Ally Brooke kicked off her eponymous podcast with a candid reflection on her Fifth Harmony days, which she described as “traumatizing.”
“I hate saying this: My time in Fifth Harmony, I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t love it,” she said in the debut episode of The Ally Brooke Show. “It was hard because there was so much going on. So much behind the scenes, so much toxicity, so much abuse, so much abuse of power, so much mental abuse, verbal abuse, and it’s just horrible and to me, it’s a shame because we were so big. I should have enjoyed myself more.”
After being eliminated on The X Factor in 2012, Brooke was brought back to the competition to form a girl group alongside Camila Cabello, Normani, Lauren Jauregui, and Dinah Jane. The outfit, which would later become Fifth Harmony, went on to release three studio albums and headline multiple tours until 2018, when they announced their indefinite hiatus. Brooke said she was proud of what she and Fifth Harmony did during their six-year run, specifically sending a message of female empowerment. However, she admitted that many of those accomplishments and good memories have been overshadowed by traumatizing experiences.
The now-27-year-old recalled a time when Fifth Harmony was “breaking,” and sought help from a label executive who ended up taking advantage of her.
“I show up to meet with him and he gives me a freaking thong,” she claimed. “I know what he was trying to do. I was humiliated. I was going there super vulnerable … At the time, that behavior was accepted.”
Brooke also opened up about feeling inferior and insecure about her body while with the group. And although she says the situation “did get better,” the entire experience took a toll on her confidence.
“I’ll look at a music video and all I’ll remember is how I felt that day. How I felt super insecure, or how I felt let down or how I felt like I wasn’t good enough,” she said. “People around me told me that I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t cool enough, I wasn’t valued, nobody cared about me. It was awful but I also try to remember the good times.”
You can watch the first full episode of The Ally Brooke Show below.
