As many have come to find out in recent years, being a child star isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Hollywood has many trappings even adult talent can fall into, so having to traverse this treacherous environment as a pre-teen or younger isn’t the easiest of feats. Add to this the online hate that’s permeated the entertainment industry in recent decades and you can imagine what a miracle it is that rising 21 year-old star Jenna Ortega has made it through relatively unscathed. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Ortega opened up about inappropriate DMs sent to her when she was a 12 year-old actress on “Jane the Virgin,” as well as pornographic AI-generated images of herself.
“I hate A.I. I mean, here’s the thing: A.I. could be used for incredible things. I think I saw something the other day where they were saying that artificial intelligence was able to detect breast cancer four years before it progressed. That’s beautiful. Let’s keep it to that,” Ortega said. “Did I like being 14 and making a Twitter account because I was supposed to and seeing dirty edited content of me as a child? No. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”
When asked to clarify further, Ortega said, “One of the first — actually the first D.M. that I ever opened myself when I was 12 was an unsolicited photo of a man’s genitals, and that was just the beginning of what was to come.”
The “Wednesday” star went on to explain that she used to have a Twitter account because it was expected of her as a way of building her “image,” but that the influx of “absurd images” skyrocketed with her rising stardom, forcing her to delete it.
“It was disgusting, and it made me feel bad. It made me feel uncomfortable,” said Ortega to The New York Times. “Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. So one day I just woke up, and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I dropped it.”
Ortega can next been seen in the upcoming legacy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” directed by “Wednesday” helmer Tim Burton and co-starring original cast members Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara, as well as newcomers Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe, and Monica Bellucci.
