Keira Knightley has every right to be angry about the relentless body shaming she endured from the British press

Keira Knightley recently spoke about how her body was policed by the British media when she was a young star, and she was very clear about how much it upset her.

In an interview with The Times, she said the tabloids constantly speculated she had an eating disorder when she knew she didn’t. It was very, very rough on her. “In that classic trauma way I don’t remember it,” she told the paper. “There’s been a complete delete, and then some things will come up and I’ll suddenly have a very bodily memory of it because, ultimately, it’s public shaming, isn’t it?”

She continued, “It’s obviously part of my psyche, given how young I was when it happened. I’ve been made around it.” Knightley was only 17 when she filmed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the movie that made her a star. She had to deal with all the worst parts of being in the spotlight before she was even old enough to drink.

Front and center among Knightley’s bullies was the Daily Mail (it’s always the bloody Daily Mail). These are the kind of people who believe sandwich fillings are woke (yes, really), and they’ve never once resisted the opportunity to shame an actress for her body. In the ’00s they dared to imply there was a link between Knightley and a teen’s death from anorexia, running the headline, “If pictures like this one of Keira carried a health warning, my darling daughter might have lived.” Knightley rightly sued the publication and won £3,000, which she donated to an eating disorder charity.

The hypocrisy is still infuriating, even after all these years. If anyone in the public sphere was contributing to eating disorders, it was the Daily Mail themselves, and the general culture of tabloids at that time. The Mail was especially cruel to Kate Winslet, another British actress thrust into stardom at a young age. In 2007 they published an article cruelly called “Should Kate Winslet win an Oscar for the world’s most irritating actress?”, published nude shots of her alongside it, and alleged that she’d been lying about exercising. This also ended with the Mail paying damages, this time £25,000. Winslet would later remember the body-shaming she got from the media as “borderline abusive.”

So while Knightley was shamed for being “too thin”, Winslet was shamed for being “too fat.” Both women were healthy, there was no problem … but the tabloid media relentlessly punished them for simply existing anyway.

I grew up in the ’00s, just as Knightley was making it big, and I remember the media’s preoccupation with weight being even worse than it is now. I remember being baffled by how girls such as myself were told of the dangers of eating disorders, yet body-shaming (before there was even a name for it) appeared on the cover of every gossip magazine, with headlines mocking actresses who’d dared to put on a tiny bit of weight.

And that wasn’t all. If an actress actually did struggle with an eating disorder, the media would treat it like it was something to be ashamed of or a target for yet more mockery. Knightley remembers this too, and said in her Times interview, “I remember viscerally one of the Olsen twins had anorexia, and she went into a clinic. I remember being asked about it on a press tour, like it was a joke. She was meant to be shamed for seeking help for anorexia,” she said. The woman in question was Mary-Kate Olsen, yet another star who grew up under the unforgiving glare of the spotlight. She was another high-profile person who suffered. Very few young women came out of that era without some serious hang-ups about weight. It was really, really bad.

Unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail’s body policing is still in full swing. A recent article about Ariana Grande is all about the speculation she has an eating disorder, even though she’s come out and told people to stop commenting on her body and health. Some cycles will sadly never end.