Marina Joyce Says She's “Grateful To Be Alive”
In July 2016, after she posted a seemingly innocent video of herself trying on whimsical dresses, fans of 20-year-old YouTuber Marina Joyce noticed something that seemed troublesome - bruises on the backs of her arms. In less than 48 hours, the hashtag #SaveMarinaJoyce took off, and fans devised explanations spanning from suspected domestic abuse to kidnapping. A few days later, Joyce offered her first statement on the whole ordeal in an interview with a fellow YouTuber.
"I haven't been paying as much attention to everything as everybody else has," Marina said. "I don't know how to tell [the story of how I was bruised], but I don't know if it's a good idea for my YouTube channel to tell what happened."
Her interviewer, Philip DeFranco, pressed her again to explain the cause of the mysterious bruises that launched an entire social media campaign to save her life, and she offered this explanation:
I went to the forest once and I stepped over something and I got really badly bruised and I bruise quite easily but I had quite a fall and it wasn't very good and so, yeah, because I like to go adventure in the park and do stuff like that and I ended up falling over and, yeah, basically, that ended up happening, and it got me a load of bruises, and um, yeah, I just ended up having all these bruises. And that's the reason why everyone said #SaveMarinaJoyce, so that's how that happened.
But now, about nine months after all the drama and concern, Joyce has another explanation for the bruising, and has further clarified her odd behavior. In a five-and-a-half minute video on her channel called "Saving Marina Joyce," Joyce said she was going through a hard time with depression during the #SaveMarinaJoyce frenzy:
The reasons why I did not give you an answer before was because I was not in the right mindset to give you one - I had to get better to give you an answer... I did suffer from depression. It was so bad. It hurts me to this day to think of all the reckless things I did that showed that I did not care about my life. Things that I would look back upon and feel so grateful that I am still alive. I lived in isolation of what happened to me, of people not understanding what I was truly going through.
In the video, Joyce also credits her fans with helping to turn her life around and take care of herself. She said, despite how crazy some of the conspiracy theories were, #SaveMarinaJoyce pushed her to get help. "I’m getting better now, which is why I decided to make this video," she says in the video. "I feel so grateful for #SaveMarinaJoyce because it did actually save me."
Joyce also asks for privacy, and to stop believing in any of the conspiracy theories that circulated last July. She's doing much better now, she says, and thanks her incredibly diehard fanbase for much of her happiness.
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