Madison Beer seemed poised for superstardom when discovered by Justin Bieber and signed by manager Scooter Braun all before her 14th birthday—only for her to suddenly be dropped three years later. At the time, reports claimed that Madison Beer was dropped by her label, Island Records, due to creative differences, but now she's telling the real story—and it's more disturbing than you can imagine.
“Literally the same day my manager dropped me, my lawyer dropped me, and my label dropped me. Everything in my life went away within 12 hours,” Madison said in her Cosmopolitan cover story. “I was 16 and my label was like, ‘Good luck.’ And I'm like, ‘You guys just stole years of my childhood that I'll never get back. And now it's just ‘good luck’ and ‘have fun’?’”
Looking back, she believes she was dropped because she “hadn't been successful enough.” She continued, recalling how executives struggled to package her as an artist. “There was a conversation around me when I was 14, I remember people being like, ‘She's too sexy’ and ‘We can't see the sex because she's so young, so we'd have to wait.’ This was a real conversation, grown men talking about how I was too sexy. I was 14,” she said. (Sexualizing a minor is somewhat of a tradition in pop music—see: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, etc.—but that doesn't make it any less disturbing.)
To add insult to injury, Madison said that many of those around her at the time treated her like family when she was signed, only to completely cut her off. “I felt like I was a dollar sign to them and when I didn't bring in enough money, they didn't care about me anymore,” she continued. “Maybe they should't have signed a 12-year-old without thinking of the consequences of what that was going to do.”
Now 26, Madison is at a place in her life where she refuses to be reduced to a dollar sign. “I prioritize my life and my mental health more than my career,” she explained. “I'm really proud of where I'm at and I'm not putting all of my self-worth into my career.” And she can be as sexy (or not) as she wants to be.
