die because of what I looked like. It was just horrible. And this was when I was seven, eight years old.
"Reading comments like that definitely affected my mental health and ultimately played into me developing an eating disorder at a very young age."
On 'Desperate Housewives', Madison played Juanita, the adopted daughter of Longoria's character Gabrielle Solis, and she says the actress was always kind to her and tried to make her feel "special".
She said: "The whole joke of my character was that Eva was this thin, beautiful model and her daughter turned out to be quite the opposite. And so, I think she was very aware that this was going to affect me.
"We never explicitly talked about it, but [Longoria] definitely went out of her way to make me feel like I was pretty and like I was special, and she made me feel like I was family. And if I ever did want to go to her with these things, I absolutely could have."
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