Ariel Winter is opening up about the disgusting interactions she had with older guys when she was only a kid.
As you may know, the actress teamed up with the organization named SOSA (Safe from Online Sexual Abuse) to go undercover and nab child sex predators as part of their true crime docuseries on YouTube, SOSA Undercover. It’s admirable work. Ariel is helping so many young kids by putting away these creeps. However, the whole experience was also “cathartic” for the Modern Family alum after her own gross encounters with older men online as a child. She told DailyMail.com in an interview published on Thursday:
“I am familiar with male predators because I worked in Hollywood at a young age, I started at age four. I don’t wanna say too much about it, but by the time I was on a laptop and cell phone, I was getting inappropriate messages from older men, and it caused trauma.”
WTF. So awful.
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She shared that what happened impacted her so much that she sought professional help:
“The experiences I had in person and online as a child have affected me so deeply that I’ve had to go to therapy for it. The movie and TV industry is a dark place.”
The constant online scrutiny greatly affected her, too. At such a young age, Ariel was sexualized and faced intense criticism about her body, even being called fat, she added:
“Having my figure written about was a major part of my teenage years. It was just everywhere. It was every headline I read about myself. I mean, I was 14.”
According to Ariel, she “was on an antidepressant in high school that caused” her “to gain 30 lbs.” She added:
“My mental health was my top priority.”
When her prescription changed, she “happened to lose all that weight.” However, the gross comments about her appearance didn’t stop. The haters went on to accuse her of being “way too skinny.” Ugh. The Sofia the First star continued:
“It was hard to be torn down constantly.”
We bet! Ultimately, it took choosing to “love” herself and leaving Los Angeles with her boyfriend Luke Benward in 2020 for things to change:
“I went on a journey of self-healing. I was healing. I’ve got great people around me. I want to have a family so I needed to heal those old wounds.”
What also helped was taking on her project with SOSA, where she posed as a 12-year-old to help catch predators. Ariel continued:
“It’s definitely cathartic to be teaming with SOSA, knowing that I can make a difference. It can be scary at times pretending to be 12 and talking to older men, but it’s validating to put away predators that have been harming children. Growing up in the entertainment industry, I’ve been the girl we are trying to save. It’s vital to me to help protect young women from the experiences I endured in my own life.”
That said, the process wasn’t easy. As you can imagine, she came across some “dark things” while trying to bust these predators:
“Finding someone is hard because they don’t use their real name or handle and we have to do research into who these people are. You see a lot of dark things when you start investigating who is after pre-teen girls.”
Jeez. The 27-year-old couldn’t believe “how many men were out there looking to talk to young girls who were 12 and under,” adding:
“It’s hundreds of thousands of men. These men also look like normal, nice guys — they don’t look like predators. They look like the guy next-door and they’re usually married and have children. The men seem nice, they have dogs, they show you pictures of their dogs. They talk about their everyday life and they seem like sweet men. But the truth is they want to spend time with a 12-year-old girl, they ask inappropriate questions and want to know if parents are around.”
There are some real sickos out there. JFC. Looking back, she recalled one disgusting encounter with an older man:
“One guy was almost 40-years-old and he wanted to take an 11-year-old girl shopping for a new bra. That’s not normal. It’s not good.”
Just horrific. For Ariel, she found the whole thing upsets her when she thinks about the girls targeted by these men, especially the young kids who were only looking for a friend:
“This whole experience has been heartbreaking because I think of how young these girls are and they’re being approached by so much older men. Kids look for online relationship because they’re lonely or bored and then they find a male and think that they can connect to them, no realizing they are older and predators with bad intentions.”
We continue to applaud Ariel for the work she’s done, especially as someone who has had a firsthand experience to this disgusting behavior as a child. These men need to be stopped!
Reactions, Perezcious readers? Let us know.
[Image via Ariel Winter/Instagram & Modern Family/20th Century Fox Television/YouTube]
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