
NEW YORK - Actress Lindsay Lohan has denied telling Vanity Fair that she suffered from bulimia, Teen People magazine said on Wednesday, but Vanity Fair said Lohan’s comments are all on tape.
In a Vanity Fair cover story last week the star of films such as “Mean Girls” and “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen” said she had suffered from eating disorders and admitted dabbling in drugs.
She said she was on the brink of physical and emotional collapse.
“I was making myself sick. I was sick and I had people sit me down and say, ‘You’re going to die if you don’t take care of yourself,’” Lohan, 19, told Vanity Fair.
The admission that she was fighting bulimia, which made her lose weight at an alarming rate, was an apparent U-turn from interviews last year. It was when she saw footage of herself on a “Saturday Night Live” appearance looking skeletal that Lohan became aware of how ill she really was, Vanity Fair reported.
“I saw that ‘SNL’ after I did it. My arms were disgusting. I had no arms,” she said.
But Teen People’s online edition on Wednesday said Lohan denied the claims made in the article. “The words that I gave to the writer for Vanity Fair were misused and misconstrued, and I’m appalled with the way it was done,” Teen People quoted Lohan as saying in an e-mail dated January 9.
Lohan accused the Vanity Fair reporter of “lies and changing of my words.” Lohan publicist Leslie Sloane Zelnik told Teen People the actress has never battled bulimia.
Vanity Fair defended its reporter and the story by saying: “Evgenia Peretz is one of our most reliable reporters. Every word Lindsay Lohan told her is on tape. Vanity Fair stands by the story.”
A spokeswoman told Reuters that when Peretz specifically asked Lohan whether making herself sick meant throwing up, the answer was yes.
Lohan’s condition led to a two-week hospitalisation with a swollen liver and kidney infection last year, Vanity Fair said.
Vanity Fair also quoted Lohan as saying: “I think younger kids should know it’s OK to experience things in life and I’m not encouraging going … off the deep end and having an eating disorder. I’m saying, if you at least admit those kinds of things … then they don’t feel the urge to go and do that.”
In the original Vanity Fair article, Peretz wrote that Zelnik had asked to have Lohan’s confession of drug use omitted from the article. Lohan had told Vanity Fair that she used drugs “a little” but quickly tried to retract the admission and denied that she had taken cocaine.