The Times- Janey Godley: I was suicidal after outcry over offensive tweets
Janey Godley: I was suicidal after outcry over offensive tweets
One of Scotland’s best-known comedians has said she was taken to the brink of suicide by the outcry over her racist language on social media.
In an interview with The Times, Janey Godley described how she “went right to the edge” at the height of the furore last month and was now having therapy. She said she would “never stop apologising” for using terms such as “P***”, “Gypo” and “n***er” in a podcast and for racial slurs against prominent black performers.
During the uproar, Nicola Sturgeon was asked about Godley’s tweets and replied “these things happen”.
The comedian, an independence supporter, revealed that the first minister had also privately messaged her “to ask if I was OK”.
By then, she had booked to see a therapist, and according to Chris Davis, her manager: “We were just trying to keep her from doing something stupid.”
A trawl of Godley’s social media by the Daily Beast news website revealed 20 “blatantly racist” tweets including a commentary in 2011 about Kelly Rowland, the singer and talent show judge, described by Godley as “the black horse”.
When Snoop Dogg, the rapper, was barred from Norway because of marijuana possession, she tweeted: “[H]e’s a black rapper of course he has weed that’s his job isn’t it? And singing.”
Godley was dropped from a £12,000 national advertising campaign to promote the Covid-19 vaccine, lost a role in pantomime in Aberdeen, while gigs at Nottingham and Paisley were cancelled, along with four corporate bookings as a result of the outrage.
She embarked on a two-month UK tour in Arbroath at the weekend with two sold-out shows, in a theatre restricted to 80 per cent of capacity because of the pandemic. Godley, 60, opened by telling her audience: “I apologise for everything I said that was horrible, I said shit and I own shit”, winning laughter even when she described how she went “to a very dark place”.
She had overcome her suicidal thoughts, she joked, locked in a toilet one morning when she realised she still had an Amex bill to settle. Her two-hour show won a standing ovation.
Godley told The Times she had been guilty of “horrible, lazy stereotyping” in her comments about Snoop Dogg and others, and said her use of the words such as “P***” had been “insidious”.
She added: “It was on Twitter, it was on a podcast, I wasn’t actually shouting it at people, but that doesn’t make it any better. It’s language that’s insidious, it’s inflammatory and it makes people feel othered. And I shouldn’t be, as a woman, using language that makes people feel othered. I’ll always be ashamed of that.”
She added: “I almost killed myself because I thought, ‘I’m a really bad person. I’m a horrible monster. There are no redeeming features here. At six in the morning I just thought, ‘There isn’t any point. if I go, all this will go, all this will end.
“But then I thought, ‘If I die, [racism] will still exist. If I die, what will that solve? It won’t solve anything. And plus I had my Amex bill to pay.”
Godley was abused as a child by her uncle, and was offered therapy when he was jailed in 1996, but never pursued it. During the tour she is consulting her psychologist regularly in video calls.
“She said, in so many words, that all my life I have been ashamed because of the abuse,” Godley said. “Then when all that [new] shame came on top of it, this was the big trigger for me. I’m ashamed. I’m deeply f***ing ashamed, there isn’t another way out.”
Godley said she was trying to understand why she spent so much time in arguments with strangers online.
“I need to look at why that language was used,” she said. “I need to look at why I spent years arguing with people online, why my whole psyche is ‘argue, argue, argue, fight, fight, fight’.”
Comments
Post a Comment