Erin Moriarty says she’s been targeted by online “verbal abuse”, leaving her barely able to eat or sleep, since former Fox news anchor Megyn Kelly accused her of getting plastic surgery.

The 29-year-old actress, who played Starlight in the Amazon Prime show The Boys, wrote a long post on Instagram, describing “bullying” she’d been subjected to following Kelly’s criticism of her appearance.

Moriarty said she had become aware of the comments following “one of the most challenging weeks of my life”, when she’d been sent “a message about a disgustingly false, counterproductive to the degree of being ironically misogynistic video of Megyn Kelly”.

The actress said she had been expecting “verbal abuse” and “accusations” when she returned to the limelight “10 pounds thinner” but that the abuse she’d received since Kelly’s comments had “horrified” her.

In an episode of Kelly’s self-named SiriusXM show, which aired on 17 January, the 53-year-old presenter used Moriarty as an example of young people turning to plastic surgery, commenting on her weight and facial structure.

Speaking to a guest, Kelly compared an old and more recent photo of Moriarty, which she said had been taken “within the last year or so”, accusing her of deciding to “completely change her face” with plastic surgery.

Describing her in the first picture as “a very beautiful girl”, she went on say, “and now look at her”, and listing all the procedures she believed Moriarty has undergone, including getting “Kim Kardashian lips,” a “nose so skinny it looks like a pencil” and “cheek implants”.

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Kelly goes on: “More and more young women are doing this.

“It’s not about an objection to plastic surgery, it’s about an obsession with turning yourself into this fake version of yourself… I find it like a sign of mental illness. I really want to get in the heads of these young girls and say, ‘Please don’t do this.'”

In response, Moriarty said in her Instagram post the first picture was from almost a decade ago, before she was “of legal drinking age”.

She said the second picture had been taken on a day she had had her makeup done professionally, which “involves major contouring and I remember leaving and feeling pretty. And even that day was an immensely stressful day for me”.

She said the posts that followed were “scathing enough to just turn my comments off” and had become “harassment” and “false news”.

Moriarty said she would no longer be using her Instagram account, and the only reason she had not deactivated it was so her post responding to Kelly’s comments would remain online.

She went on: “I’m horrified by the reaction, the reductive assumptions, and the aforementioned video that is a primary example of such harassment.

“It’s broken my heart. You’ve broken my heart. You’ve lost the privilege of this account.”

Accusing Kelly of perpetuating a message of “exhibitionist feminism,” she said that the videos were “absolutely false” and that “there’s no excuse” for the way she has been treated or spoken to.

Sky News has contacted Kelly for comment.

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