Jenna Bush Hager was once dumped after her then-boyfriend saw her in a bathing suit. The “Today with Hoda & Jenna” anchor made the revelation when she and co-host Hoda Kotb had a discussion on Ariana Grande’s response to online comments about the singer’s body.
Talking about the long-term impact of severe body shaming on one’s mental health, the 41-year-old reflected on her own experience as a victim. “It’s so interesting because people really do hit you right where it hurts,” she began to spill in the Wednesday, April 12 broadcast of her show.
The mother of three went on to dish what went down to her, “I had a boyfriend in seventh grade who broke up with me after we went swimming together, after he saw me in a bathing suit.” She then confessed that she still bore the impact of the incident to this day.
“I feel like even sometimes now when I feel great – I have three kids, three C-sections, I feel really in my body and I think of it as a beautiful thing – I’ll walk in a pool and have a moment,” the journalist daughter of former president George W. Bush pointed out.
Pool was not the only thing that would trigger bad memories for Jenna. During her chat with Hoda, the news personality admitted that the negative comments about her appearance that she received during her time on the show also took her “back to that moment.”
Jenna has always been open about her experience being a victim to body-shaming. In early 2023, the TV personality got candid about the time her teen self received a comment about her body from her own grandmother, Barbara Bush.
“I remember the bikini color that I was wearing; a yellow bikini color. I was laying next to my sister. And my grandmother, who I adored but had kind of a biting personality, said something like, ‘Oh Jenna, looking chubby.’ I remember feeling like I wanted to hide in,” she spilled in the January episode of “Today with Hoda & Jenna”.
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