Jade Thirlwall is reflecting on the effect that Jesy Nelson’s exit from Little Mix had on the rest of the group.
Back in 2020, after almost a decade as part of the chart-topping girl group, Jesy announced that she was leaving the band, with the rest of the line-up carrying on as a three-piece.
She said at the time: “The truth is recently being in the band has really taken a toll on my mental health. I find the constant pressure of being in a girl group and living up to expectations very hard.
“There comes a time in life when we need to reinvest in taking care of ourselves rather than focussing on making other people happy, and I feel like now is the time to begin that process.”
Reflecting on Jesy’s exit from Little Mix during an interview on Louis Theroux’s podcast, Jade insisted: “I will never begrudge Jesy wanting to leave, because if she needed to do that for herself, no matter what happened behind the scenes or, you know, anything that unfolded, I’ll never discredit or invalidate the struggles that she had in the group, particularly at the beginning.
“She really did suffer the most in terms of, like, trolling, the press being really mean, all of that stuff. And it really did some lasting damage. And we always tried our best to support her in that. Sometimes you get it wrong, sometimes you get it right.
“We’re not qualified – especially at 18 years old – to help someone with that. You just be a friend as much as you can. And I think towards the end, yeah, I think she gradually clocked out and that’s fair enough.”
“I feel like I can’t and I don’t want to talk about it in depth because it isn’t just my story to tell,” Jade continued. “I’d be speaking for people and I don’t think that’s right. But for myself, I will say that I’m still getting over it now, quite truthfully.
“Just because it was really sad and it was really stressful because when it all happened, we were literally promoting a single and an album at the same time. Everyone was asking what was going on. We didn’t necessarily know exactly what was going on. We found out very abruptly that it was happening.
“I don’t want to go into the details of it, but I think all of us were very confused. We had a lot of group therapy, I had a lot of personal therapy and because the contact was so abruptly cut off, it was very hard to deal with and quite traumatic.”
Adding that she and Jesy are no longer in touch, the Angel Of My Dreams singer said one reason she “struggled with” the departure was “because we didn’t all get a chance to just sit together, like we’d done for so many years”.
“And then I had to grieve that happening,” she added, insisting “there’s no hate there from me or from any of us I think”.
Jade also spoke about how the fall-out from Jesy’s exit inadvertently brought her closer to boyfriend Jordan Stephens, with whom she was still in the “very early days” of dating at that time.
“I was scared to show him what this meant for me,” she admitted. “Because I think in his head, he was like, ‘Oh, you know, someone left that happens all the time’. But you know, he disbanded from Rizzle Kicks years before. So he was like, ‘Babe, you’ll be all right. This is all good’.
“We were driving up north to see my family, and I was being really short with him, like very snappy because I was frustrated. And he kept probing like, ‘what’s wrong, what’s wrong?’. Honestly, out of nowhere, I literally, like, bellowed, like, a fucking whale or something.
“You know, like, when you have so much grief that you feel like you’ve been, winded, and you start, like, wailing? And I’d never cried like that since my grandad died when I was 13. And I think it was all the years of, the love and the everything we’d been through together, the good things, the bad things, you know. So much of it was brushed under the rug and then it just fucking exploded.
“We parked up at a service station and he was like, ‘do you want some peace?’. And I was like, ‘yes’. And then, bless him, that’s when I knew he was a keeper because he was like, ‘are you all right on your own for a little bit?’. I mean, I couldn’t actually speak because I was, like, screaming, and then he went out into the shops and he came back with a pastie from Greggs and I thought, ‘that’s the one’.”
While everyone involved initially maintained that Jesy’s departure from Little Mix was an amicable one, this appeared not to be the case as time went on.
Elsewhere in her Louis Theroux interview, Jade also spoke about being ghosted by Harry Styles after a date when they were both still teenagers, and how she and her boyfriend once confronted Noel Gallagher over disparaging comments he’d made about Little Mix.
Listen to Jade’s latest interview in full on The Louis Theroux Podcast.