Ariel Winter, Now 27, Reveals She 'Left L.A.' to Build a New Life After Traumatic...

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Ten years ago, life looked very different for actress Ariel Winter, 27, who was born and raised in Los Angeles and started acting in commercials when she was just 4 years old.

She had a thriving career starring as middle child Alex Dunphy on the hit sitcom Modern Family, but she was also facing the uglier side of growing up onscreen: Endless scrutiny from the press and online trolls about her body and how she looked as she naturally grew up and changed.

“It was just everywhere," she says of the negativity. "It was every headline I read about myself, like, grown people writing articles about me saying how I looked terrible or pregnant or like a fat slut. I mean, I was 14,” she says. “It totally damaged my self-esteem.”

She says she couldn't catch a break.

“I understood what it was like to be hated," she says. "No matter what I was going through, I was a target. It made it very difficult to look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘I love this version of me.'"

A stable home life might have helped Winter navigate the darker side of child stardom, but instead, she'd publicly endured a tumultuous relationship with her mother, Chrisoula Workman, whom she’s accused of abuse. (Workman has publicly denied any allegations of abuse.)

“Honestly, it’s just my entire childhood,” Winter says of her single biggest source of trauma. “It’s a really deep, painful, sore, sore part for me that’s so much deeper and bigger than I’ve ever felt ready to talk about.”

These days, after lots of therapy, Winter can look back on her upbringing with clarity and peace of mind. A change of scenery also helped. After Modern Family wrapped its final season in April 2020, Winter and her boyfriend, actor Luke Benward, decided to move out of L.A.

Now they live a quiet, more domestic life where Winter has leaned into cooking and being a dog-mom to their six (yes, six!) dogs.

“I didn’t leave the industry,” she explains, noting that she still loves acting and is pursuing it all the same while enjoying getting into producing several projects of her own, as well as starting a podcast and developing a cooking show.

“I just left the city of L.A. It holds some not-great memories for me, and I’m young and never lived anywhere else, and thought, ‘Why not?’ If you’re no longer on a network show that shoots there, you don’t really have to be there, and if I get a network show, I can easily go back."

She's also leaning into a surprising new passion: fighting against online sexual predators. One night, she and Benward were watching TV and came upon Max’s Undercover Underage, which followed an organization called SOSA (Safe From Online Sex Abuse).

The group acts as decoys to lure in Internet pedophiles and then works with local law enforcement and vice squads to arrange in-person meetings and get the perpetrators arrested.

“I was just like, ‘God, I’d love to be a part of that,’” says Winter, who referred to herself as “a victim of grooming online and IRL [in real life] and CSA [child sex abuse]” in an Instagram comment earlier this year but declined to share any further details. “It just impacted me so deeply because I’d been that kid who’d been preyed upon online so many times.”

Between working with SOSA and now teaching others about the importance of rescue dogs, Winter feels like she's found her new calling. She just hopes her story isn't one of tragedy and survival.

“Technically, yes, I’m a survivor. I’ve gone through some s---," she says. "But a lot of people have gone through some s---. Calling me a survivor takes away from what I’m here for, which is to help others and shine a spotlight on those that need it. More than anything, I want my story to be that she uses her platform for good. My journey to figuring things out and healing is now through helping other people. That’s all I care about.”