40 The Times Magazinehen Zara McDermott, the
model and reality TV star,
was 14 years old, a boy at her
school pestered her for weeks
to send him nude photographs
of herself. The boy was not
her boyfriend, far from it.
She had never kissed a boy,
and had been the victim of
persistent and brutal bullying
about her supposed “ugliness” since she had
moved to senior school, aged 11.
“They called me Hitler, because I had
a little bit of upper-lip hair,” she remembers,
“and they called me a ‘goon’ because I tried to
do my schoolwork to the best of my ability.
“One day, I walked into a classroom and
everybody just stood up and did the Hitler
salute at me. The teacher had no idea what
was going on.”
That experience was so mortifying, she
recalls, and so devastating for her self-esteem
that she vowed to do something, anything,
to turn it around. Her parents had already
spoken to the teachers about the bullying,
“but there are only so many times your
parents can get involved”.
“There was this hierarchy of students. The
closer you were to the top, which was the pretty
girls, the less likely you were to be bullied and
picked on. I was bullied about my appearance
and the person I was. I thought, ‘I need to do
something, because this is just not stopping.’ ”
Soon afterwards, lying in the bath, she
decided to give the boy what he wanted.
She lifted her right hand above her and took
a shot of herself naked. She sent it to the
boy. As she says today, the gesture was not
motivated by her own sexuality, but rather
a poignant, desperate attempt to fit in and be
liked. “ ‘Please Zara, please do it. It will make
me like you more,’ ” she remembers him
texting over and over and over again.
“I honestly thought that if I took the
picture, it would make him like me, and want
to be with me, and I saw it as a way to prove
myself to him.”
What happened next forms the basis of a
new BBC documentary about revenge porn,
made and presented by McDermott, now 24,
with the specific intention of helping teenagers
and young women navigate the prevalent and
normalised trend of sexting.
“I know what it’s like to be a teenager.
I remember. Tell me to do one thing and I’ll
do the opposite. I don’t want to be that person
wagging her finger because I don’t think that
person gets listened to. But sharing my story
and what I have had to go through, I hope it
will be enough to make people think twice.”
The day after Zara McDermott sent the
picture, she walked into school and felt a
chilling “strange energy, kids sniggering in the
corner with phones in their hands, looking atme”. By breaktime, the naked picture of her
had circulated around the school. By lunch,
it was on the phones of hundreds of children
in neighbouring schools. In her history
lesson, a boy on his way to another class
held his phone to the window so that she
could see her naked image on it. Everybody
was laughing and pointing. It was just the
start. The image went everywhere, including
to her own 11-year-old brother. Her mother,
who worked in the food tech department
of the school and quickly learnt what had
happened, was forced to face the horror of
her colleagues and her boss, the headmaster.
Not long after, the mum of a classmate
knocked on the door and told McDermott’s
mother she should be ashamed. The family
shut down. Girls in the street approached her
to call her “a slag”.
McDermott was called into the headmaster’s
office and promptly suspended from school.
A month later, the police were called and she
was given a talk about having created child
pornography. She was shamed and criminalised.
Today, when we meet, she is composed
and able to talk about what happened then
without crying. This has only been possible
in the past year, she says, from having finally
worked through the shame during the process
of filming and talking – finally – to her parents
rather than shutting down. “No one was ever
ashamed of you,” her mother tells her in the
film, crying herself. “I just wanted to protect
you.” “Don’t cry, Mama,” McDermott pleads.
It is very relatable.
“People don’t realise when something
like this happens, it affects the whole family,”
McDermott says. They all struggled to cope
“and my parents took the school’s lead”.
The shame was deep-rooted. “My teachers
just washed their hands of me. Drilling it into
me, constantly blaming me. Do you know
what that does to a young girl?”
The boy, by contrast, “got off scot-free”,
she says. He received no reprimand,
no punishment.
McDermott felt so isolated by the shame- especially for her parents – that she
considered suicide. “Thinking, ‘How would
I do it?’ ” she remembers. “I never want to go
to that place again.”
The nude photograph affected her entire
school career. She was known as the “slag” or
the “slut” who had sent the picture. She was
never fully able to move on. “My relationship
W
‘NO ONE WAS ASHAMED OF
YOU,’ HER MOTHER TELLS
HER IN THE FILM. ‘DON’T
CRY, MAMA,’ ZARA PLEADS
En route to appearing in The X Factor: Celebrity in 2019Zara McDermott Continued from page 29PREVIOUS SPREAD: SHUTTERSTOCK. THIS SPREAD: SHUTTERSTOCK, GETTY IMAGES, TOM JACKSON With boyfriend Sam Thompson, December 2019