Between Jeanette McCurdy's bestselling memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died, and others like Daniella Monet and Alyson Stoner corroborating allegations that Nickelodeon sexualized their child stars, 2022 has taught us a lot about the horrors of how the industry treats child actors. Bella Thorne is firing back at a director that claimed she flirted with him during an audition when she was 10 years old.
Appearing on Emily Ratajkowski's High Low podcast (which is quickly becoming a reliable new source for celebrity tea), Thorne recounted a story about a casting director who felt "uncomfortable" by what he perceived to be the preteen's advances. "I had a director give me feedback once and I was 10," Thorne recalled. "The casting director calls my agent and the agent calls my mom, and they're like, 'So, she's not moving forward because the director felt like she was flirting with him and it made him really uncomfortable.' What the fuck are you talking about, man? I don't give a fuck what I said. I don't care if I said, 'Eat my pussy right now' — she is 10 years old! Why ever would you think that? Why?"
Thorne went on to point out just how messed up the inherent power dynamics at play are. “You’re in a director session —you can’t really say or do much. You do the scene, you say hello, you walk out. There’s no time to like ‘let me go sit on your lap’ or like make you feel uncomfortable. What the fuck are you talking about?”
The exchange would go on haunt Thorne for years to come, with her explaining that she still thinks about the moment practically every day. "I'm trying to find almost fault in myself," she says. "Like, 'What did you do, Bella? What did you do that made him feel like this?' And every time I'm like, 'Bella, stop it.' Even that thought right there is becoming part of the problem. Don't even think that thought. It does drive me crazy."
Ratajkowski, who has had her fair share of skin-crawling run-ins with creeps, including an exchange with a modeling agent that pointed to a picture of her and said, "This face. This is how we know this girl gets fucked," saw the absurdly fucked up nature of Thorne's tale. “Just putting that on a 10-year-old child and making it like they made an adult man uncomfortable is insane… and then that was relayed to a casting director who was happy to relay that to your mom,” Ratajkowski remarks. “If you need a more fucked up story about Hollywood and, like, pedophilia and the sexualization of children, I don’t know if there is one.”
Photo via Getty/Victor Boyko
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