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Shirley Ballas was left with bald patches after bully pulled out her hair

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Strictly's Shirley Ballas was left with bald patches after bully pulled out her hair

Shirley Ballas has detailed being targeted by bullies as a youngster and recalled the horrific time a girl yanked out chunks of her hair

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Strictly Come Dancing head judge Shirley Ballas has bravely reflected on being bullied as a child.

The 60-year-old, who grew up in Merseyside, has revealed that she was picked on for being poor - which led to her being beaten up by nasty bullies.

Dance guru Shirley says that before she was a teenager she had "heard it all" after the mean youngsters called her names.

She also told how the trauma has meant she is now "resilient" to social media trolls.

Shirley said: "Let’s face it, I was a show-off, and they weren’t having it," The Daily Star reports.

The BBC favourite continued: "That’s why when people are mean to me on social media I’m resilient to it.

"By the time I was 10, I’d heard it all – language, bullying, nasty comments, the lot."

Recalling one horrific incident, she added that a girl once "beat the holy living s**t out of me, leaving me with bruises and great patches where she’d pulled the hair out".

Shirley has been targeted by trolls since being in the public eye and in her memoir, Behind The Sequins, Shirley revealed that she once received a terrifying death threat that was delivered to her by hand while she was appearing in a pantomime.

The message included a drawing of her digging a grave, which read: "Do you realise how much you are hated? The country hates you. How did they ever give a job to someone like you, you old witch."

She also shared the messages on Instagram and urged her own fans to be strong if they received such abuse.

She wrote at the time: "As we know I had quite a lot of bullying on Strictly this time and my Inbox on insta was full of horrific and horrendous messages. But this has gone a step further now so I've had a hand-delivered message which I'm going to share with you.

"Hand-delivered to the hippodrome addressed to me with not such nice comments or words or whatever and my message is for the young people, anybody out there who receives awful messages or hate mail or things from people that don't know them.

"The issue is the other person's issue it's not so much ours. Even though i still do find it quite upsetting to have to go and perform and then read something like this from somebody who doesn't even know me.