Miley Cyrus has always come off as a highly-confident woman, and nothing proved that quite like her twerk-tastic performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards alongside Robin Thicke. However, what happened afterward affected her for years to come.
The "Party in the USA" singer said she saw so many negative posts that she changed her wardrobe to hide her body.
"I basically went through two or three years where I wouldn't wear shorts. I stopped wearing skirts on stage… because after the VMAs and I had on my cute little nude bodysuit, everyone started comparing me to a turkey and putting a turkey in my outfit," she said during an Instagram Live chat on Tuesday. "I was just so skinny and so pasty and they kept putting me next to this turkey, and I was feeling so bad on myself that I did not wear a bikini for like two years."
She added, "No one thought that that would've ever made me feel some type of way. It was just really, really hurtful to be so body-shamed like that. And it really affected me in my personal life."
Because of her mental state, Miley felt some sense of guilt, almost as if she wasn't being honest to her fans about who she really was.
"I think what was so hard about it was my brand has always been about being so unapologetically myself and being confident, and the worse thing that I would feel like I would be to my fans is lying or a fraud," she said. "I felt like having this persona of being the most confident girl on the planet was actually kind of fraud because I was so insecure on the inside that in my personal life I wasn't even wearing bathing suits and shorts. And when I was wearing like my little leotards and things, I had on f—ing four pairs of tights because I was so insecure."
Miley has often spoken about that controversial VMA performance, but this may be the first time she's been so open about the effect it had on her.
"Not only was culture changed, but my life and career were changed forever," she told Wonderland magazine in 2018. "It inspired me to use my platform for something much bigger. If the world is going to focus on me and what I am doing, then what I am doing should be impactful and it should be great."