Al Porter has revealed he contemplated “ending it all” after stepping away from the spotlight.
The Tallaght native was one of the biggest stars of Irish TV, radio and stage until 2017, when he took a step back from the public eye after a series of allegations were made against him.
The former Blind Date Ireland host was accused of assaulting a young man at a venue in Dublin back in 2016, but prosecutors officially dropped their case against him in November 2019.
In a new interview with The Sunday Independent, the comedian admitted there were months where he “didn’t even get out of bed, and longer [periods] when I didn’t leave the house” after the allegations.
The 30-year-old said: “Everything I’d ever done in the past was erased, bulldozed, and anything I had imagined for my future had turned to dust. Your head goes to such dark places, and that’s when I was thinking, ‘I need to end it all’.”
“Everything happened extremely quickly… I was totally overwhelmed, totally unprepared in terms of maturity and I didn’t understand or know how to deal with it.”
Al then decided to step back from his work and the public eye, admitting that if he didn’t he was “going to be dead”.
He explained: “It hadn’t even been discussed. Nobody had raised it. I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘I quit everything’. And underlined it and handed it over. And nobody had asked for that to happen yet. I walked away.”
“I could have been pushed eventually, but I didn’t hang around to find out. I knew if I tried to weather it publicly, I was going to be dead. I couldn’t do it. I was on a knife-edge.”
Comedian Al Porter faces up to his past in todays @TheSundayIndo interview with @DonalTLynch Photography by @stevehpix #AlPorter #comedian #comedy pic.twitter.com/lzeDk8irGv
— Steve Humphreys ❌ (@stevehpix) August 13, 2023
