Bonnie Ryan has opened up about a “hideous experience” online that saw her mother believe that she had passed away.
She explained how her mother Morah was in an “awful state” because of online gossip about the makeup artist.
Speaking on the Trolled podcast, she told host Aoife Moore that she visited her mother who was distraught.
“I went over to my mom’s and she was in an awful state, she was like hysterical. Somebody had called her and said I’d been in a really bad car accident,” she recalled.
“My mom thought I had died in a car accident, called my fiancé, my fiancé was trying to get through to me, he couldn’t.
“There was this big drama going on. I was driving my car, not answering them because I was driving and got over to my mum. She was in an awful state. I was like, ‘Where did this person see this? Where did they hear it? What the hell?’.”
She continued: “I googled. Never do it. I googled, ‘Bonnie car accident’ to see where has this come from. The first thing that popped up was this other page. I’m not even gonna say the name of the thing.”
What a horrible time for her poor mother, Morah!
She went on to say: “I’m shaking talking about it, but it was this full page about me and I really, really didn’t think there was this.
“I thought the worst if it was the odd random DM you got or something like that. Stupidly, I clicked on and I was like, ‘What is this?’ I have to say, for a few weeks, it turned my world upside down.
“I never went back onto it. I’ve never since looked at it and I never will again, but my whole world was rocked. I was really shocked at myself because I think I prided myself on the fact that I had been brought up in this family. We’ve really been instilled to think this stuff doesn’t matter.”
She admitted that she was “really rattled” by the experience but once again shared her love for her family who helped her get through it.
“So when I saw that stuff and it affected me the way it did, I was really rattled and it has now made me think, you know, the majority of people who do what I do haven’t been brought up in the family I’ve been brought up in.
“I feel like sometimes I have a little bit of an armour, maybe, that not everybody has and I can’t imagine how badly this actually affects them if that’s what it did to me.”
She concluded: “It was a hideous experience. One of the things that kind of, like, shook me when I read it was people were watching me, like not online, like they were watching me when I was out and going online and writing about seeing me in certain places.
“Like walking my dog or with my fiancé, who I specifically do not post online, and I think that kind of scared me a lot that these people were like, I don’t know, it almost felt like seeking me out.”
