As Britney Spears fires back at her mom, more child stars who felt betrayed by their parents emerge

On the surface, Britney Spears spent decades living out a fantasy, achieving global fame at the tender age of 11, before going on to become one of the most famous faces in the world – and all with the support of her seemingly picture-perfect family behind her. 

Even as the now-40-year-old chart-topper was ascending to worldwide stardom, her mom Lynne and father Jamie were there by her side, smiling happily in photos as they flanked their famous daughter. 

But, as it turns out, when the cameras stopped snapping, and the studio lights went down, Britney’s family life was far more dark and complicated… the extent of which is still being laid bare by the popstar in a series of furious public rants about her parents and their behavior over the years.  

To the world, it seemed as though the chart-topper was living out something of a fairytale – having left behind her very humble beginnings to achieve the kind of excessive fame and wealth that most people can only dream of. But away from the spotlight, Britney claims she was being ‘abused’ by her ‘controlling’ father Jamie, now 70, who was struggling with his own alcohol addiction issues. 

Back then, many might have seen Jamie’s so-called ‘controlling’ tendencies as a father who was simply trying to support and aid his daughter’s dreams of stardom. Now, however, that behavior seems much more sinister – at least according to Britney. 

While on the surface, Britney’s story seemed like something out of a fairytale, inspiring millions of youngsters across the globe to reach for the stars, behind the scenes, the singer’s incredibly difficult family life couldn’t have been further from the glossy, picture-perfect image she projected to the world. 

Even as Britney herself began to publicly struggle with the increasing stress of life in the spotlight, the truth about her complex and, at times, bitter family dynamic wasn’t truly understood.

It was only when the singer laid bare her experiences living under her father Jamie’s control for 13 years as part of an incredibly controversial conservatorship agreement that the world began to see just how toxic her family dynamic had become. 

So how did such a seemingly dream scenario turn into such a public nightmare?  

In the wake of the chart-topper’s latest public attack on her parents, FEMAIL lays bare the brutal family struggles of other childhood superstars that detailed bitter feuds with their family. 

Britney Spears blasts her mom Lynne for being the mastermind behind her conservatorship and details how their relationship spiraled into a furious public battle 

Britney got her original start on Disney channel show Mickey Mouse Club when she was just 11 years old and began her life in the limelight. 

The songstress was born to a school teacher mom and an alcoholic building contractor who raised the future pop princess in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana. 

The youngster originally auditioned for the show when she was eight years old but was turned away because she was too young. However, just three years later in 1993, the star became one of the members of the popular Disney show. 

Despite the star’s appearance in the joyful TV show, her childhood wasn’t as bright. 

The Mirror reported that Jamie’s brother Willie told the outlet Jamie would often get drunk and argue with Lynne, 67, and that Jamie once even tried to ‘drive off with Britney’ after an argument. 

In her latest rant, which was posted to YouTube over the weekend and then made private, Britney aired further bombshells about her childhood, claiming that her father Jamie was abusive to both her and her brother, Bryan. 

‘My brother was a football player. And my dad was really, really hard on him when he was younger, really abusive,’ she alleged. 

Following the removal of Jamie as her conservator, Lynne made a public statement claiming to support her daughter in her decision. 

She said: ‘It is clear to me that James P. Spears is incapable of putting my daughter’s interests ahead of his own on both a professional and a personal level. 

But Jamie wasn’t done yet and hit back, accusing Lynne of being an absent mother and added: ‘In stark contrast, it appears that Lynne is the one who is incapable of putting her daughter’s interests ahead of her own.’    

Britney would later accuse her mother of ‘secretly’ ruining her life and being the real mastermind behind her conservatorship. 

‘My dad may have started the conservatorship 13 years ago … but what people don’t know is that my mom is the one who gave him the idea,’ Britney said, adding that Jamie was ‘not smart enough’ to come up with the idea.

She continued: ‘She secretly ruined my life … and yes I will call her and [Britney’s former manager] Lou Taylor out on it … so take your whole ‘I have NO IDEA what’s going on’ attitude and go f*** yourself!!!!’

More recently in a post published in April of this year, Britney alleged that her mother ‘thrived on drama’ and that she would argue with a ‘drunk’ Jamie ‘every night of my life.’

