Whitney Way Thore says she went to a dark place after encountering online hate from fans and followers of My Big Fat Fabulous Life . Sitting down with ET's Deidre Behar ahead of season 12's premiere on TLC, the reality TV star, 40, opened up about the mental health challenges she faced from social media harassment. "After season 11 premiered, the amount of hate that I was getting surpassed anything that I've experienced in my entire career, and I was almost suicidal over it.
Especially because so much of it was about my mother," Whitney tells ET. The TLC personality lost her mom , Barbara "Babs" Thore, to a cerebral amyloid angiopathy in December 2022. Babs had suffered a stroke a year earlier in December 2021.
According to Whitney, many of the mean messages included people telling her that her mom would be angry and disapprove of the choices she was making in the wake of Babs' death. While Whitney did not share with ET exactly which decisions fans decided to harass her over, she said some viewers took it to an extreme. One person, she claims, even left a physical note for her that left her shaken to her core.
"I think it said something like, 'Your mother is rolling over in her grave,'" Whitney explained of the letter she received. She added, "I've read the most horrible things about myself on a daily basis. But when my mom died and people started saying stuff like that to me – 'Your mother hated you,' 'Your mother would be disappointed in you, Whitney,' 'I don't like that .