'Desperate Housewives' former child star Madison De La Garza reveals online abuse led to eating disorder
DALLAS, TEXAS: Madison De La Garza, a former child actress on the 'Desperate Housewives' series, opened up about the heartbreaking online response she experienced when she was just seven years old. De La Garza remembers "starving" herself as a young child in response to comments about how she looked. On the well-liked series, the actor and director, who is Demi Lovato's younger half-sister, portrayed Juanita Solis, Gabrielle Solis' (Eva Longoria) daughter.
De La Garza claims that after her appearance on the show, she started receiving online abuse, which led to the onset of an eating disorder. On the 'Heart of the Matter' podcast Tuesday, April 11, she talked openly about the incident with Elizabeth Vargas, reports Page Six.
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'Concerned for my health'
"The reactions that I got to my character on ‘Desperate Housewives,’ it was just shocking," the actress remarked on the show on Tuesday. "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 6-year-old," De La Garza said.
De La Garza claimed that despite being restricted from using a computer "unsupervised" when she was that young, she would spend "hours and hours" reading comments about herself under YouTube videos. "I would just spend a crazy amount of time reading through these comments, and most all of them were just atrocious," she recalled. "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 7, 8 years old," the 'Subject 16' actress continued.
The 'Desperate Housewives' star claimed that her family was unaware of the fact that "I was seeing these things and I was reading these things" or that, in response, she had started "trying to starve myself." De La Garza, who is now 21 years old, claimed that the crude comments "definitely affected [her] mental health and ultimately played into [her] developing an eating disorder at a very young age."
Why De La Garza was cyberbullied at 7?
In Season 4, De La Garza made her debut on the popular ABC show as Juanita Solis, the adopted daughter of Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) and Carlos Solis (Ricardo Antonia Chavira). While filming the mystery thriller, the young actress said she knew Longoria understood her suffering and even "went out of her way" to make her feel comfortable.
"There was one episode where I went to school with a bunch of makeup on because girls in my class said that I wasn’t pretty enough to be her daughter. 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," De La Garza added. "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," the now 21-year-old woman continued.
Although the actress said that the show's crew "never came out and said anything to me," they did "go out of their way to tell me that I was beautiful." De La Garza recalled how she received numerous compliments from the cast and crew of the show, as well as how the wardrobe team made sure she felt at ease in both her clothes and her own flesh, which she "appreciated."