And when Britney posted a bombshell since deleted audio clip on YouTube, confirming her mother was indeed the mastermind behind the conservatorship, Lynne responded.  

‘Britney, your whole life I have tried my best to support your dreams and wishes! 

‘And also, I have tried my best to help you out of hardships! I have never and will never turn my back on you!

‘Your rejections to the countless times I have flown out and calls make me feel hopeless! I have tried everything,’ Lynne wrote on Instagram Sunday alongside an old black-and-white photo of her and the singer. 

She then concluded the public post by saying, ‘I love you so much, but this talk is for you and me only, eye to eye, in private.’ 

In the clip, Britney revealed she felt ‘more angry’ with her mother in regards to the conservatorship.  

‘I heard when reporters would call her [Lynne] at the time and ask questions of what was going on, she would innocently hide in the house and she wouldn’t speak up,’ the singer alleged in the now-deleted 22-minute audio clip that she uploaded to YouTube.

‘It was always, like, ”I don’t know what to say. I just don’t want to say the wrong thing. We’re praying for her.”’

Britney added that her mother could have gotten her a lawyer in ‘literally two seconds’ if she wanted to help her.   

‘My friend helped me get one in the end, but every time I made contact with a firm, my phone was tapped and my phone would get taken away from me,’ she said in the clip. 

Britney and her mother have been feuding publicly since her daughter’s conservatorship was terminated in November 2021.

Britney ended the clip by noting the entire experience was ‘demoralizing’ and she hadn’t wanted to share her story because ‘it’s unbelievable offensive, sad, [and] abusive.’

She concluded the audio clip by questioning: ‘Honestly would anyone believe me?’ 

Jennette McCurdy’s mother Debbie McCurdy forced her to diet so she could keep booking younger roles and would give her ‘invasive’ breast and vaginal exams

 On Wednesday, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died hit the shelves and one day later, it was sold out. McCurdy’s memoir told an all-too-familiar tale of child stars who felt exploited by their parents in bravely deep detail.

McCurdy, 30, claims she endured physical, emotional and sexual abuse from her mom, Debra McCurdy, from when she first pushed her daughter to pursue acting at six years old.

When McCurdy would plead to her mom that she wanted to quit acting, her mother would emotionally manipulate her into continuing on. 

It wasn’t until she died in from cancer in 2013 that she truly felt ‘free.’ 

Since her mother wasn’t able to pursue her own dreams of stardom, she lived vicariously through her daughter who was all-too-happy to please her.]

McCurdy fought a constant battle against her own needs to please her mother. 

Her mom often critiqued her looks and forced her to diet in order to stave off puberty so she could keep booking younger roles.

McCurdy learned the art of calorie counting through her mom at just 11 years old. 

She fell victim to her to her mom’s emotional pleas to stick to her 1,000-calorie plans and daily weight checks, writing that her mom would ‘often weep and hold me really tight and say she just wants me to stay small and young.’

Eventually, this mentality caused McCurdy to develop anorexia which eventually transformed into bulimia. 

Additionally, her mom insisted on showering her well into her teenage years and giving her breast and vaginal ‘exams.’ 

‘She says she wants to make sure I don’t have any mysterious lumps or bumps because those could be cancer,’ McCurdy wrote in her memoir.  

In order to console herself during the ‘invasive’ exams, she would ‘just try and think of Disneyland.’

Her mom sent her on countless auditions, even on days when she was feeling under the weather, and after one particularly disheartening audition for CBS’s Without A Trace, she told her mom she wanted to quit acting. 

‘She bangs on the steering wheel, accidentally hitting the horn. Mascara trickles down her cheeks,’ she wrote of her mom’s unpleasant reaction, adding, ‘her hysteria frightens me and demands to be taken care of.’

‘You can’t quit! This was our chance! This was ouuuuur chaaaaance!’ Her mom screamed.

She kept acting to appease her mom and finally pleased her mom like she had been striving to when she landed the role of Sam Puckett on iCarly.

‘I jump into Mom’s arms. She squeezes me. I’m elated,’ she wrote. 

‘Everything’s going to be different now. Everything’s going to be better. Mom will finally be happy. Her dream has come true.’

