Los Angeles: Hollywood actor-producer Reese Witherspoon said that as a young mother, she too was chased by the paparazzi, but the media had arbitrarily decided to brand her 'good' and singer Britney Spears as 'bad'.
Witherspoon got divorced from Ryan Phillippe in 2008, around the same time Spears split from Kevin Federline. They both had two young children with paparazzi camping outside their home.
"My children will tell you stories about being in preschool and people climbing on the roofs of our cars," said Witherspoon as she looked back on her early career.
The actor said that watching 'Framing Britney Spears' made her feel like one of the lucky ones because she and stars like Jennifer Garner were considered 'good', while Spears and Lindsay Lohan were branded 'bad'.
"What if the media had decided I was something else? I would be in a different position. I want to say it is my decisions or the career choices I made, but it felt very arbitrary. And kind of worse," the actor added.
'Framing Britney Spears', a 'New York Times' documentary, looks back at how the popularity of the singing star, who burst on the American music scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, led to her mistreatment in the media with paparazzi documenting minute details of her personal life. In 2007, the year she got divorced from Federline, Spears had a meltdown and shaved her head with electric clippers at a salon in LA as paparazzi photographed
her. She admitted herself to a treatment facility after that and later that year lost the custody of her sons.