“These girls just started taking me on."
Priyanka Chopra spoke about the racist comments she faced while attending a school in America.
Speaking to Alex Cooper on her podcast Call Her Daddy, Priyanka revealed that she was racially abused by a group of “mean girls”.
When Alex asked the actress what she was bullied about, Priyanka said:
“It’s always about a boy.”
Priyanka explained that the girls accused her of going out with a boy they liked and bullied her with racial slurs.
They believed she was spending weekends with a boy when in reality, she was not allowed to go out after school.
Recalling some of the slurs, Priyanka said:
“These girls just started taking me on.
“What they started saying instead of ‘b*tch stay away from my man’, they started using racial slurs. Like, ‘I smell curry’, ‘Ooh I smell curry walking down the hallway’, ‘I don’t think she had the time to shower’.
“Nasty, racial things. Then it became just bullying, pushing against lockers, writing something nasty in the bathroom stalls.
“Things like mean girl stuff that high school is made of.”
Priyanka explained that the racist bullying made her lose her confidence.
“It made me feel smaller, inferior, made me feel like dim my shine, curl my toes. And I am not that girl.
“My parents raised me with confidence, having my shine and being okay with it.”
After a phone call with her parents, Priyanka decided to “pack her bags and go”.
She added:
“I was like ‘f**k you America, I am going back to India and I’m glad that I did as it kick-started my whole career.”
After moving back to India, Priyanka won Miss World 2000 and starred in Bollywood films.
She returned to the United States in 2015 to work in her first TV series Quantico. Priyanka also starred in several Hollywood films, such as Baywatch.
She was last seen in the Amazon Prime Video series Citadel.
Priyanka Chopra previously detailed the bullying in her memoir Unfinished.
Looking back on the racist bullying, Priyanka said:
“I don’t even blame the city, honestly. I just think it was girls who, at that age, just want to say something that’ll hurt.
“Now, at the other side of 35, I can say that it probably comes from a place of them being insecure. But at that time, I took it very personally.”
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