Niecy Nash-Betts Shuts Down The House With Emotional, Electric Speech At The Emmys

Ben Blanchet
Updated ·3 min read

Niecy Nash-Betts declared that she’s a “winner baby” as she took the stage for an electrifying and moving speech at the 75th Emmy Awards on Monday.

Nash-Betts won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her role as Glenda Cleveland in Netflix’s “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

The win marked her first-ever Primetime Emmy win after earning five nominations at the award show over the course of her career.

On Monday, she held back tears as she thanked a handful of people following the win.

“And you know who I want to thank? I want to thank me,” Nash-Betts said amid thunderous applause and a show of smiles from the crowd.

“For believing in me and doing what they said I could not do, and I want to say to myself in front of all you beautiful people, ‘Go on girl with your bad self. You did that.’”

She ended her speech with a powerful message, saying: “Finally, I accept this award on behalf of every Black and brown woman who has gone unheard yet over-policed. Like Glenda Cleveland, like Sandra Bland, like Breonna Taylor. As an artist, my job is to speak truth to power, and baby I’mma do it till the day I die. Mama, I won.”

In remarks in the press room after the win, Nash-Betts said she was the “only one who knows what it cost me.”

“I’m the only one who knows how many nights I cried because I couldn’t be seen for a certain type of role,” she said. “I’m the one who knows what it’s like to go through a divorce on camera and you still have to pull up and show out.”

“And you still have to go home [because] you have children and a whole life. So, I’m proud of myself. I’m proud that I did something that people said I could not do because I believed in me. And sometimes people don’t believe in themselves. I hope my speech was a delicious invitation for people to do just that,” she continued. “Believe in yourself and congratulate yourself. Sometimes you’ve got to encourage – what? Yourself. And that’s why it’s not called ‘mama-esteem,’ ‘them-esteem,’ ‘us-esteem.’ It’s called ‘self-esteem’ — because don’t nobody got to believe it but you.”

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