Home And Away Star Penny McNamee Reveals More On Upsetting Bullying Ordeal

Penny McNamee, star of Home and Away, has opened up more about her painful experience with bullying.

In a moving Instagram post, the actor—who portrayed Tori Morgan on the Australian soap opera—recently talked about her experiences growing up bullied.

McNamee described how she lost her “sense of joy” and cried every day for six months as a result of being “terribly bullied” by a gang of females at her school.

Following the “overwhelming” outpouring of support from parents and kids who had gone through similar things, McNamee wrote a piece for the Australian magazine Mamamia that goes into further detail on the difficulties she faced growing up.

In my ninth year at an exclusive girls’ school, three girls tormented me nonstop. They’d been my best friends for the last two years. “One day, they made the decision to no longer communicate with me,” she wrote.

McNamee remembered the girls laughing as they passed her, “vividly” recalling that at first she assumed it was a joke. Slightly to the contrary, it marked the beginning of a “six-month campaign” to “isolate and humiliate” her.

She continued by describing how she felt “trapped and hopeless every single day” as a result of being avoided and spoken about incoherently, as well as being laughed at and whispered to as she entered a classroom.

“As a child, I was inherently joyful and could always find humor and happiness in my days. Thus, you can only imagine how worried my parents were when their happy, fourteen-year-old daughter stopped smiling,” she remarked.

Following several months of upheaval, McNamee’s parents decided it was “difficult” to remove her from the school. Later on, the soap opera star enrolled in a coeducational school, which she calls “the greatest gift”.

“I found beautiful, inclusive, creative friends who are still my friends today,” McNamee said. “I decided to pursue a career in acting after landing the lead role in the school musical. I was able to start over in a new setting where no one knew who I was and I could be anyone I wanted to be by switching schools.”

“Looking back, I see a desperate child who was powerless to change her circumstances,” she said in closing. Nor did the school have the authority to alter the circumstances.

But yesterday, when I thanked my parents for yanking me out of school at the age of 14, I broke down in tears. I will always be appreciative that they did.”

McNamee began filming Home and Away in 2016 and left the series in 2021, following Tori Morgan’s marriage to Christian Green. Before making an unexpected guest appearance in April, the actor returned to the soap opera last year as a writer.