She’s back on the X Factor judging panel but Cheryl Cole has admitted that she thinks Simon Cowell was right to sack her from X Factor USA.
This revelation came as a bit of shock since Cheryl was left publicly humiliated when she was axed from the series before it even went on air.
Opening up about her to experience to Elle UK, she said: “I can talk about this because I’m OK about it now. But I went through hell and it literally drove me mad. I became so desensitised, you could say terrible things to me and I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d read awful stuff about myself and not blink. I shut down because I didn’t know what else to do.”
She added: “Now I can say that Simon was right to get rid of me. I wasn’t well in the head when that was going on, so it wasn’t going to work. But he wasn’t right not to tell me to my face.”
Cheryl also mentioned the text she sent Simon after he sacked her: “F**k you, F**k Fox, F**k the orange and purple outfit. F**k the big hair. F**k the UK X Factor. F**k you all. I hate you,” she wrote.
Cheryl also revealed she felt like she was having a nervous breakdown last year. “It only hit me at the beginning of 2013 that I’d completely lost myself. I’d look in a mirror and think: ‘Who the hell is she?’,” she said.
“I didn’t know what I thought or felt about anything, couldn’t make decisions – I didn’t even know what to eat or drink. Something was seriously wrong: it felt like a nervous breakdown. I had to stop, get out of my life I’d been living and find myself again. The consequences if I didn’t were just too frightening.”
In 2010 Cheryl divorced footballer husband Ashley Cole and is now dating French restaurateur Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini.
You can read the full interview in Elle UK’s August issue.