Brooke Shields says that an interview Barbara Walters did with her as a teen was "practically criminal."
The remarks came while discussing a Calvin Klein jeans campaign which she appeared in during the '80s with Dax Shepard during an appearance on his "Armchair Expert" podcast. In each ad, Shields would recite different lines, one of which was "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." Backlash ensued and as a result, Shields did a series of interviews including one with Walters, who asked intimate and probing questions about her sexual history. Shepard described the interview as "maddening" and Shields agreed, according to Yahoo Life.
"It's practically criminal," she said. "It's not journalism."
Shields also spoke about the campaign, and the "ridiculous" public outcry that followed, earlier this year during a Vogue interview.
"I was away when they all came out, and then started hearing, 'Oh, the commercials have been banned here, and Canada won't play them,'" Shields said of the response to the ads. "And paparazzi and people screaming at me and screaming at my mother, 'How could you?' It just struck me as so ridiculous, the whole thing."
Shields explained that she was too "naive" to think anything of the controversial line at the time.
"I think the assumption was that I was much more savvy than I ever really was. I was a virgin, and I was a virgin forever after that," she said, adding that she remained proud of the campaign, which turned out to be a massive success.
"The controversy backfired," she added. "The campaign was extremely successful, and then the underwear overtook the jeans. [Calvin Klein] understood how to push the envelope. It set the tone for decades."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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