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Brooke Shields SLAMS Barbara Walters For 'Criminal' Interview When She Was Just 15

Brooke Shields Calls Barbara Walters ‘Criminal’ For Salacious Calvin Klein Interview!

Brooke Shields just called out Barbara Walters BIG TIME!

During Monday’s episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, the former supermodel opened up about a particularly obscene interview she did with Walters in 1981, in which the TV maven asked the then-15-year-old a series of invasive and inappropriate questions!

Related: Brooke Shields Details Her Fight To Walk Again After Freak Accident!

The controversial chat in question was filmed after Shields made headlines for an eyebrow-raising Calvin Klein campaign which saw the young teen posing in tight jeans alongside the provocative slogan:

“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

You can check out her commercials — the one mentioned starting at (1:13) — here:

Shortly after those began airing, Shields and her mother Teri sat down with the veteran journalist for what was supposed to be just a casual interview but turned into an apparent interrogation about The Blue Lagoon star’s personal life. In the clip (below), Barbara first asksedBrooke:

“What are your measurements?”

Visibly uncomfortable by that question, Brooke hesitantly gives her height and weight. But then Walters makes her stand up to prove how tall she is! The Today alum then muses to Teri:

“Very hard when you get a little kid this size. It’s hard to keep her down to size, isn’t it?”

Uhhhh, WTF!!

The View lead then turned her attention on the mother-daughter relationship, wondering:

“Would you be a mother like your mother?”

She also targeted Teri’s decision to let Brooke become a child star, arguing:

“What about people who say, ‘She had no childhood’?”

Shields defended her momma throughout the entire thing, arguing back that, despite what people say, she was still living out her adolescence and wouldn’t want it any other way. To which the now-92-year-old interviewer asked:

“Do you have any secrets from your mother?”

Watch Brooke navigate the frustrating full interview (below).

 

Reflecting on the sit-down, Brooke told Dax Shepard on his podcast Monday:

“It’s practically criminal. It’s not journalism.”

Dax couldn’t have agreed more, calling Walters’ interview tactics “maddening.”

Related: Star Jones Addresses Claims Barbara Walters & Joy Behar Sabotaged Her Career

But rather than harp on one instance, Shields used the unfiltered moment to call out all the interviews she did after the Calvin Klein commercial, sharing:

“The [interviewers] never wanted my answer. They just wanted their point of view.”

The whole thing was also made worse because the then-teen claimed she was “naive” to the risqué nature of the slogan. In October, the mother of two opened up about the ordeal to Vogue, saying:

“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.”

TBH, while some of the jean commercials in the campaign were a bit salacious, we can see how the 15-year-old wouldn’t have picked up on the double meaning of the controversial underwear innuendo since the video it appeared alongside was hardly noteworthy otherwise. The now-56-year-old actress concluded:

“I think the assumption is that I was much more savvy than I ever really was.”

Interestingly, Shields and Walters have maintained a professional relationship since that 1981 chat. They’ve often been spotted together at social events looking like buddies.

That said, the television personality has faced her fair share of controversy as of late, specifically when Ricky Martin blasted Walters for similarly invasive questions during a 2000 interview in which he claims she was trying to get him to come out publicly before he was ready. So awful that both these stars suffered so much trauma from one sit-down! SMH. Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments (below).

[Image via MEGA/WENN/Andres Otero]

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Dec 07, 2021 10:41am PDT