With the advent of technology, many people have suffered from the leaking of intimate photographs, one of them was the footballer Leigh Nicol, Scottish who now plays the Crystal Palace, But he thought of committing suicide when the world fell on him.
This fact occurred in 2019 when his phone was hacked and his photographs were published. The content was from a few years ago, when she was 18 and her world was torn down when she found out by direct message on Instagram and even fought to find equipment, as they did not want to relate it to their brand .
“The fact that she was a football player made the images spread quickly without me being able to control it, ”he told Sky Sports.
“I have nieces and nephews who are coming of age now, who are proud of me and want to search me on Google, but it’s impossible to do without my name stuck in the dirt,” he added.
Nicol deciding to move away from the sport after the great emotional blow it represented for her, As he suffers from anxiety and suffered a deep depression, from which he was recovering with therapy, although he has not been able to fully recover from the harassment he has suffered.
“I entered a vicious circle. There was never a moment of calm. I still suffer from anxiety and I have times when I can’t get out of bed. Now I can understand why people commit suicide for things like this, because I don’t know how I managed to get over it. It was necessary to change my perspective and surround myself with the right people, “he said.
Leigh then shut down his social media for all the hurtful and obscene messages he received and recently reopened them, but the problem still persists:Still receiving comments. At least one per night. I’ve come to normalize it and that hurts me. It’s frustrating to be recognized just for that. ”
After the hell he lived, he found an opportunity in the Crystal Palace to put it back together, a team who didn’t care about his past and in the locker room he has the photo of the tree he thought I would commit suicide, Instead of their loved ones as do their peers.
“I smile when I look at him. It doesn’t make me sad. He has no negative memories for me. I’m very grateful to have been able to get through this period of my life. He kindly reminds me that anything is possible, and puts things in perspective. Even on a match day, when there are a lot of nerves, I just look at the tree and it reminds me that I have overcome worse things“, He confessed.