Dicko: “I’d like to have learned from it”

Part of the I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here gig is revealing star secrets, regrets and long-buried thoughts on famous situations.

Last night it was time for former Australian Idol judge Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson to reflect on those infamous 2003 comments, when he told a young Paulini, “You need to choose more appropriate clothes or shed some pounds.”

Last night he told campmate Woody he had once received a letter from a surgeon about his daughter who was in hospital with an eating disorder.

“He said, ‘This is your fault. She was an Australian Idol fan and when you said that comment to Paulini, she spiralled out of control and she is now in hospital, she might die and if she does, I am going to hold you personally responsible,'” he said.

“To feel that my words had driven a beautiful young girl, the apple of her father’s eye, into a hospital ward where she could die, it’s really hard.”

A visibly emotional Dicko, a father of two young girls at the time, said he sought professional advice on eating disorders and accepted his comments may have triggered vulnerable viewers.

“You’ve got to accept responsibility, you know? And I’m prepared to accept in that long society struggle to get there, I’m one of the villains that brought us there. I can’t change that. We do live in a different world now.

“I’d like to have learned from it, I’d like the world to have learned from it. I certainly don’t have the slightest inkling for bailing someone up for the way they look these days.”

butterfly.org.au