Brooke Shields calls infamous Barbara Walters interview ‘practically criminal’

Brooke Shields is opening up about her past experiences as a young woman growing up in the spotlight. The actor and spokesperson recently sat down with Dax Shepard for an episode of his Armchair Expert podcast, in which the two chatted about the over-sexualization of teens by the media, and Shields' personal insights on a gross interview with Barbara Walters back in 1981.

At the time, Shields was 15 years old and had just released a controversial campaign with Calvin Klein jeans. In the ad, Shields modelled the jeans and looked into the camera saying, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

Although Shields has since explained that she wasn’t aware of the sexual innuendo at the time and had been asked to say several lines during the shoot, the public immediately jumped all over it. The backlash was enough to convince Shields and her mom to do a string of interviews, including the one with Walters.

During the interview, Walters specifically asked Shields about her height and measurements, and then asked the teen to stand beside her so that the audience could see how tall she was. She also prodded the mother-daughter duo about their relationship and asked several other intimate questions about Shields' sexual history.

“That Barbara Walters interview is maddening,” Shepard said on the podcast, looking back. “It's practically criminal,” Shields agreed. “It is not journalism.”

She talked about the general tone of the interviews she did at the time, saying no one really cared about the truth of the ad -- that she didn't know what the Calvin Klein innuendo meant when she recorded it.

"The [interviewers] never wanted my answer. They just wanted their point of view," she said. "They were mad at themselves for not figuring it out and then taking it out on me."

Shields says she's been looking back at her old interviews for an unspecified project she can't talk about yet and noted how disturbed she is at some of the exchanges, particularly when it comes to her mother, who she admits, was abusing alcohol at the time. 

"I watch this little sweet girl stick up for her mom in this way," Shields continued. "There was one [interviewer] that said [to my mother] -- whatever, it's negative. Negative, negative, negative -- 'You're this blotchy-faced sloppy drunk.' And they'll do it in this way where they say, 'It's been written that...' so it leaves them out of it. So I interrupt him and I say, 'Well, excuse me, but with regards to that, my mom has allergies.'" 

"I'm just like, 'Oh! Oh, oh, oh, baby girl!'" she said. "And then as I get a little bit older, you watch me say, 'No, that's not actually the way it was,' and then they say, 'Yeah, but come on, really?' and I say, 'Okay, let me say it this way: no, that's not how it was.'"

"And then finally, I say at one point, 'Look, I don't really think you want to know my answer. Okay, this is my truth and I don't know how else you need me to say this."

This past October, Shields also opened up about the now-infamous campaign in an interview with Vogue, calling the controversy ridiculous and unexpected.

“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.' And paparazzi and people screaming at me and screaming at my mother, 'How could you?' It just struck me as so ridiculous,” Shields told the publication.

“I didn’t think it was about underwear or sexual in nature. I was naïve. 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,” Shields continued. “The controversy backfired. 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.”

As we’ve recently seen with projects like Framing Britney Spears or the recently resurfaced David Letterman interview with Lindsay Lohan from 2013, that tone was definitely problematic. 

Shepard, who has two girls of his own, has discussed the subject on his podcast before. Back at the end of 2020, he welcomed Natalie Portman onto the show, where she too opened up about the damage being sexualized at a young age caused her.

“Being sexualized as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality, because it made me afraid,” Portman said at the time. “But at that age, you do have your own sexuality, and you do have your own desire, and you do want to explore things, and you do want to be open. But you don't feel safe, necessarily, when there's, like, older men that are interested, and you're like, 'No, no, no, no,'” she continued.

"When I was in my teens I was like, 'I don't wanna have any love scenes or make-out scenes.' I would start choosing parts that were less sexy because it made me worried about the way I was perceived and how safe I felt.”

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[video_embed id='2333939']BEFORE YOU GO: Andrew Garfield was obsessed with 'Hamilton' before Lin-Manuel Miranda asked him to star in 'tick, tick... Boom!' [/video_embed]