While some of her mom’s extreme behaviors subsided, she was sacrificing her own happiness for that of her mother’s. 

‘Fame has put a wedge between Mom and me that I didn’t think was possible,’ she wrote. ‘She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy.

‘But now that I have it, I realize that she’s happy and I’m not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited. 

‘Sometimes I look at her and I just hate her. And then I hate myself for feeling that.’ 

After six years of therapy, McCurdy was able to recognize the abuse and understand why she felt that ‘little bit of relief’ when her mom passed.

Selena Gomez fired her mom Mandy Teefey as her manager and they stopped speaking

Selena Gomez, 30, and her mother, Mandy Teefey weren’t always at odds. Teefey was just 16 years old when she had her. Five years later, she ended up being a single mother and Gomez was a child of divorce.

That didn’t deter Gomez’s parents from helping her pursue an acting career. By the time she was 10 years old, she landed a role on Barney & Friends. 

During that time, her mom hinted that she struggled with raising the actress, saying that she couldn’t ‘love them the way they needed to be loved.’

‘I was parenting her in a way that I needed to be parented when I was younger. That wasn’t working for our relationship,’ she admitted.

She booked her next big gig in The Wizards of Waverly Place when she was 15 years old. At this point, Teefey and Selena’s stepdad, Brian Teefey, signed on as her manager.

In 2014, she decided she didn’t need her parents as her manager at 21 years old, which reportedly infuriated her mother.

A source told E! News that they even stopped speaking. 

‘It caused a huge rift in their relationship. Mandy wouldn’t even let Selena talk to her sister for a long time,’ the source shared. 

They continued: ‘Mandy and Selena’s stepdad [Brian Teefey] really did everything they could for Selena so when she fired her it took a toll on Mandy emotionally and professionally.’

At the time, the two were planning to produce 13 Reasons Why together and Teefey had a ‘really hard time’ with the process once Gomez fired her.

‘[Teefey] lost her clout as a manager after Selena left. It caused a major rift in their relationship but they eventually reconnected,’ the source disclosed. 

They ended up walking the red carpet together for 13 Reasons Why in 2017 but later that year, they found themselves at odds again. 

Teefey was not happy when Gomez rekindled her romance with ex Justin Bieber.

The two got in a fight that was so explosive that the police were called for a wellness check and Teefey was taken to a hospital. She ended up voluntarily checking herself in for treatment.

Their relationship was strained once again, as another source explained their ‘complicated’ situation to E! News. 

‘Selena has always said that the one person that means the most to her is her mom, Mandy,’ they explained. ‘But still, they’ve had a really complicated relationship and have gone through a lot of ups and downs.’ 

Not too long after, Teefey called Gomez out for her decision to collaborate with Woody Allen after he had been accused of sexual abuse. 

‘Sorry, no one can make Selena do anything she doesn’t want to,’ Teefey wrote in a since-deleted post when a fan pleaded for her to change Gomez’s mind. She shared that she had even already tried to talk her out of it.

 ‘I had a long talk with her about not working with him and it didn’t click,’ she wrote.

She added: ‘She makes all her own decisions. No matter how hard you try to advise. It falls on deaf ears.’

Fortunately, they have since rekindled their relationship and have gone through life’s recent highs and lows together. 

She was there for her mom when she got double pneumonia followed by COVID in 2021. She was rushed to the hospital and was told that if her body hadn’t kept fighting, she would’ve had just two days to live.

At the same time, the two were also collaborating on a mental health app called Wondermind. 

Both were proud to be working on a project that meant so much to them.

‘Taking care of your mental health is so important,’ Teefey said on Good Morning America in an interview alongside Gomez.

‘Something I’ve always tried to do in my career is make sure I lend my voice to places where it matters,’ Gomez told Entrepreneur. ‘And I have to give my mom credit for that because she taught me everything.’ 

Ariel Winter filed for emancipation from age 14 after her mother ‘deprived her of food’ and kept her in ‘isolation’ on top of being physically and emotionally abusive

Ariel Winter may have closer with her Modern Family than her own family at the time. She has a tense relationship with her mom caused her to seek out emancipation at 14 years old. 

