Trisha Goddard revealed a haunting moment from her life on Celebrity Big Brother. The TV star shocked her housemates as she shared a time she was on the receiving end of vile racist abuse – in front of her young daughter.
As the stars sat at breakfast, Trisha, 67, spoke about when she headed to Australia for her career, and shared: “I didn’t even realise I was their first Black presenter until all the headlines came out.”
The mum of two then described: “I had KKK sprayed on my door, they offered me security. It was just non-stop for a few months. I had someone – when I was carrying Billie once – just come up and spit in my face when I’m holding Billie and call me the N-word. And it broke my heart.”
A shocked Danny Beard asked: “How do you explain that to a child?” Ella-Rae Wise agreed, with the TOWIE star echoing: “How do you explain that to a child? Children should never know any difference. We all come in the world the same way and we all leave the same way.”
This isn’t the first time Trisha has spoken out about her experiences with racism throughout her life. The star was born in London but raised in Norfolk after spending her early years in Tanzania, and admitted that returning to the UK for primary school wasn’t a happy memory.
Speaking to Davina McCall on the Begin Again podcast just days before she went into the Big Brother house, she recalled: “As we walk up to school, every day, one kid would go ‘they’re coming,’ and they’d then all go ‘blackie, blackie, blackie, blackie,’ all the kids. Open the school gate, and they’d smack us like this [gestures] ‘blackie, blackie.’”
Trisha remembered one particular incident at the school, sharing: “One time I was looking around for a table and I saw a space.
“Anyway, I went towards this table, got my school dinner. And a boy came and hit my tray and the food went everywhere. And they were like, ‘blackie, blackie.’
She added: “I went back and I said… ‘They knocked my tray down, can I have some more food?’ And this dinner lady looked at me and she said, ‘you’ve had.’ And everyone laughed.
“So I ran outside, burst into tears. I’m sitting on the step. I remember it like it was yesterday – crying and crying and crying. And a teacher came and sat down next to me… and said, ‘You’ve got to toughen up. You got to toughen up. You got to toughen up. I know it’s upsetting. You got to toughen up.
The teacher told her: “‘You see, people in this country don’t want you here and you’re going to get this all your life because they don’t want coloured people. So you’ve got to – this is how it’s going to be. So you can’t cry every time it happens.’ You know, basically telling me that that’s okay, that’s my life, you’ve got to suck it up and grow a pair because of that.”
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