Osbourne deserves peace beyond lifelong body shaming

It should have been a celebratory night for the Ozzy Osbourne (an English singer, songwriter, and media personality) family, or at least a brief respite from their grief. On Saturday 28 February, Ozzy’s beloved daughter Kelly and his wife Sharon took to the stage of Manchester’s Co-Op Live arena to accept a posthumous lifetime achievement Brit award for the Black Sabbath frontman and heavy metal pioneer, who died in July at the age of 76, following years of ill health.

But the award, and the tribute performance that followed it, ended up being overshadowed by criticism and speculation focusing on Kelly’s appearance. The 41-year-old DJ, presenter and singer undoubtedly looked frail, holding on to her mother’s hand on the red carpet and on stage.

The outspoken figure who Rolling Stone once hailed as “a wickedly funny, brutally honest, pint-size potty mouthed spitfire” seemed uncharacteristically subdued, leaving most of the talking to 73-year-old Sharon. Over on social media, never the most empathetic of forums when it comes to probing a celebrity’s weight, there was a mix of genuine concern and snide jibes speculating about Ozempic (Kelly has always denied using weight loss jabs, while her mother has been vocal about her own stint using the injections).

After the show, Kelly, never one to mince her words, posted an Instagram story calling out her detractors. “There is a special kind of cruelty in harming someone who is clearly going through something,” she wrote, before railing against those who are “kicking me while I’m down, doubting my pain, spreading my struggles as gossip, and turning your back when I need support and love most”.

The closing sentences of her statement were perhaps the most searingly honest — and the most poignant. “I’m currently going through the hardest time in my life,” she concluded. “I should not even have to defend myself. But I won’t sit here and allow myself to be dehumanised in such a way.” It is far from the first time that the former teenage reality star has felt the need to provide a counter-narrative to cruel trolls. Only a few days before the Brits, Kelly had to defend her appearance at London Fashion Week after receiving similarly critical comments. “No one deserves this sort of abuse,” she wrote in another social media post.

And in December, in a since-deleted Instagram video, she railed against those scrutinising changes to her body in the wake of her father’s death. “What do you expect me to look like right now?” she asked. “The fact I’m getting out of bed, facing my life and trying should be more than enough.”

Amid all the speculation, what seems all too clear is that Kelly is still in the throes of grief — and that, at a time when she could probably do with public sympathy, she is being treated as some kind of spectacle to gawk at. Weight loss is a very common side effect of grief; appetite sometimes seems to melt away when you are dealing with loss, and there are countless other physical side effects — nausea, tiredness and distraction, to name just a few — that can compound this.

So often, we are expected to bounce back from the death of a loved one in a matter of weeks, if not days; in our emotionally guarded culture, it’s more acceptable to metabolise loss into a more palatable narrative of personal growth over adversity than actually talk about how painful bereavement can be. “People usually say, ‘I’m great,’ (but) I’m not doing so great,” Kelly said at the Grammys last month, which she and her family attended to watch another tribute to Ozzy.

It can’t be easy to have to keep performing your grief — albeit an acceptable version — in the public eye like this. The loss of a parent can be one of the most destabilising events that humans must go through, especially when that bond runs as deep as Kelly’s close relationship with her dad. “If I’ve got a favourite kid, it’s Kelly,” the rocker told Rolling Stone in 2023, adding that they were “like two peas in a pod”; Kelly, meanwhile, hailed her father as her “best friend”.

Born in London in 1984, Kelly is Ozzy and Sharon’s youngest daughter (she has an older sister, Aimee, who opted out of starring on the family’s reality series, and a younger brother, Jack). On screen on The Osbournes, their fly-on-the-wall MTV show, the father-daughter duo seemed to share an offbeat sense of humour along with a fondness for expletives. Kelly’s sharp, sarcastic takedowns provided a counterpoint to her dad’s eccentricities, while Ozzy brought a certain “been there, done that” tolerance to his daughter’s teenage rebellions.

The show, which aired between 2002 and 2005, painted a portrait of a chaotic but loving clan, transplanted from the UK to LA, and set a reality TV template that would later be picked up by the likes of the Kardashians. It also ensured that Kelly’s adolescence was beamed into millions of houses around the world, exposing her to then-unprecedented levels of scrutiny. She went “from no one knowing who I was” to “suddenly being one of the most famous 16-year-olds in the world and not understanding why, everybody wanting something from you and everybody having an opinion on you”, she later said in an interview with Sky.