During an interview with LaPalme Magazine, she said she had ‘an interesting family dynamic’ while she was growing up and that it was ‘mostly my mom and I, and we didn’t have a fantastic relationship.’

Her mother, Crystal Workman, reportedly kept her in ‘isolation.’

‘There wasn’t a lot of connection with a lot of people [during my childhood] because I wasn’t allowed to have them,’ she explained. ‘I spent the first 14 years of my life in isolation and it wasn’t great.’ 

As for why she wasn’t close with her older sister, Shanelle Gray or her father, it seemed her mother was also the force that drove them apart.

‘When I was younger, we all suffered from the negative effects of my mother. We all kind of separated a little, and everyone was trying to deal with it in their own way,’ she said.

Workman was both emotionally and physically abusive towards Winter. During her 2012 emancipation trial, her lawyer revealed that ‘the child is, apparently, slapped, hit, pushed – not so as to leave marks. Mother is smart enough not to do that.’

Her mother reportedly also brought those problems onto the set of Modern Family. 

He alleged cast members described her mom as a ‘terror on the set’ and that Winter was almost fired ‘because of the mother’s harassment and interference.’ 

It was then brought up that the cast would ‘sneak this child food because the mother deprives the child of food.’ 

Meanwhile, Workman accused Winter of filing for emancipation so she could be with her 18-year-old boyfriend at the time.

Gray was granted custody of Winter and raised her until she was 18. 

Macaulay Culkin filed for emancipation so he could access the millions of dollars that only his abusive father had access to 

Macaulay Culkin’s relationship with his father was rough from the start. 

‘My father was always, you know, abusive, but it didn’t get really, really, really bad until later on,’ he said of his early childhood in an interview with New York Magazine in 2001.

‘He beat our spirits down,’ he said of his father hitting him, his siblings and mother, adding, ‘He was a screamer, he was an intimidator.’ 

Eventually he saw his son as a path to financial success and power. His stage manager neighbor needed a kid his age for a show at her theater and that lead to booking his first movie, Rocket Gibraltar.

As he became more and more successful with films like Home Alone, he began to grow tired of working. 

‘I just remember the exact point when I was growing a little more tired – during The Good Son,’ he told the outlet. ‘I had already done one or two things that year, and I just said to Kit, “Listen, I’m really getting tired and I’m not at school as much as I’d like to be; I really need some time off.”‘

Culkin continued: ‘He said, “Yeah, sure,” and the next thing I knew I was on the next set doing the next thing, and it just kind of clicked in my brain: Ok. There’s basically nothing I can do to make this stop.’

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Even though Culkin was making him money, there relationship still wasn’t pleasant. 

‘I’m going around the country, locked in a room with a man who didn’t like me,’ he told Maron on WTF of his childhood acting career. His father would take advantage of his power to torment his son.

‘I was making God-knows-how-much money, and Kit was making me sleep on the couch, just because he could,’ Culkin said. 

‘Just to let you know who’s in charge and just to let you know if he doesn’t want you to sleep in a bed, you’re not going to sleep in a bed.’

Culkin suspects that his father was resentful towards him because his father had wanted to become a child star and had never made it. 

‘He did some stuff when he was a kid… He pretty much never made it beyond chorus,’ Culkin said in his New York Magazine interview.

‘Everything that he tried to do in his life, like, I excelled at before I was 10 years old,’ he added. 

When he had turned 14, his father had just taken off one day and he was able to walk away from acting.

He noted that his family didn’t even notice at first that their father had left but after they did, ‘all that stress in our shoulders was gone.’ 

Since his father had kept Culkin’s profits hidden from him, it wasn’t until his parents started fighting over custody that he had realized his family made $50million in his name. 

‘Basically, I had millions and millions of dollars in the bank and my mother couldn’t pay the rent because she was spending all of her money on lawyers,’ Culkin said. 

This is what lead to Culkin filing for emancipation from his parents. 

‘We were about to get evicted from our apartment. The only way I could get access to that money was to take my father’s name off it, but I didn’t want to make it messy, so I figured I’d take both their names off.’

His father never showed up for the final day of the trial but didn’t leave without a trace.

‘When he disappeared after the trial, first, he stole all my memorabilia, like my very first costume and all the things I had collected over the years,’ he shared.

