The news is buzzing with updates about Lindsay Lohan’s jail time. Although many people seem fascinated with Lindsay’s legal woes (only celebrity court cases that will get viewers are actually taped. Eg. OJ Simpson), it just makes me sad.
I was truly a Disney-kid. I cried when I couldn’t dress up as Princess Jasmine for Halloween, I still know every line of every song from The Lion King, and back in the days of Zoog Disney, I used to tune in every month to watch the Disney Channel’s latest made-for-TV movie. Watching Lindsay Lohan, an actress who first entered my generation’s collective heart when she played twin sisters, Hallie Parker and Annie James in Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, struggle like this is upsetting.
Lindsay Lohan is a textbook example of a child star gone astray under the pressure of too much fame. After appearing in a few Disney channel movies in her tween years, she played burst back on to the scene starring as Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter in Freaky Friday. It was a cute, family-friendly movie, and people like Lindsay, but it was nothing too extreme. Then came Mean Girls.
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Suddenly there was this beautiful and busty version of Lindsay everywhere. She’d grown up a lot since Freaky Friday, and naturally, people were a little obsessed with her. Actually, more than a little. After Mean Girls did well in the box office, Lohan became a permanent fixture in the realm of celebrity gossip. There was always news about whoever she was dating, what clubs she went to (despite the fact that she was underage at the time), where she shopped – the public would gobble up any kind of Lindsay news wholeheartedly. Women and girls loved her, and men counted down the days until they could lust over her openly without feeling guilty.
It had to have been hard. Lindsay wasn’t even 18 years old when she was hospitalized because due to stress and getting into car accidents while trying to outrun the paparazzi. From there, it just got rougher. The star appeared in more widely released films, but rumors of drug and alcohol use began to circulate, including that embarrassing interview with Vanity Fair, when she admitted using hardcore drugs, a statement she promptly denied making.
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From there it was just an endless cycle of bad news. Pictures of a drunken Lindsay surfaced, as did a letter in which a studio executive reprimand
