It’s easy to imagine that Porsha Williams has had a glamorous life. After all, her time on The Real Housewives of Atlanta made her a major celeb and a household name. Along the way, she also secured more wealth and prestige than the average person can even dream of.
However, even seemingly glamorous celebs can have behind-the-scenes struggles. We know much about Williams’ own struggles thanks to her 2021 memoir The Pursuit of Porsha: How I Grew Into My Power and Purpose. Williams treated writing the book as a therapeutic exercise, and that means her readers got to be like therapists, passively receiving all the juicy gossip about her life.
And trust us: gossip doesn’t get much juicier than this. If you want to go from one drama bomb to another, keep reading to learn more about the tragic truth of Porsha Williams!
Traumatic parental divorce
Porsha Williams never had an easy life. Arguably, this all started when her parents got divorced. While divorce is always most difficult on the children, Williams took it particularly hard.
As Bravo reports, she opened up about this in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. “It was just kind of confusing at first because I had my home with Mommy that felt complete, solid, and then over here with Dad, it was another home that could be complete and solid. And why am I going in between?”
Fortunately, things seemed to have smoothed over in recent years. Not only did Williams cheer her father remarrying (which meant she gained a half-sister), but she also took to Instagram to quickly and bluntly dispel any rumors about her father cheating on her mother.
Her dad died when she was young
It’s great that Williams was able to make peace with her father after he remarried. Unfortunately, this peace was short-lived for one sad, simple reason: her dad was diagnosed with leukemia and ended up dying from bone marrow transplant complications when Williams was only 17 years old.
This led to some major issues with Williams, especially when she began dating without having a strong father figure in her life. As People reports, she opened up on her show about how her dad’s death led to her hooking up with some very sketchy men. “That mindset of me just having a skeleton idea of what a man should be led me into like, seriously abusive situations,” she said.
These days, Williams keeps her father’s memory alive by sharing details about his life with her own daughter. In this way, her father gets to live on in the memories of a new generation.
Other sudden family deaths
Losing her dad was arguably the most formative loss of Porsha Williams’ life. Sadly, she ended up losing more family members in unexpected ways, especially in the past few years.
In early 2021, the star took to Instagram to discuss how she lost her aunt, Autherine Ford, to COVID-19. “My heart is so heavy[.] Today I lost my beloved Aunt Autherine[.] Please pray for her husband and beautiful daughters. God please comfort and bless our family at this time[.] Totally heartbroken,” she wrote.
The year before, she wrote on Instagram about losing both her Aunt Louve and her Uncle Torrey. These sudden deaths helped her learn an important message: “Love hard and cherish the ones near and dear to you.” Truer words were never written!
Her own messy divorce
While Porsha Williams may have dated some sketchy fellows before, she eventually married Kordell Stewart. Everyone hoped she was going to get her own happily ever after, but this simply wasn’t in the cards.
He ended up filing for divorce in 2013 and offered no spousal support. She went on to allege that he threw her out of their home and changed the locks after blindsiding her with the divorce paperwork.
That wasn’t the darkest part, though. As reported by The Box Houston, she alleged that Stewart was also physically and mentally abusive to her. “There were several different occasions that this happened. When you’re in an abusive situation, it kind of just builds, and it starts to get worse and worse,” said.
Interestingly, she noted that of all the alleged abuses that Stewart later denied, “the ones that have stuck with me the most is the mental abuse.” Tragically, she ended up in other allegedly abusive relationships, including one with R. Kelly. In an interview with Variety, she reportedly called it quits with Kelly only after attending a house party he was throwing and hearing what sounded like a woman getting beaten. “I was completely traumatized, completely confused about why this was now happening to me again as a grown woman,” she said.
Dealing with bullying, suicidal thoughts, and fertility problems
You may think the rich and the famous had an easy time growing up, but this wasn’t the case with Porsha Williams. She once confided to Women’s Health that she was brutally bullied as a child. “I was really skinny, and, according to those who bullied me during that time, I also had a big head and big teeth (still do!). That bullying experience made me wish I could just dress like a boy.” This eventually led to a longstanding problem of not feeling validated unless a man told her she was beautiful.
This bullying mixed with suicidal thoughts she experienced at only 12 years old. In an interview with Women’s Health, she revealed details about her struggles with depression and how far things nearly went. “I didn’t know that I was dealing with what I would call depression now. I just had this overall feeling of hopelessness, and felt like my existence didn’t really matter,” she said. In fact, she pondered committing suicide and only held off because of the effect it would have on her mother. “She tried her best to give me everything she could, and I didn’t want to give her another problem to deal with.”
While Williams eventually learned to love herself and even become a mother, she faced a different kind of struggle: infertility. She discovered only too late that she has uterine fibroids, and these caused her first pregnancy to end in a miscarriage. As she later disclosed to People, this made her very frightened and paranoid when she was pregnant with her daughter, Pilar “PJ” McKinley. “Just the fear of, ‘Is the baby going to be okay? Will I make it full term?’ All those questions that you ask if you’ve had a miscarriage before.”
Those fears were put to rest when she successfully gave birth to her daughter in 2019.
Overcoming everything from infidelity to racism
While Porsha Williams’ daughter has been a real blessing in her life, she can’t say the same about her daughter’s father, Dennis McKinley. He was Williams’ former fiancé, but things fell apart after he cheated on her. The two tried therapy after splitting up and even got back together, but they split again (permanently this time) in 2020.
That also ended up being a year that dredged up some old trauma for Williams. She grew up dealing with intense racism and even had a confrontation with the KKK when she was a child. After Breonna Taylor was murdered by police in 2020, she went on Instagram and began rallying her followers against the racism and abuse running rampant throughout America. As Bravo reports, she wrote that “They don’t want to stop us, they actually want to silence us … This is about the future for our children. This is about the future for my daughter that I just had. This is about a better life for everyone.”
Ultimately, Porsha Williams’ story is one of inspiration. She may have experienced decades of tragedies and setbacks, but she emerged stronger for it. And just as importantly, she is now using her strength to lift others up and fight injustice whenever and wherever they see it.