All in all, Culkin was glad his father had disappeared from their lives. 

‘For now, my opinion is, the farther away he is the better when it comes to, like, everything,’ Culkin said.

His brother Kieran Culkin has expressed similar sentiments about their father in an interview with THR.

While he didn’t have the same ‘crazy, negative, awful, traumatic experiences as a child actor’ as his brother, he  acknowledged that their father ‘wasn’t a good person and, yeah, probably not a good parent.’ 

Demi Lovato didn’t have a ‘fairytale ending’ with her father who passed away in 2013

Demi Lovato chose to keep her birth father, Patrick Lovato out of her life up until he passed away from cancer in 2013.

He was abusive to Lovato’s mother, Dianna De La Garza, which De La Garza depicted in her memoir Falling with Wings: A Mother’s Story. She wrote of one instance when he slammed a door on his mother’s hand so hard that her finger broke off.

De La Garza struggled with leaving him at first, writing, ‘I thought I could change him, and I think victims of domestic abuse often feel the same way. You’re not always going to be able to change someone, no matter how much you want to.’  

She ended up finding the courage to leave when Lovato turned 18 months old and she realized how dangerous the environment was for her children. 

‘When I realized they were not safe anymore, no matter how much I loved this person and wanted things to change, I knew I had to get out,’ she wrote. 

From that point on, Lovato became estranged from her father. She attempted to forge a relationship with him in the early 2000s but ended up cutting off all contact with him again in 2007.

‘It didn’t have the fairy tale ending that he portrayed,’ she told NY Daily News of her attempt to rekindle her relationship with her father. 

She continued: ‘The last time I talked to him was two years ago. You try to have faith in somebody, even when you’re the last person that believes in him. But when somebody lets you down after you’ve been the only one there for them, and so many times, you don’t know what else to do. 

‘I had to cut off all connection. It was hurting me too much. Writing about that subject on the album will probably surprise some people.’

In 2015, two years after her father passed, Lovato wrote a song titled Father for her album Confident. In a video series about the making of the album, she broke down the difficult emotions she has around her father’s death.

‘I was very conflicted when he passed because he was abusive,’ she stated. ‘He was mean, but he wanted to be a good person, and he wanted to have his family.’

She added:  ‘He knew he wasn’t capable of raising a family, and it was because of his mental illness. To know that it wasn’t fully his fault really was saddening to me. I wanted to write about it. I wanted to process it.’ 

Justin Bieber and his mom stopped talking after he started experimenting with and getting addicted to drugs

Justin Bieber has had an on-and-off relationship with his mom, Pattie Mallette. Mallette was just 17 years old when she had him and had a rough upbringing herself, enduring childhood sexual abuse and struggled with addiction.

When Bieber was four, his father left them for about a year. When his father came back, he would raise him on weekends and Wednesdays.

His mother was insistent on having a religious upbringing, mentioning that ‘she had brought around a bunch of weird pastors.’

‘When I was 7, she wouldn’t let me listen to anything but [Pastor] Judah’s tapes falling asleep,’ Bieber told Billboard.

She also was determined for him to get discovered. She would often enter him in talent contests and post videos of him singing online trying to get him noticed. 

Eventually, he was discovered by Scooter Braun and was signed onto Island Def Jam by CEO Antonio ‘L.A.’ Reid. 

However, as Bieber shot up in fame, he ended up turning to drugs and found himself using whatever he could get his hands on. 

‘My security and stuff were coming into the room at night to check my pulse. People don’t know how serious it got, like it was legit crazy scary,’ he told NY Daily News. 

‘I was waking up in the morning and the first thing I was doing is popping pills and smoking a blunt and starting my day,’ he added.

In addition to fame, Bieber attributed his drug use to his ‘lack of security in his family and home life.’

At this point, his mom felt it was best to cut him off since she couldn’t ‘control’ him.  

‘When your kids hit a certain age your parenting style changes and it is hard letting go,’ she told People in 2013.

She continued: ‘His life was my life and now I’ve had to let him go a little bit and let him be independent. It is hard to not be able to control everything that your adult child does.’

