Former Fifth Harmony member, Ally Brooke, debuted the very first episode of her new podcast, The Ally Brooke Show, on Tuesday and there was no holding back.
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Brooke got candid about her time with girl group Fifth Harmony, sharing it wasn’t as perfect as it may have looked.
"I hate saying this, you know, my time in Fifth Harmony… I didn't enjoy it, I didn't love it," Ally said in the episode. "It was hard because there was so much going on. So much behind-the-scenes. So much toxicity. So much abuse. So much abuse of power. So much mental abuse. Verbal abuse. It's just horrible, and to me it's a shame, because we were so big. I should have enjoyed myself more."
Fifth Harmony came together in 2012 after Brooke along with Camila Cabello, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui and Normani were eliminated from the TV singing competition, X Factor and decided to form a girl group on their own.
The group shot to fame and enjoyed major success with the release of three studio albums and touring the world. Cabello left the group in 2016, with the rest of the group calling it quits in 2018.
"And, again, I wanna just tell the fans that… I'm so proud to have been there. I'm so thankful for Fifth Harmony, it changed my life," Brooke said. "I got to see the world, meet people who completely changed my life… but it's kind of a weird balance. It's a balance of being grateful but also being OK with the fact that things were not OK for me in that."
While Brooke said she is still processing some of the trauma she experienced, she got vulnerable and shared some examples of the abuse she was referring to in the episode.
The first example shared was having to compete with her group members for certain vocal features on songs and they wouldn’t know the “winner” until the song was released. The second was a meeting Ally had with a label head that tried to take advantage of her when she was asking for help.
“I show up to meet with him and he gives me a freaking thong,” she disclosed. “I know what he was trying to do. I was humiliated. I was going there super vulnerable... At the time, that behavior was accepted.”
Brooke has gone on to see new success as a solo artist, currently working on a solo album. She also competed on Dancing With the Stars and authored a memoir, Finding Your Harmony.
Tune in every Wednesday for a new episode of Brooke’s podcast.
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