Jenny McCarthy Recalls Childhood Bullying, Says Girls Would 'Light My Hair on Fire'

Jenny McCarthy is speaking out about the bullying she faced as a teenager.

During an April 3 appearance on Kit Hoover's The Coop with Kit podcast, the actress, 51, opened up about her experiences while attending an all-girls high school in the 1980s.

"What was little Jenny McCarthy like?" Hoover, 53, asked the Masked Singer judge. "Because in one of your books I was reading about you being bullied in an all-girls Catholic school. It made me so angry. What was all of that about? Take me on the inside there."

McCarthy recalled being interested in hair and makeup, and how that made her a target for the bullies.

"I really liked hair and makeup. So I had my big giant '80s hair, my blonde hair down on my butt that was permed. Lots of makeup," she said.

"When you go to an all-girls school, that's not appreciated," she explained with a laugh. "If I went to a co-ed school, it might've been appreciated, but the girls were just not having it and it was very scary because they would like wait for me after school."

At one point, she said, some girls even attempted to light her hair on fire.

"They tried to — they did — light my hair on fire," she continued. "But looking back on that now, I realized it was almost like a training school for Hollywood because it taught me resilience, it taught me how to not take things so personally."

McCarthy said she hardly ever spoke out about the bullying while it was happening because of embarrassment, explaining she was worried that "my mom would think I'm a loser."

"Plus, I'm a person that doesn't like empathy," she said. "I didn't like people feeling sorry for me 'cause I felt like I can handle anything. And we didn't have much money growing up and it was hard. So I didn't wanna be a burden anymore."

"It wasn't until she found out that girls were trying to wait for me after school to beat me up," she added of her mom.

The actress recalled other incidents where girls would come to her family's house and try to drag her outside or where they would write her name on a maxi pad. "Isn't that horrible?" she said to Hoover.

The John Tucker Must Die star added that she learned to have thick skin and not let insults — or any other type of bullying — get to her, especially after she moved to Los Angeles and started making her way in the film industry.

"I really dove into spirituality the moment I got into L.A. and figured out very quickly early in my career that people who throw insults are really projecting their own level of consciousness on you, and how I react to them it will show mine," she said. "So that's kind of how I got through high school."

"I also try to make people laugh a little bit," she added. "I tried to self-deprecate to be silly, and it helped me. So I was like, okay, that's something I can do that will appease the girls around me a little bit."

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McCarthy also spoke about hosting the dating show Singled Out in 1995, sharing that it was way for her to try something comedic and not take herself too seriously.

"I went over the top to make fun of myself and be like, 'I don't take any of this stuff seriously,' " she told Hoover. "This is just fun. And let me show you that there's more to what meets the eye."