There are many heart-wrenching moments in Jesy Nelson’s new documentary – when her twins are born against all the odds, when we see her take pride in Little Mix’s storming performance of “Shout Out to My Ex” at the Brits in 2017 – but one sticks in my mind. Sat on her bed during a pregnancy photoshoot, she tells the camera that since she became pregnant, she cares less about how she looks. “I don’t really give a shit anymore,” she says. “It’s lovely.”
It might sound like the sort of thing any mother-to-be might say, but coming from the mouth of Jesy Nelson – a woman who has been bullied about, and obsessed over, her weight and the way she looks from the day she auditioned on The X Factor at 20 years old – it feels especially powerful.
The scene comes from the opening episode of her new six-episode Prime Video documentary, Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix. When filming began, it was supposed to be both a revealing tell-all about Jesy’s supposed fall-out with her bandmates (Jade Thirlwall, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Perrie Edwards, who are now on a hiatus and pursuing their own solo careers) and an intimate look at her early days as a new mother to her twin girls.
The reality of the series is much darker and much sadder. Bravely, she and her (now ex) partner, Zion, bring us along for every uncertain step of her pregnancy, learning that their babies – Ocean and Story – are sharing a placenta, that they will be born prematurely, and eventually that they both have Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) Type 1, a disease with a life expectancy of less than two years. The tragedy is almost unbearable, yet Nelson bears it boldly.
Much of the documentary series follows Jesy’s difficult pregancy (Photo: Amazon)It hits hard, not least because it feels like just another hurdle Nelson feels like she has to jump in the public eye. When she left Little Mix in 2020, she explained that being in the band had “taken a toll on my mental health” while the official statement read that the other women were “fully supportive” of her decision to leave. Quickly, however, the narrative turned and Nelson was cast as the villain of the break-up – “there would be days when I would cry, there would be days when I was a miserable bitch,” she admits. But what wasn’t taken into account was just how ill she was.
In Life After Little Mix, Nelson shares her side of the story. “I never wanted to leave first,” she says. “I never wanted any of this to happen.” It turns out that another member (Jesy says it’s not for her to name who) had wanted to quit the band in 2020, sparking a plan to have a final tour before everyone called it a day together – no drama. But the pandemic put a spanner in the works.
When the world went into lockdown, Nelson found comfort and happiness in not being a pop star – in her words, she “lived”. But those anxieties all came flooding back with just one text during lockdown, alerting Jesy that she had to shoot a music video within two weeks. She Googled “quickest way to lose a stone in a week” and fell back into depression and having regular panic attacks.
The pressures of being a girl band – specifically online abuse about her weight – were among the reasons Nelson tried to take her own life in 2013. The details were first revealed in a BBC documentary Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out – a sensitive, heartbreaking film but one that seems not to have told the whole story. Here, Nelson says that just a week after this suicide attempt, her manager told her to “pull herself together” and she was filming a music video a week later. “It just got swept under the rug, and everything went back to normal,” she says.
Nelson left the band after a second suicide attempt (Photo: Kevin Mazur/One Love Manchester/Getty Images for One Love Manchester)The same happened post-lockdown, too. She brought the girls together to tell them how down she was: “I remember one of the responses being, like -” she rolls her eyes – “‘Are you done now? Can I go now?’ … That just made me feel really alone … It’s like no one cares.” Days later, she attempted to take her own life again. It was her mother who told her she had to leave the band: “That’s it now, that’s it. No more. You’ve got to stop doing what’s making you unhappy,” she told her.
Pinnock, Thirlwall and Edwards don’t come off well in Life After Little Mix, yet it’s far from a bashing. “Was it them or was it the management?” Nelson asks. She says that her lawyer gave them the news that she wanted to leave the group before she got the chance to talk to the girls herself, and she regrets that. “I think they felt really hurt about that, and it should never have played out like that,” she says. “I didn’t get my opportunity to explain why I couldn’t do this anymore. I feel mad that that was taken away from me.” The last time she spoke to her bandmates was five years ago over the phone – a call that the other girls said they would only feel “comfortable” having if a therapist was present.
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This story is wildly different from the narrative we were sold by the press and makes all the abuse of Nelson feel even more nefarious. But the story of Nelson’s departure needed a villain; we were more than happy to follow along with the easiest version of events. It was made even easier to demonise her when she launched her own solo career – surely, she can’t have been that sad in Little Mix if she wants to go and do it all on her own? Or so went our skewed, biased logic.
If we had known just how serious Nelson’s mental health issues were, if the band – her “sisters” as she calls them – had listened to her concerns, would things have been any different? We’ll never know. And while we have only heard her side of the story in full (Pinnock, Thirlwall and Edwards are notoriously tight-lipped about what really happened), I do wonder if this is the last we hear of the Little Mix mess. If this documentary still doesn’t tell the whole truth, then surely the other band members will want to have their say.
Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix re-writes girl band history, but it does so with grace and clarity – there are many times Nelson enforces the fact that this is only her perspective. But as she says towards the end of the documentary, “We’re grown women. We’ve got kids. I just think there are so many more important things in life.” I seriously hope the others feel the same way.
‘Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix’ is streaming on Prime Video
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