Jade Thirlwall has admitted she is "still getting over" Jesy Nelson's departure from Little Mix.
Jesy quit the British girl group after nine years in December 2020 and her remaining bandmates Jade, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Perrie Edwards carried on as a trio for a year and a half before going on a hiatus.
During an appearance on The Louis Theroux Podcast on Tuesday, the Angel of My Dreams singer admitted she was "still getting over it now".
"It was really sad and it was really stressful because when it all happened we were literally promoting a single and an album at the same time. Everyone was asking what was going on. We didn't necessarily know exactly what was going on. We found out very abruptly that was happening," she recalled of that "confusing" time.
Declining to go into detail about the split, the 32-year-old clarified that there wasn't a big argument but more "one thing after another" over the years "simmering" under the surface, for which they "had a lot of group therapy".
Explaining why she found Jesy's exit so hard, Jade continued, "Because the contact was so abruptly cut off, it was very hard to deal with and quite traumatic. I think that's why I struggled with it because we didn't all get a chance to just sit together, like we've done so for so many years, to just hash it out."
The pop star revealed that she had to "grieve" the loss of Jesy and their friendship and once "wailed for like an hour" in front of her boyfriend Jordan Stephens about the split.
While she is not in touch with her former bandmate, Jade insisted they harbour "no hate" towards her.
"I'll never begrudge Jesy wanting to leave because if she needed to do that for herself, no matter what happened behind the scenes, or you know, anything that unfolded, I'll never discredit or invalidate the struggles that she had in the group," she shared. "Particularly at the beginning, she really did suffer the most in terms of like trolling, the press being really mean, all of that stuff, and it really did some lasting damage."
Jade refused to comment on Jesy's 2021 debut single Boyz or the 'Blackfishing' controversy surrounding the video. However, she confirmed that the bandmates "brought up" the topic of 'Blackfishing' - in which a white person tries to appear Black - with Jesy when she was still in Little Mix.
Earlier this month, Jesy, 33, revealed she is expecting twins with her musician boyfriend Zion Foster.
