Courtney Stodden Is World's Weirdest Anti-Bullying Advocate

Child bride Courtney Stodden has been speaking out about bullying — after a fashion — for a long time. Now she has more advice for bullying victims.

In a characteristically bizarre interview with theFABlife, Stodden pets her pink-haired dog as she discusses where she’d be in her career if she hadn’t married 51-year-old Doug Hutchison (“I wouldn’t be blessed with this gift of great success so early on, but I’d still be pursuing the same thing”). She also takes on the issue of bullying, explaining,

My advice for victims of bullies would be, victims, you need to realize that it’s not [you]. It’s the bully who’s picking on them, it’s their problem. There’s nothing wrong with the victim. They’re perfect, they’re beautiful, and they need to stay true to themselves. Not just because someone who isn’t true to themselves is picking on you. They need to think about that, realize that and embrace the truth.

This isn’t the first time Stodden has spoken out against bullying. She recorded a sort of PSA last year, before her marriage to Hutchison. The YouTube video includes a cringe-inducing litany of mean Internet comments against Stodden, to which she responds point-by-point (“My breasts are real”).

It’s hard to argue with the substance of Stodden’s latest anti-bullying effort — bullying victims should indeed recognize that they aren’t the problem. And Stodden has been the victim of plenty of internet cruelty — in her PSA, she quotes one hater who wishes her dead. Still, her bullying has come about not because she’s gay or perceived to be gay (the focus of the It Gets Better campaign that may have inspired her video), but because she’s been transformed into a strange underage sex kitten and married off to a man over thirty years her senior. I use the passive voice here because it’s unclear what role Stodden herself has played in her own rise to infamy. She’s aware that her marriage has helped her name recognition, but seems to erroneously think it has launched a stellar career. Depending on how that career plays out, we could see her in twenty years recording a PSA on letting your children be children, a message she’d be much better-suited to deliver.

Courtney Stodden Tells Bullying Victims To “Stay True To Themselves” [TheFABLife]
Courtney Stodden Tells Bullying Victims To ‘Stay True To Themselves’ [Huffington Post]