Anne Hathaway has shared a concerning experience from her days as a child actor, revealing that at the age of 16 she was asked by a journalist whether she was a "good" or "bad" girl.
"One of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting and had to do press was: 'Are you a good girl or a bad girl?'" Anne said [via Variety] on Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival. "I was 16."
By sharing the revelation, Anne joins a long list of former child celebrities – specifically women – who've been subjected to such treatment, such as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Britney Spears, Emma Watson and OG Matilda star, Mara Wilson.
"Even before I was out of middle school, I had been featured on foot fetish websites, photoshopped into child porn and received all kinds of letters and messages online from grown men," Mara told Elle in 2017. "What’s really at play here [is] the creepy, inappropriate public inclination to sexualise young girls in the media."
More recently, Stranger Things' Millie Bobby Brown was the focus of "creepy" online forums that were set up to countdown to her 18th birthday. Millie herself went on to call out the "gross" way she'd been treated as a child actor growing up. "[I'm] definitely seeing a difference between the way people act and the way the press and social media react to me coming of age," she said on the Guilty Feminist podcast. "It's gross."
Erm, this behaviour was never acceptable, but why the heck is it still going on!?
