‘Real Housewives Of Dubai’ Star Chanel Ayan Says She Was “Bullied” For Opening Up About Her Circumcision: “I Got So Depressed”

Chanel Ayan was forced to confront her past during an August 2022 episode of The Real Housewives of Dubai‘s inaugural season. While attending a hypnotherapy session with co-star Sara Al Madani, the supermodel, who grew up on the border of Kenya and Uganda, emotionally revealed that she was circumcised as a five-year-old without her mother’s knowledge. Now, more than two years after the episode aired, Ayan is opening up about the mental hardships she faced in light of telling her story for the first time.

In a new interview with DECIDER, Ayan admitted she was “scared” to return to The Real Housewives of Dubai Season 2 because she was “going through depression” as a result of sharing her experience with female genital mutilation (FGM).

The practice, which is described by the World Health Organization as “a violation of the human rights of girls and women,” is defined as the “partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”

Ayan said she was “bullied a lot” for being open about her own experience FGM, noting, “I understand that because I come from a culture that is very closed.”

“We marry each other, we’re 100% Muslim, nobody talks about FGM like it’s something bad,” she told us. “I was talking about things that I’m not supposed to talk about. So I got a lot of backlash from that.”

She added, “I got so depressed. I wasn’t leaving my house. I was really in, I would say, the darkest moments of my life before we started filming.”

Ayan’s father — whom she previously said tried to sell her into marriage when she was 14 — “went home and beat up” her sister after her story aired on the show, she said.

“I went into the worst depression you can ever think of,” Ayan said of how she dealt with rehashing her past trauma with FGM. “I mean, I’m African. I didn’t think depression existed. When we would talk about depression, I just thought it was very Westernized stuff. Now I know it exists because I’ve been through it.”

Ayan continued, “I could not stop myself from crying. It was that bad to the point where I would wake up my husband in the middle of the night and be like, ‘I need to talk to you because I’m having really bad thoughts, like, I need to talk to you. This is really hard on me right now.'”

But with the Western African country of Gambia recently voting to advance a bill that would overturn a ban on FGM, Ayan knows that now is the time to use her platform to spread awareness about the atrocity so other young girls aren’t forced to undergo the same trauma.

“I’m literally trying to put myself out there so now I feel like it’s not about me anymore,” she said. “It cannot be about me if African countries are bringing it back. How can I sleep at night even if I’m in sad moments and knowing that this is happening to children that it shouldn’t happen to?”

She added, “Even if it changes two people’s minds or three people’s minds, I think I’m reaching somewhere … And then I feel like this platform, I mean, I can’t be beautiful all the time. I have to use it for the greater good. This is why my brand is about helping and stuff and you get to see that on the show.”

The Real Housewives of Dubai Season 2 premieres on Sunday, June 2 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo. Beginning Tuesday, June 11, the series will move to its regular timeslot of Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.