(Image: Pinterest)
While promoting her new Netflix series "Black Doves," Keira Knightley has been opening up to the media about the bullying and public body shaming she endured after rising to fame with the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Knightley reflected on the cruelty of having her privacy stripped away as a teenager, but also acknowledged that the intense exposure from that period laid the foundation for her career. "Without that period, I wouldn't have the financial stability or the career that I have now," she said. "Those five years, from 17 to 21, were a level of success I’ll never have again, and it completely set up my life. But was there a cost? Yes, there was a huge cost."
(Image: Los Angeles Times)
Knightley was shocked by the public's attitude toward her at the time. "I felt that attitude was not OK, and you had a lot of people saying, 'Well, you asked for it,' which is that gaslighting thing," she explained, calling it "the language of a rapist. 'You deserve it.' It was a very violent, misogynistic social atmosphere."
Knightley continued, "It was very clear that I was meant to want men to follow me. And whether the motivation for following me was a mental illness, or whether the motivation was that people were trying to make money out of it — it felt the same. It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye."
Knightley concluded, "As I see a new generation of young women and teenage girls being hurt, the landscape has been completely changed by social media. But ultimately, that’s the nature of fame — it is public shaming. And a lot of teenage girls don’t survive it."
via： Los Angeles Times