by Lately, old clips by Justin Bieber resurfaced and featured multiple instances of the pop star being asked incredibly inappropriate questions during his teenage years. He expressed discomfort on several occasions and said he felt “hurt”.
This sparked a bigger conversation as people reflected and reviewed times when child and teen stars were treated inappropriately by the industry, interviewers, the press, and even fans. Here are some examples:
1.
Britney Spears was 17 years old when Ivo Niehe asked her in a television interview whether or not she had breast implants.
2.
Marcus Scribner was 18 years old when he was there The Wendy Williams Show and she asked him if he was a virgin.
3.
An NSFW subreddit claimed it would open on Millie Bobby Brown’s 18th birthday and was counting down the days until then.
The group had over 6000 members, and one Reddit user explained that the subreddit was supposed to “post sexual pictures of her the day she turns 18. I’ve already prepared a sub with thousands of subscribers.”
4.
There was also a countdown from the media to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s 18th birthdays because they would be “of legal age”.
In a Reddit thread about the Reddit group Millie Bobby Brown, someone recalled that for Mary-Kate and Ashley, “radio talk show hosts had countdowns to it, there were TV spots to it.”
5.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were 17 when Oprah asked her height during a conversation about her alleged eating disorders.
6.
Brooke Shields was 12 when she played a child sex worker in it pretty baby, which also included a nude scene of her. Her mother, who was her manager at the time, received a lot of backlash for letting her take on the role.
When Brooke went to the Cannes Film Festival, the film caused an uproar and someone who tried to cut Brooke’s hair with scissors had to be restrained. Expressing how traumatic it was, she said: “I had never seen a frenzy like this before. It was so obscene but absurd. I couldn’t relate to it…the level of attention was really scary.”
7.
Lindsay Lohan was 17 when she hosted SNL, and they did for quite a while Harry Potter Sketch revolving around characters staring at her breasts.
8th.
Britney Spears was 19 when she hosted SNL in 2000, and many of the skits contained sexual jokes about her.
9.
Finn Wolfhard shared that at just 13 years old he was a group of eager, grown-up people stranger things Fans followed him back to his apartment as he was filming It.
“stranger things had just come out and I was alone. The faster I went, the faster they went,” he recalled. “When I got to the door, I was getting a little nervous. All of a sudden they were like, ‘Hey dude, can we take a selfie?’”
“And I was like, ‘No, you can’t take a selfie! How about not following kids?’”
10
During Ariel Winter’s acting career, she said her mother wore her dress in outfits that sexualized her.
Ariel claimed her mother “dressed her in the smallest miniskirts, sailor suits, low-cuts, the shortest dresses you’ve ever seen. People thought I was 24 when I was 12. If there was a nude scene at that age, my mom would have said yes, 1,000 percent.”
11.
Shirley Temple’s mother, Gertrude, brought her daughter into the industry when she was a toddler. Her first credited role was in war babies at 3 years. It was a sexually suggestive short film in which children pose as adults, and in her autobiography Shirley described it as “a cynical exploitation of our childhood innocence”.
In her memoir, she also cited multiple instances of sexual harassment by studio executives during her childhood career.
12.
Alyson Stoner wrote in an essay that she had to audition for scenes of sexual violence at the age of 6 and that it took an emotional toll on her.
She added that many companies made her work longer hours than the law allows for minors, that the conditions set were unreasonable and dangerous, and that she had also experienced sexual harassment.
13.
Joe Jonas said that the fame of the Jonas Brothers is scary at times.
He recounted a meet-and-greet in Spain where 100,000 people turned up and chased them through the mall, and another incident in South America where a hotel worker smuggled his child into his room.
14
In Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, she writes about how, when she was a child star on Nickelodeon, she was encouraged to drink alcohol at dinner by someone she refers to as “The Creator.”
She declined and he told her about the children iCarly were too healthy and that the victorious Cast drank often. Jennette says she took a sip to please him and he forced her to wear his coat and then massaged her shoulders, which made her uncomfortable.
15
And Bhad Bhabie – aka Danielle Bregoli – expressed discomfort at how such a large, older audience subscribed to her Onlyfans when she opened her account just days after her 18th birthday.
She claimed to have made over a million dollars on her first night on the platform and said she made $52 million within the first year of opening her account. When asked if she thought people who subscribed immediately would go to jail, she agreed.
