Reese Witherspoon Talked About How She and Britney Spears Were Treated Differently

With Britney Spears's court appearance on the horizon and her Hulu documentary in everyone's collective memories, Reese Witherspoon reflected on coming of age in Hollywood alongside the singer. In a new interview with Time, Witherspoon says that it was "shitty" that the media decided that she and a few of her colleagues were labeled as "good" and that other stars, like Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton were considered "bad" girls.

"What if the media had decided I was something else?" Witherspoon said. "I would be in a totally different position. I want to say it's my decisions or the career choices I made, but it felt very arbitrary. And kind of shitty."

Like Spears, Witherspoon said that she was hounded by the paparazzi, even after she had children. She said that photographers followed her to church, to her kids' soccer practices, and even parked an RV outside of her California home.

"My children will tell you stories about being in preschool and people climbing on the roofs of our cars," she added. She also explained that she had issues with the photographers and had screamed at them, but the media brushed the incidents off. For Spears, Witherspoon says, the reputation stuck.

Hilton had similar memories of the time, saying that she saw the treatment as "cruel and mean." She discussed it in a February episode of her podcast, This Is Paris.

"I've been reading all of these articles coming out where they were just saying, like, Britney, Paris and just, like, a group of us were just were treated so unfairly and just, like, this really misogynistic view and just being very cruel and mean and making fun of us," she said. "It made me think a lot this week, reading all these new things that are coming out after the Britney film."