During his Billboard interview in 2015, he said his relationship with his mom was ‘pretty nonexisting,’ sharing, ‘I was distant because I was ashamed. I never wanted my mom to be disappointed in me and I knew she was. We spent some time not talking, so it takes time to rebuild that trust.’

However, after Bieber went on his sobriety journey, he rekindled his relationship with his mom. In 2018, he wrote a Mother’s Day tribute and posted a sweet picture of the two hugging on Instagram. 

‘Please forgive me of all of my shortcomings as I forgive you of yours, past present and future!!’ she wrote in the comments section. 

‘Bless you to be all you were created to be. What an honor it’s been to know you and watch you grow as your mother. We got this. #LoveWins.’

Angelina Jolie dropped her father, Jon Voight’s last name from her name after declaring her relationship with him ‘unhealthy’

Angelina Jolie eventually found a way for her father, Jon Voight, to be a part of her life but it took decades. She first took issue with her father when he cheated on his mother which lead to her parents’ divorce.

‘She studied to be an actress but married my father and by 28 was divorced with two kids,’ Jolie said of her mother during a 2008 interview with Express. ‘She gave up her dreams.’

Her brother James, painted a darker picture, telling the outlet, ‘He put my mum through years of mental abuse.’ 

Susan Margaret, whose daughter was a childhood friend of Jolie’s also accused Voight of abuse. 

‘Jon Voight was a terrible father to her back then. He cheated on her mother,’ she stated. ‘Marcheline was broken-­hearted. She told me Jon had emotionally abused her.’

Even though she resented her father, she made her acting debut with him in the film Lookin’ to Get Out when she was just seven years old. 

Jolie’s issues with her father lead to behavioral problems growing up. The starlet has admitted that she was ‘very sexual in kindergarten’ and lost her virginity at 14. At that point, she took up self-mutilation. 

She briefly reconciled with him to film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001 but the peace didn’t last for long. 

During 2002, Voight appeared on Access Hollywood where he attributed Jolie’s ‘serious mental problems’ and resentment toward him to the divorce. 

‘It comes from their inability to let go of years of programmed anger from their mother, who understandably felt quite hurt when we divorced,’ Voight said. 

He had also been caught talking about her divorces and leaking the fact that she was adopting Maddox, nearly jeopardizing the process. 

‘I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father,’ Jolie said in response to the interview. 

‘After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child,’ she continued. 

Months later, she legally dropped the name Voight from her name. 

‘I didn’t feel that close to my father. I felt more of my mother’s daughter when I was a child. So that was one part of it,’ she said of why she changed her name on THR’s Awards Chatter podcast in 2017. 

The second part of it was I did want to have my own identity and didn’t want to walk into a room as Jon’s daughter. I wanted to see if I could get the job on my own, and not be hired for a name,’ she added. 

In 2008, she warmed up to the idea of reconnecting with her father with the help of Brad Pitt encouraging her to foster a relationship between their kids and their grandparents. 

‘I think sometimes you have to distance yourself from relationships you feel are unhealthy for you. But we have spoken,’ she said in the 2008 Mirror interview.

She added: ‘We are going to try to get to know each other and maybe try not to be this daddy and daughter, but to be there for each other as friends in the coming years.’

It seems she has found a way for her dad to be in his grandkids’ lives.

‘Through grandchildren now we’re finding a new relationship and it’s very, very nice,’ she told THR. ‘We’ve had some difficulties. Through art is a way we’ve been able to talk. It’s a common language. We don’t really talk politics well.’ 

She has also stressed the important of setting boundaries to him. 

‘He’s been very good at understanding they needed their grandfather at this time,’ she explained. ‘I had to do a therapy meeting last night and he was just around. He knows kind of the rule — don’t make them play with you.’

Wil Wheaton claims his mom ‘forced’ him into acting since she wanted to be an actress herself

Wil Wheaton revealed that he has always been resentful towards his parents, whom he claims forced him into acting.

Wheaton’s acting career started during his mom’s own journey to become an actress. His mom, Debbie Wheaton, brought him along when she was auditioning for a commercial and asked if he could read with her. They both booked the commercial and Wheaton kept getting asked back for more projects.

He alleged that she coached him into talking to her commercial agency and telling the agent, ‘I want to do what mommy does.’

