What started as a search for music online - purely homework procrastination - would change Lizzie Velasquez's life.
She was 17 when she stumbled across a YouTube video entitled "The World's Ugliest Woman". What she didn't expect was that the woman featured in the video would be her. It was an eight-second clip and had been watched over four million times.
She didn't realise it was her until it started playing.
"I was shocked," Velasquez recalls, "but it wasn't until I started to read the comments that my stomach really sank."
"Why would her parents keep her?!" read one of the comments, "kill it with fire" said another. And they continued on and on. Some commentators said she should kill herself, and one said people would go blind if they saw her on the street. Velasquez couldn't help but read every comment, and she says there were thousands.
"I cried for many nights - as a teenager I thought my life was over," she says. "I couldn't bring myself to talk to anybody about it, I didn't tell any of my friends, I was just so shocked that it had happened."
Velasquez was already used to being bullied daily for the way she looks. Born with two rare conditions - Marfan and lipodystrophy - she is unable to gain weight, no matter how much she eats.
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