The sexist, misogynistic treatment of women in the media is still a subject that is showing no signs of wearing down, particularly when it comes to the resurfacing of 90s content. We saw it on the Framing Britney Spears documentary and during countless interview clips from famous TV chat shows. Who can forget in 2013, when David Letterman brazenly asked Lindsay Lohen about her experience of rehab and addiction, digging deeper and deeper while she was clearly protesting. "We didn't discuss this in the pre-interview," she responds and yet he continued to pry, making jokes about her struggles with addiction. It makes for awkward viewing, and so it should. It reminds us just how bad things really were.
The star is celebrating her 37th (!) birthday today.
The latest to pop up? An interview from The David Letterman Show again (according to People, the show had no female writers and it’s kind of obvious). This time it’s a 1998 interview with Jennifer Aniston and it’s making fans seriously uncomfortable. Aniston was on the show to promote her film, The Object of My Affection and the star was telling Letterman about running into fans in her gym’s steam room and then Letterman decided to do something seriously creepy.
He moved his chair behind Aniston and told her: “Forgive me if this is rude, I just want to try one thing," he says. Aniston seemed apprehensive about what as going to happen next. Letterman then placed a tendril of her hair into his mouth, YES REALLY. Sucking it before pulling away. She is sat there wondering what the heck was going on and jumped as he moved in closer. “What are you doing??” she asked, laughing behind gritted teeth. He then rolled his chair back and handed her a tissue to dry her hair of his saliva. ‘I’m sorry” he said, “Something to do with the steam room.”
Oh wait, he’s blaming her - course, she was the one who brought up the steam room incident.
Naturally, fans coming across the clip for the first time were just as angry.
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One wrote: “Can't get over how creepy and disturbing this clip of Jennifer Aniston on Letterman is.”
Another added: “These Letterman clips have been making the rounds online - and they are disturbing to say the least. How was this even acceptable baffles the mind and conscience.”
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One Twitter user posted: “It baffles me too.This is not okay, never was okay and I hate how men have gotten away with it.”
Back in 2009, Nell Scovell, who was only the second female writer ever hired for Late Night with David Letterman, wrote a scathing Vanity Fair essay about Letterman, in which she said the show was a “hostile work environment” for women when she worked there. In 2019 she wrote a follow up, revealing that she had since a meeting with Letterman in which he apologised for his past actions and apologised for the lack of female writers on show.
He said: “I don’t know how it got sidetracked. It just did. It was sloppiness. Inertia. I see it differently now and if I were to start a show today, holy God, I’m certain there’d be mistakes, but not the mistakes that were just so gosh-dang obvious.”
We’d like to think that we’ll never see a stint like this again but we can imagine we will, at some point and in some capacity, on one platform or another. It was wrong in 1998 and it’s wrong now. If anything, the more we share this content, the harder it will be to forget it. And that’s exactly what we need.
