Brooke Shields looked back on her now-infamous Calvin Klein jeans advertisement from 1980, which drew criticism at the time for its alleged sexual implications.

According to Brooke Shields, her interview with Barbara Walters when she was a teenager was “practically criminal.”

The 56-year-old actress is criticizing the treatment she received from the media, especially when it came to sitting down with journalists and talk show hosts, four decades after she appeared in the iconic Calvin Klein commercials and advertisements.

The actor discussed a “maddening” interview Barbara Walters had with the young supermodel during a conversation with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman for their Armchair Expert podcast.

On the program from December 6, she commented, “It’s practically criminal.”
“It is not journalism.” While the two did not specify when the interview took place, a clip online of one sit-down between Brooke and Barbara shows the journalist asking for the star’s measurements and posing the questions, “Would you be a mother like your mother?” and “But what about the people who say she had no childhood—and accuse you [points to mom Teri Shields]. You took away her childhood.”

In response to the Calvin Klein advertisement, Shields said that the interviewers she talked with “never wanted my answer; they just wanted their point of view.”

Shields concurred and said: “It’s practically criminal. It’s not journalism.”

The ad campaign in which a teen Shields asked “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” catapulted her modeling career and stirred controversy.

“I was naive, I didn’t think anything of it,” Shields remembered. “I didn’t think it had to do with underwear. I didn’t think it was sexual in nature. I’d say that about my sister, nobody could come between me and my sister.”

“If they had intended on the double entendre, they didn’t explain it to me,” she continued. “It didn’t faze me. It didn’t sort of come into my psyche as it being anything overtly sexual, sexualized in any way.”

In October, Shields spoke about the public backlash she received in the wake of the campaign, calling it “ridiculous.”

“I was away when they all came out, and then started hearing, ‘Oh, the commercials have been banned here, and Canada won’t play them.’ And paparazzi and people screaming at me and screaming at my mother, ‘How could you?’ It just struck me as so ridiculous, the whole thing,” Shields remembered.

“They take the one commercial, which is a rhetorical question…I was naive, I didn’t think anything of it,” Brooke recently said in an October Vogue video. “I didn’t think it had to do with underwear. I didn’t think it was sexual in nature. I would say it about my sister, ‘Nobody can come between me and my sister.'”

She went on, “What was shocking to me was to be berated by, ‘Oh, you knew this was happening. This is what you thought. You were thinking these thoughts.’ I was a kid and where I was—I was naive. I was a very protected, sequestered young woman in a bubble that my mom was just paroling the outside of.”

Despite the criticism, the ad was a huge success and helped Calvin Klein become known to a whole new audience.

“I feel like the controversy backfired. The campaign was extremely successful. And then, I think the underwear sort of overtook the jeans, and they understood what sells and how to push the envelope. There’s an appeal to it that is so undeniable, and they tapped right into it. They knew exactly what they were doing, and I think it did set the tone for decades.”