Madison De La Garza Went Through Hell During Her Time on Desperate Housewives

While Desperate Housewives is definitely a cult show, with many people still re-watching it a decade later, it's hard not to agree that some of its storylines feel a bit dated to the modern viewer.

The relationship between Eva Longoria's Gabrielle Solis and her daughter Juanita, played by Madison De La Garza, is the most glaring example of this. The fact that Juanita was overweight, while her biological mother was a slim and gorgeous woman, was practically the only reason for Juanita's existence on the show, and that detail was used as a running joke throughout the series.

What's worse, it looks like it did a lot of damage to Madison's mental health.

While Madison joined the show at the age of six, she was still surfing the web and reading comments about her character online. Needless to say, most of them were negative, with anonymous viewers often making fun of Madison's weight and even wishing her death.

The cyberbullying at such a tender age made the young actress really insecure about her body and caused her to develop an eating disorder, as Madison herself recently revealed.

'They said things like they wanted me to die because of what I looked like. It was just horrible, like, "ugly fat cow" and "I hope you get cancer and die because you're so fat." Just horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible things and this was when I was six, seven, eight years old. Reading comments like that definitely affected my mental health and ultimately played into me developing an eating disorder at a very young age,' the actress said.

Even though Madison was viciously bullied online, her co-stars supported her in every way, and her on-screen mom Eva Longoria often went out of her way to support Madison, calling her beautiful and complimenting her acting skills. Knowing this makes fans feel a little better about Madison's time on Desperate Housewives, but all those horrible online attacks still leave a sour taste in their mouths.

Fortunately, Madison was able to fix her eating disorder problem and taught herself not to take bullying to heart. The actress has become a true role model for all the overweight people out there, proving that with enough determination and belief in yourself, nothing is impossible!

Source: Heart of the Matter podcast