Bette Midler Says She Should Have SUED 13-Year-Old Lindsay Lohan For Screwing Her Over!

Damn, Bette Midler is one bad beach you really don’t wanna mess with! Even if you’re a kid!

The Hocus Pocus star was on David Duchovny‘s new Fail Better podcast this week and brought up an ancient beef she had with Lindsay Lohan. The child star. As in when she still was a child star.

OK, so Bette had a sitcom on CBS in the year 2000. You’d be forgiven for forgetting as Bette only lasted 18 episodes, not even a full season order back then, before getting canceled. And she at least partially blames 13-year-old Lindsay! She explained:

“Lindsay Lohan was cast as my daughter in the pilot. Well, after the pilot, Lindsay Lohan decided she didn’t want to do it, or she had other fish to fry. So Lindsay Lohan left the building. And I said, ‘Well, now what do you do?'”

Ouch! That’s a big blow to a TV show! We’re talking about LiLo fresh off The Parent Trap. She was already a name, and it almost certainly would have given the show a lot more juice! Heck, it may even have been thought of as a two-hander, Bette Midler trading quips with little Lindsay Lohan. Damn, we’d pay to see that NOW!

David naturally wondered why LiLo didn’t have a contract that kept her from flaking on the show. The podcast is all about failure, and Bette said her personal failure in this case was in “asserting” herself. And frankly, she probably should have sued a little girl!

“If I had been in my right mind, or if I had known that my duties were to stand up and say, ‘This absolutely will not do, I’m gonna sue,’ then I would have done that.”

Right, it isn’t just being about vindictive. She was an exec producer on the show, and someone was endangering the jobs of the entire cast and crew. So it was her responsibility to hold the child star to her contract, even if that meant getting litigious. It’s been known to happen. Stars have been sued in order to keep them on projects they decided they didn’t want to do. Whoopi Goldberg was infamously sued to force her to do the ’90s dinosaur detective movie Theodore Rex she’d agreed to. (TBH, Whoopi had the second sight IRL on realizing that one was going to be a horrible flop…)

In hindsight, Bette says the show fell apart for more reasons though, and they all had to do with her inability to assert her position. She says she “couldn’t make myself clear” and had a hard time communicating with the showrunner and writers about changes that needed to be made. But it all started with losing Lindsay.

Hilariously though, Bette says the end came after she lit the match:

“I was booked on David Letterman and he said to me, ‘How do you like it so far?’ I said, ‘It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life. It’s like being a dung beetle and pushing a pile of s**t up a hill every day.’ And of course, the next day I was fired.”

Ha! Having LiLo in her corner wouldn’t have saved her from that one! Heck, maybe Lindsay was right to bail! After all, if the show had been a hit, she never would have had the time to make Freaky Friday in 2003 and Mean Girls in 2004. So you know what? Everything worked out for the best…

Inneresting P.S… Lindsay must have heard about this week’s episode in advance. Because last week she posted an IG throwback pic with Bette out of nowhere. Huh.