For almost 10 years, Iyanla Vanzant has been using her skills as a life coach to mend families and broken homes on her “Iyanla Fix My Life” show. But in May that chapter of her life closed and she said goodbye to the series, stating that she would prefer to now help people off camera and in a more intimate setting.
She has said in the past that viewers’ “mean and nasty” comments is what made the show “exhausting” to be a part of. Now, in a recent interview on “The Tamron Hall Show,” Vanzant opened up once more about the comments she was receiving that compelled her to leave her successful on-air profession.
“I’m very sensitive to energy” she said and, in reference to filming in her guests’ homes for her show she added, “Because you go into people’s homes, you’re in their bathroom, you’re in their kitchen, they think they know you and they think they have a right to say certain things because we’re not clear and conscious of the energy we send out.”
Vanzant went on to explain that she experienced cyberbullying. “So through the emails, through the social media, people would come into my home. I was getting death threats because they didn’t like something I said or did. And I’m like, I want to be free of this. I don’t want this.”
She expounded on her experience, saying, “I got death threats around certain shows, around certain issues, around things that I said. People would come to my home, you know, because with the internet, they can find you anywhere.”
The 68-year-old also explained how people would reach out to her for help, but it was not done in the appropriate way. She said they would get ahold of her personal phone number and “they would call me, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I need help.’ Wait a minute, hold up! And I have so many vehicles and avenues where I serve people. I’m on social media, I have classes, I teach. You don’t get to call me on my private phone at two o’clock in the morning. So I just wanted to be free of that. That was more important to me.”
Earlier in the interview, she mentioned how her “principle is freedom.” “I wanted freedom. Freedom to be, to do, to go, and you know, doing a show, you don’t have no freedom.”
