'Matilda' star Mara Wilson has opened about how 50-year-old men sent her love letters when she was still a child.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, titled The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls, the former child star opened up about the current discussion around the treatment of Britney Spears as a young woman and how she could relate.
Wilson, now 32, detailed some of the disturbing things that she encountered as a child in the limelight.
She said that during this period of her life, she remembers seeing teen actors being sexualized "on the covers of lad mags or in provocative music videos" and she concluded that she never wanted this to happen to her.
Cast your mind back to the Matilda trailer:Wilson wrote: "I had already been sexualized anyway, and I hated it. I mostly acted in family movies – the remake of Miracle on 34th Street, Matilda, Mrs. Doubtfire. I never appeared in anything more revealing than a knee-length sundress. This was all intentional: My parents thought I would be safer that way. But it didn’t work."
She added: "People had been asking me, 'Do you have a boyfriend?' in interviews since I was 6. Reporters asked me who I thought the sexiest actor was and about Hugh Grant’s arrest for soliciting a prostitute.
"It was cute when 10-year-olds sent me letters saying they were in love with me. It was not when 50-year-old men did. Before I even turned 12, there were images of me on foot fetish websites and photoshopped into child pornography. Every time, I felt ashamed.
"Hollywood has resolved to tackle harassment in the industry, but I was never sexually harassed on a film set. My sexual harassment always came at the hands of the media and the public."
This comes after Wilson previously opened up about her complicated relationship with fame in her 2016 book Where Am I Now? in which she explains why she quit acting in 2000 to follow other dreams.
While Wilson has gone on to make some TV appearances in recent years such as in road City and BoJack Horseman, she is now a well-known writer with her work appearing in publications such as McSweeney's, Reductress, Cracked, and The Toast.
