The Traitors star Meryl Williams has got candid about experiencing cruel abuse and trolling over her dwarfism, as she revealed how undergoing cosmetic surgery had enabled her to find her confidence and start looking to find love.
The reality star, 29, – who shot to fame after winning the hit BBC show’s first series with Aaron Evans and Hannah Byczkowski in 2022 – was born with a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia.
She has described how her condition has caused people to ‘point and laugh’ at her in the street and target her with vile abuse on social media.
But after her Traitors win, Meryl has used her £33,000 share of the prize money to get a forehead reduction and a boob job, allowing her to ‘finally feel comfortable and proportionate in my own body.’
In an interview with The Sun, the star, who also had corrective spinal surgery in 2011 and a procedure to realign her jaw in 2019, proudly declared: ‘I might be the height of an eight-year-old, but I’m not a child and I want to feel sexy’.
Meryl admitted that after the show, she actively went looking for negative comments on social media out of ‘morbid curiosity’, before realising she was only reinforcing it.
The Traitors star Meryl Williams has got candid about experiencing cruel abuse and trolling over her dwarfism, as she revealed how undergoing cosmetic surgery had enabled her to find her confidence and start looking to find love (seen in July)
The reality star, 29, – who shot to fame after winning the hit BBCshow’s first series with Aaron Evans and Hannah Byczkowski in 2022 – was born with a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia
Despite struggling not to let the hate affect her, she said: ‘I’ve had to learn not to internalise cruelty from people who don’t know me. I mute, block or step away, and remind myself that abuse says everything about the person giving it, not the person receiving it.’
She has opened up about the trolling she’s faced in the past, previously revealed that even before her Traitors stint, people would ‘point and stare’ in the street.
Appearing on Good Morning Britain in 2023, she insisted the cruelty was an issue with or without TV, saying: ‘I think because I do experience it on a day-to-day basis even before the show, when I go out in the street people do stare and that was before the show.
‘After the show I did receive some negative comments but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before and because I had such a good experience on the show I just ignored it.’
She continued: ‘But I do experience it, I did know what it would be like for people to stare and point because that’s what people would do before, but I thought by doing this I can at least change people’s ideas so they at least know that we can do the same as them.’
Meryl also explained that awareness was the reason she wanted to do the BBC show in the first place as she hoped to change perspectives.
She said: ‘The whole reason why I wanted to go on the show was to raise awareness, a lot of people don’t think that I can do the same things they can. So I thought, if I go on and I do the same challenges that they all do, we all have a level playing field.
‘A lot of the challenges people would ask if I got extra time and stuff and I didn’t. Even when I go out people think “Oh they can’t do this and they can’t do that” so I just wanted to show that I can do the exact same as everyone else.’
But after her Traitors win, Meryl has used her £33,000 share of the prize money to get a forehead reduction and a boob job, allowing her to ‘finally feel comfortable and proportionate in my own body
She has opened up about the trolling she’s faced in the past, previously revealed that even before her Traitors stint, people would ‘point and stare’ in the street
And as a result of her forehead and breast surgeries, Meryl now says she finally feels ‘sexy’ and like ‘what I was meant to look like’, and is ready to find love for the first time.
However, she wants to meet someone organically rather than through dating apps – which she branded as ‘exhausting’ for people who are ‘visibly different’.
Voicing her hope to find someone ‘who accepts me for me’, she explained: ‘Dating as a little person comes with challenges and it’s taken time for me to unlearn the idea that I have to accept less. I have never been in love, but I know I deserve it and I don’t need to compromise.’
Meryl first went under the knife aged 16, when she got a breast reduction that took her from a 28FF to 32B, after suffering from ‘extreme back, neck and shoulder pain’ over the size of her boobs, which ‘went down to my belly button’.
But while the surgery eased her physical issues, she confessed that it had a negative impact on her confidence, feeling that her breasts were no longer ‘perky’ and took to covering up in conservative clothes.
After getting her second boob job over a decade later, she is now excited to show off her new chest in low-cut tops and bikinis, declaring that she has ‘worked hard to feel comfortable in my body and I plan to enjoy that’.
She previously revealed her plans to boost her chest from a 32B to a 32C and get an uplift to Fabulous, explaining: ‘I’ve lost weight over the years and my body has changed and so my boobs have become saggy and lost their elasticity.’
After winning season one of the hit BBC show as a Faithful with with Aaron Evans and Hannah Byczkowski, Meryl spent £7,500 of her £33,000 share of the prize money to pay for a forehead reduction.
Meryl first went under the knife aged 16, when she got a breast reduction that took her from a 28FF to 32B, after suffering from ‘extreme back, neck and shoulder pain’ over the size of her boobs, which ‘went down to my belly button'(pictured in her teenage years with her mother)
In 2023, Meryl spent £7,500 on a forehead reduction, which involved having the upper part of her forehead removed and then her scalp lifted and moved forward (right, after the surgery)
In 2023, Meryl spent £7,500 on a forehead reduction, which involved having the upper part of her forehead removed and then her scalp lifted and moved forward.
Having ‘always hated’ her forehead, in childhood she would always style a fringe in an attempt to hide, before gathering the funds to go under the knife.
She admitted to Daily Mail at the time that the procedure was ‘not for the fainthearted’, as she ‘genuinely looked like I’d had a fight’, but that it had been the best decision.
At the beginning of last year, Meryl revealed the level of cruelty she was frequently subjected to, after being verbally abused by feral teenagers on a London-bound train.
She took to TikTok to detail the incident, explaining how her dwarfism made her an ‘easy target’ for cruel bullies and condemning her fellow passengers for not stepping in to help.
Meryl recalled: ‘I got on the train, they sat opposite me because I’m sitting on the seats with tables, and so far they’ve said that I need a stepladder to get on the train, I’m a midget, they’ve watched dwarf throwing, they’ve taken videos of me, they’ve taken photos of me, they said I’ve got sausage fingers, and they’ve laughed at me.’
She added: ‘This is all in the space of 10 minutes. I’m on my own right now. Everyone around me has witnessed this, heard this, and no one’s said anything. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Living with this condition is something that you can’t hide,’ she explained. ‘People see you straight away; they notice you straight away, you’re just an easy target.’
