Did you know that it’s only been five years since Modern Family ended? If you had told me that it was celebrating its tenth anniversary off-air, I would have believed you. The post-pandemic/lockdown time warp strikes again! For some reason I thought that half of the adult cast had popped up on Elsbeth but I looked it up and it turns out it was just Tyler Jesse Ferguson.
After Modern Family ended, Ariel Winter, who played the Dunphy’s middle child, Alex, decided to give up life in Los Angeles. During the show’s run, she faced a lot of very public challenges, including online body shaming and and issues with her mother, whom from whom she was emancipated after years of abuse. Now 27, Ariel is living a much more peaceful life in Tennessee with her longtime boyfriend and six dogs. She’s even starting a cooking show and doing volunteer work.
She was affected by the online criticism: “It was just everywhere. It was every headline I read about myself, like, grown people writing articles about me saying how I looked terrible or pregnant or like a fat slut. I mean, I was 14. It totally damaged my self-esteem.”
“I understood what it was like to be hated. No matter what I was going through, I was a target. It made it very difficult to look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘I love this version of me.'”
She was removed from her mother’s home to live with her older sister: A stable home life might have helped Winter navigate the darker side of child stardom, but instead, she’d publicly endured a tumultuous relationship with her mother, Chrisoula Workman, whom she’s accused of abuse. (Workman has publicly denied any allegations of abuse.) When Winter was 14, the Department of Child and Family Protective Services removed her from her home, and she was placed in the care of her older sister, Shanelle Gray.
“I went on to have a great rest of my teenage years thanks to being under her custody,” she says of her older sister, who became her legal guardian. Three years later Winter was legally emancipated and declared an adult, and she has since refrained from talking to Workman.
“Honestly, it’s just my entire childhood,” Winter says of her single biggest source of trauma. “It’s a really deep, painful, sore, sore part for me that’s so much deeper and bigger than I’ve ever felt ready to talk about.”
Up next: a podcast and a cooking show: “I didn’t leave the industry,” she explains, noting that she still loves acting and is pursuing it all the same while enjoying getting into producing several projects of her own, as well as starting a podcast and developing a cooking show. “I just left the city of L.A. It holds some not-great memories for me, and I’m young and never lived anywhere else, and thought, ‘Why not?’ If you’re no longer on a network show that shoots there, you don’t really have to be there, and if I get a network show, I can easily go back.”
She’s volunteering to catch online predators:She’s also leaning into a surprising new passion: fighting against online sexual predators. One night, she and Benward were watching TV and came upon Max’s Undercover Underage, which followed an organization called SOSA (Safe From Online Sex Abuse). The group acts as decoys to lure in Internet pedophiles and then works with local law enforcement and vice squads to arrange in-person meetings and get the perpetrators arrested.
“I was just like, ‘God, I’d love to be a part of that,’” says Winter, who referred to herself as “a victim of grooming online and IRL [in real life] and CSA [child sex abuse]” in an Instagram comment earlier this year but declined to share any further details. “It just impacted me so deeply because I’d been that kid who’d been preyed upon online so many times.”
“Technically, yes, I’m a survivor. I’ve gone through some s—,” she says. “But a lot of people have gone through some s—. Calling me a survivor takes away from what I’m here for, which is to help others and shine a spotlight on those that need it. More than anything, I want my story to be that she uses her platform for good. My journey to figuring things out and healing is now through helping other people. That’s all I care about.”
Ariel was 11 when MF started airing and 22 when it ended. That’s a really long time for anyone to spend in such a big spotlight, let alone for a child to grow up with. She’s spoken out before about some of the really terrible things that people called her, which was just despicable. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for Ariel to navigate without a good support system, either. Thank goodness she ended up with her sister because it sounds like that was a saving grace for her. I’m also glad she figured out that she could get out of LA and still have a career. Cooking shows are big right now. I’m not surprised about the podcast thing because everyone has a pod nowadays, and if she’s comfortable sharing more about her life on her own terms, then go for it.
I am just so freaking impressed that she’s involved with that online predator-catching organization. I hadn’t heard about SOSA before, so I looked them up, and they’re legit. Good for Ariel. It appears that therapy and a few years away from LA has done her a lot of good.
I wish her all the best and it looks like she’s living her best life.
The dogs are so cute.
I’d love to have a big group of doggies like that! If I was rich and had lots of space, I’d totally have a big group of dogs of different sizes, ages, abilities. There’s so many good dogs out there that need help, and I want to save them all.
I’m happy to hear that she seems to have found peace. I’m happy that she had a stable older family member to go to. I hear her on getting away from people, places things that trigger her trauma. I couldn’t go back to the town where I went to college for years because the most traumatic event of my life happened there. I’m fine going back there now but I needed time and space to heal.
She turned out well, both in general and despite the things she’s been through. I remember that based on nothing but her clothing choices, misogynists were saying she’d be the next Lindsay Lohan (in general I think we need to rethink comparing young women to the extreme examples of Lindsay and Britney, for more reasons than one). But that didn’t happen. It’s another example of why we don’t need to catastrophize every situation where a young woman is wearing what she wants. She’s together and has a good head on her shoulders. I’ve also heard that she’s kind.
It’s not easy being a woman who rejects our boys will be boys culture and who rejects the belief that a woman’s purity is her worth. It’s possible for these women to be hurt and worn down by the abuse they get and start to think, “Maybe I should just be who they want me to be instead of being who I want to be,” because our patriarchal society actively works against women who resist those elements of the culture. Megan thee Stallion admitted that this almost happened to her because of the way she was treated during the Tory Lanez trial.
I’m glad Ariel found a way to protect her peace.
I’ve always wondered how many actors/celebrities leave LA to save their peace-of-mind. The few times I’ve been out West or down South, it’s surprising who turns up in places you don’t expect.