Keira Knightley Says She Was Shamed About Her Body
While we are listening and learning about the way we treated female celebrities in the early aughts, Keira Knightley has a few things to say. In a new interview with The Sunday Times, she reflected on the public obsession over her weight in the early years of her career when she was a teenager.
“I knew I was eating,” Knightley told The Times of the years when tabloids claimed she was suffering from anorexia. “In that classic trauma way, I don’t remember it,” she said of the public scrutiny around her body. “There’s been a complete delete.” She described the rampant speculation about her eating habits as “public shaming,” adding that the experience is now “obviously part of my psyche, given how young I was when it happened.”
Knightley, who revealed in 2018 that she’d had a “mental breakdown” at 22 after struggling to adjust to her sudden fame and was diagnosed with PTSD, also recalled being asked a question about Mary-Kate Olsen shortly after the then-18-year-old star entered treatment for anorexia nervosa in 2004. “I remember viscerally … being asked about it on a press tour, like it was a joke,” Knightley said of Olsen’s condition. “She was meant to be shamed for seeking help for anorexia. That made me really emotional.”
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