James Tindale has revealed he’s been sent death threats online.
The reality star rose to fame on Geordie Shore in 2011, before the leaving the show in 2015 and making a comeback in 2019.
Speaking to MailOnline, the 30-year-old opened up about the “nasty” messages he has received online since being in the public eye.
James said: “I had some really bad ones at the start. We used to do a lot of personal appearances… I posted one picture saying I’m off to Ireland now and posted a picture of the plane and said like see everyone in such and such nightclub later.”
“Then someone wrote ‘I hope the plane crashes and you die and burn’ and I was just like WHAT… That one really stuck in my head. But I don’t think a lot of people realise the damage of what they say, they don’t understand how much it hurts people.”
“I think at the very start [of fame], you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, and you don’t expect everyone to have an opinion on you,” he admitted.
“It’s like, you would never expect someone to walk down the street and hurl abuse at you, its weird for someone in real life to comment on the way you look, what you’re wearing, your personality, but online, it’s absolutely fine to comment…”
“I think you can never be mentally prepared for that. So when it starts, you just kind of have to get used to it in a way. Still to this day though I’m not used to it, like even now if I get a message saying something nasty in my DMs I’m kind of thinking like, who are you to say this to me?”
“Personally I feel that I have got off lightly, I know other people who have been on reality shows have had it way worse.”
James is calling for anonymous social media use to be banned, by forcing users to input personal details such as a passport number when setting up an account.
“Of course it won’t completely stop it, but it will help a lot,” he said.