‘Acting was actually something that was forced on me,’ he told Access Hollywood in May. ‘I have these very clear memories of saying over and over, “I don’t want to do this. I just want to be a kid. Let me be a kid.”‘ 

This lead to him starring in big films like Stand By Me (1986) and Toy Soldiers (1991) and TV series like Star Trek.

He kept up with acting to please his mom and win the attention of his father Richard William Wheaton, who had essentially disowned him.

‘I just learned as a child, I’m gonna be happy. If I’m gonna get attention and approval from my parents, that I think every child absolutely deserves unconditionally, I have to do what mom wants,’ he stated. ‘Maybe if I do what mom wants, for some reason, dad will love me.’ 

Speaking of his father, he said, ‘There was a time in my life where he made a choice that I wasn’t his son but Debbie’s thing.’ 

When watching back clips from Stand By Me, he said he notices ‘how sad I look,’ adding, ‘It hurts my heart to see that little boy and see how much he’s hurting.’

He also confessed that he had felt suicidal as a teenager while he was being made to pursue acting by his parents.

‘The only reason I didn’t kill myself as a teenager is that I didn’t know how,’ he admitted. ‘That’s how much pain I was in.’

He continued: ‘I thought maybe I might get my dad’s attention. And maybe it would make an impression on my mom and she would see me and not her thing.’ 

He decided to speak out to the outlet because ‘I was silenced for my entire life and I’m not gonna be silenced anymore.’ 

A spokesperson from his family spoke out about the interview, stating, ‘Wil’s entire family is shocked by these allegations. We have always been a tight-knit, close, loving family.’  

Leighton Meester was born while her mother was in jail and ended up cutting off her mom after winning a lawsuit against her

Leighton Meester was forced to grow up quickly. Her mother Constance Meester gave birth to her in a hospital while she was in prison for helping her boyfriend, Douglas Jay Meester, smuggle drugs.

Meester was then raised in a halfway house by her mother who eventually had to return to jail. She was then raised by her grandparents until her mother was released.

She and her mother moved to Florida and she grew up doing community theater there. At ten years old, she attended a modeling convention in Atlanta and got discovered. She signed with an agent and she and her mother moved to New York City, apartment-hopping in lower-income areas.

‘I worked a lot, even though I was just a kid,’ she told Marie Claire of the experience in 2012. ‘It seemed normal to me.’ 

At 14, they moved to LA to  pursue acting where Meester booked job for the sake her family’s survival. The actress even willingly skipped out on prom. 

‘I couldn’t relate to kid stuff,’ she told the outlet. ‘”Jimmy doesn’t like me!” Who cares? I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food. Those were my concerns.’

Eventually she booked the hit show Gossip Girl. 

Even though her upbringing may have been hectic, she maintained a positive attitude about it. 

‘It makes me very nonjudgmental and open-minded,’ she told Us Weekly in 2008. ‘And I think it just makes me appreciate the things that I have now.’ 

However, things went south with her mother in 2011 when Meester sued her, accusing her mother of spending the $7,500 a month she sent for her sick brother on cosmetic procedures. 

Once Meester filed the lawsuit, her mom countersued, for $3million in damages for ‘sacrificing her happiness’ to support Meester’s career and claimed Meester ‘intentionally assaulted Constance by throwing her to the ground and repeatedly hitting her with a bottle,’ in legal documents obtained by People.  

‘This whole thing’s been really tough on Leighton,’ a source told the outlet. ‘Her only concern has always been taking care of her brother.’

Meester even sought out gaining custody of her brother at the time.

 ‘Leighton is disgusted by her mother and is determined to get her brother Lex out of that situation,’ an insider told RadarOnline.com.

‘She wants Lex to leave their mom’s California home and come to live with her in New York.’

Her mom fought back by saying Meester was meeting their arrangement – alleging the actress claimed she’d send $10,000 a month in a verbal contract.

In 2012, the court ultimately ruled with Meester over her mom. She hadn’t requested any money and felt that having her mom out of her life was enough of a prize.  

Even after the lawsuit, Meester maintained a positive attitude about her childhood. 

‘My family has a crazy history. Probably the craziest I’ve heard of,’ she said during her 2012 interview with Marie Claire. ‘I look back now and I see it in a nice light.’