Kelly Osbourne is asking people to “stop kicking me while I’m down” after her appearance at the Brit Awards on Saturday garnered a slew of body shamers scrutinizing her appearance.
Osbourne, 41, was onstage alongside her mother, Sharon, to accept a lifetime achievement award for her father, the late Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne died last summer of a heart attack at 76 after a legendary heavy metal career.
But audience reactions to clips of their acceptance speech focused more on Kelly Osbourne’s body than on her father’s award. On social media, many expressed shock about her thinness, with some voicing concerns about her health and others expressing suspicions about Ozempic use.
“There is a special kind of cruelty in harming someone who is clearly going through something,” Osbourne wrote in an Instagram story Sunday, aiming her statement at those online who are “kicking me while I’m down, doubting my pain, spreading my struggles as gossip, and turning your back when I need support and love most.”
“I’m currently going through the hardest time in my life,” Osbourne added. “I should not even have to defend myself. But I won’t sit here and allow myself to be dehumanized in such a way !”
Just days prior, Osbourne had slammed criticism of her body after photos of her appearance at London Fashion Week stirred more unsavory comments online. Last week, she shared to her Instagram story a screenshot of one comment that called her “tooooo thin and fragile,” compared her to “a dead body” and said she “Looks like she’s going to see her dad soon.”
Osbourne called the behavior “disgusting,” writing: “No one deserves this sort of abuse!”
She’s been on the receiving end of speculation about her health and appearance for months. In a social media clip last year, Osbourne told those commenters to “f--- off.”
“To the people who keep thinking that they’re being funny and mean by writing comments like, ‘Are you ill?’ or ‘get off Ozempic,’ or ‘You don’t look right,’” she said in the video, “my dad just died, and I’m doing the best that I can, and the only thing I have to live for right now is my family.”
When asked about the clip in a December interview with Piers Morgan, her mother, Sharon, told the British broadcaster that “she’s right” and that her daughter “can’t eat right now.”
Osbourne’s recent comments are the latest in a broader, highly divisive discourse that has been building around the resurgence of thinness among women in Hollywood.
On TikTok, the hashtag #SkinnyTok, which promoted content around disordered eating, was banned from search results last summer after gaining massive popularity on the platform. And last year, the “Wicked: For Good” press tour spawned various think pieces about the comeback of thinness, as well as intense online discourse about whether it’s ever appropriate to comment on people’s bodies.
The British Academy Film Awards last weekend drew similar concern, as many online shared their opinions about the thinness of several celebrity attendees. British actor Jameela Jamil was among those who voiced unease.
“The women at the BAFTAS were scarily thin, in a way that reminded me of watching when I was a kid,” Jamil wrote on Instagram last week. “Where everyone looks like they could snap. It’s a specifically fragile type of thin.”
She added that she “resent[s] this beauty standard being pushed on everyone, I resent the obedience of my industry, and fear the impact on the impressionable people at home thinking that is the only way to be accepted.”
Jamil further warned commenters not to “waste time and energy with ‘skinny shaming’ accusations,” noting that as a slim woman, she herself has been ridiculed before for her thinness.
“We should all be all sorts of different sizes. When one is prescribed, be that skinny or curvy, it treats women as if our bodies are trends,” Jamil wrote in her caption. “Anorexia is the most dangerous as it has the highest cause of death in any mental illness, so it’s the bigger emergency than the feelings of any naturally thin women who feel offended.”
