The O.C.’s Mischa Barton Says She Could ‘Go to Therapy Every Day’ of Her Life After the ‘Trauma’ of Teen Fame

Mischa Barton gets candid about being famous at an early age.

The Neighbors actress, 37, opened up in a recent interview about the “trauma” she faced in her personal life after becoming a star at the age of 17 while playing Marissa Cooper on OC

“You can go to therapy every day for the rest of your life,” Barton explained The Sunday Times. “But there is only a certain amount of trauma [from] everything I’ve been through, especially in my early 20s, doesn’t happen overnight.”

She admitted that one of the reasons she thinks it was a difficult time is because she wasn’t “completely ready for that level of fame” because it was “never” something she was “looking for”.

She noted, “I’d rather be anonymous.”

Mischa Barton and Benjamin McKenzie in ‘The OC’ circa 2003.

Warner Bros TV/Kobal/Shutterstock

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Along with the fame, Barton said she was constantly hounded by the paparazzi and described it all as “very Hunger Games.” She said the paparazzi would “do all kinds of crazy things to me,” which included following her car, trying to climb over the walls of her house and paying restaurants for information.

“I was stalked,” Barton said. “I went a little crazy [one] full stop. I just felt really helpless.”

She said the paparazzi had also made other aspects of her personal life more challenging, including dating, and said the attention was “not healthy” for romantic relationships.

“Everything is so emphasized. You depend a lot more on the person, you think you are so much more in love because they are your grip on some kind of normality,” said the actress.

Mischa Barton photographed on the red carpet. Paul Archuleta/Getty Mischa Barton joins ‘OC’ co-stars Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke to revisit Marissa’s death: ‘So hard’

She recalled that one of those relationships led to one of the “most exhausting experiences” of her life – when she got into a legal battle with her ex-boyfriend Jon Zacharias in 2017. He tried to sell her illicit videos online, but she ended up getting a court order battle by preventing him from posting videos.

“It’s shocking to realize that there is this kind of darkness in the world,” she says. “And you wonder what you did to attract it.”

She said she also experienced negative attention from online bloggers during her early years of fame, which also affected her. “Nothing I did was good enough,” Barton said Time. “It was the height of cruelty to young women’s bodies. It was wild.”

“People feel they have a right to you, your body and your image. It’s a strange feeling. It’s strange,” she added.

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However, she said she believes society is in a better place when it comes to people being open about struggling with their mental health and talking about having “had depression or anxiety”.

“You see how sorry people are for what they did to people like Britney [Spears] then,” she said. “Everybody is now saying, ‘I can’t believe we did that to those poor women.'”

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Source: HIS Education