In the wake of the Britney Spears documentary, many in the media are reckoning with how flippantly they treated the singer throughout her various personal crises, and the same reckoning is also due for her contemporary Lindsay Lohan.
Throughout the same era that the tabloids were reporting on Spears’ every move, there were also ravenous, minute-by-minute updates on Lindsay Lohan and her struggles with sobriety and the law as well as her fractured family life.
A recently-resurfaced interview with Lohan and David Letterman illustrates just how the media treated her in those days. The clip is from 2013, and though she was ostensibly appearing to promote Scary Movie 5, things quickly wet off the rails.
The host kicked things off by reading out a series of jokes he’d made about Lohan’s various misadventures. Though she laughed this off, things took an awkward turn when he started quizzing her about her substance abuse problems.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in rehab right now?” he asked a visibly uncomfortable Lindsay Lohan. “What exactly are they going to be rehabbing?”
She remarked about how none of this had come up in their pre-interview, but took it in stride, offering up a few platitudes about being happy and healthy, but Dave continued to push.
“Do you have addiction problems? Is it alcohol? Do you drink too much?” he asked. The below clip condenses the interview down to its most awkward moments.
This Lindsay Lohan interview on David Letterman in 2013 is horrifying to watch now. pic.twitter.com/lZxKVvbVB0
— 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐲𝐥𝐨𝐫 (@treytylor) February 13, 2021
The eight-year-old clip has gone viral on TikTok in the wake of the Britney documentary, and the general feeling is that the host was out of line in the way he ambushed Lohan.
“She handled this absurdity with class,” said one. “It’s actually not funny that he’s making fun of someone who has a substance abuse problem,” said another. “The network should not have been okay with this.”
You can see the entire clip below:
