Actress and model Brooke Shields, now 56, said recently that her famous interview with Barbara Walters, which took place in the 1980s when Shields was just a 15-year-old girl, was “practically criminal.”
What are the details?
During an interview with Dax Shepard on his “Armchair Expert” podcast, Shields recalled a time during the early ’80s when she was particularly uncomfortable during an interview with a woman who was supposed to be an ally.
The 1981 interview took place amid the wildly popular Calvin Klein jeans ad for which Shields became a modeling world staple.
The ad featured a teen Shields asking, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
“I was very naive,” Shields said of the sexually charged, double-entendre commercial during an October Vogue interview. “I didn’t think it had to do with underwear. I didn’t think it was sexual in nature. I’d say that about my sister, nobody could come between me and my sister. … If they had intended on the double-entendre, they didn’t explain it to me. It didn’t faze me. It didn’t sort of come into my psyche as it being anything overtly sexual, sexualized in anyway.”
The televised interview with Walters, however, was a horse of a different color.
During the interview, Walters asked myriad intimate questions about fresh-faced, soft-spoken Shields’ body and sexual history, even though she was just 15 years old at the time.
Shields told Shepard that some of the more personally invasive questions included “What are your measurements?” and “Do you have any secrets from your mother?”
“It’s practically criminal,” she said of Walters’ conduct. “It’s not journalism.”
Shepard agreed, calling it “maddening.”
He added that the 1980s media at the time created “competing narratives” about Shields and said that much of the media said that the teen was a “sexual tigress” with “overtly sexual” tendencies, but other media outlets said that the “naive” teen was “being taken advantage of.”
Shields agreed and said that those insisting that she was naive were correct.
She added, “They were mad at themselves for not figuring it out and taking it out on me.”