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 is getting candid about tackling fame at an early age.

The Neighbours actress, 37, opened up in a recent interview about the “trauma” she faced in her private life after rising to stardom at the age of 17 while starring as Marissa Cooper on The O.C. 

"You can go to therapy every day for the rest of your life," Barton explained to The Sunday Times. "But there's just a certain amount of trauma [from] all that I went through, particularly in my early 20s, that just doesn't go away overnight."

She admitted that one of the reasons why she thinks it was a difficult time was because she wasn’t “fully prepared for that level of fame" as it was “never” something that she “sought out.”

She noted, “I really would much rather be anonymous."

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

“I was stalked,” Barton shared. “I did go a little bit nuts at [one] point. I just felt really helpless.”

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

"Everything is just so heightened. You depend on the person so much more, you think you're that much more in love because they're your grip on some sort of normalcy," the actress said.

She recalled that one of these relationships led to one of the “most grueling experiences” of her life — when she had entered in a legal battle with her ex-boyfriend Jon Zacharias in 2017. He had tried to auction illicit videos of her online, but she ended up winning the court battle preventing him from releasing the videos.

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

She said she had also experienced negative attention online from bloggers during her early years of stardom, which also affected her. "Nothing I did was good enough," Barton told The Times. "It was the peak of cruelty about young women's bodies. It was wild.”

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

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However, she said that she believed society was 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 can see how sorry people feel for what they did to people like Britney [Spears] then,” she said. “Everyone now is like, ‘I can’t believe we did that to those poor women.’”