Courtney Thorne-Smith Says She Stood Up For Herself At 17 & Pushed Back At Wearing “A Really Sexy Negligee”

Courtney Thorne-Smith looked back at her career and recalled a particular moment she experienced when she started.

The Melrose Place alum is opening up about an inappropriate encounter with a director in a movie she did as a teenager.

“One of my first movies, I was 17 years old, and I was in Tahoe. And the storyline was, I was 17, and I was playing against this guy who was in his late thirties,” she did on the Still the Place podcast she co-hosts with Daphne Zunida and Laura Leighton. “We did sleep together in the script, and I wore one of his button-down shirts afterward.”

Thorne-Smith said what she arrived on the set of the production she was uncomfortable with the “really sexy negligee” costume she would have to wear and told the director that was not in the script.

“And he said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter,'” Thorne-Smith recalled. “Then I said, ‘The way it’s cut, something will show.’ And I also had this mindset of I’m 17 with an [older] man. Like I knew it was kind of off, but the shirt made it feel alright.”

Thorne-Smith recalled that a producer told her the crew said she was “being a baby” for not wanting to wear the lingerie. The actress would call her agent and support her decision not to do anything she was uncomfortable with.

Thorne-Smith said she later found out the producer “lied about the crew” calling her a baby and “every single member of the crew came up and said, ‘Good for you,” being grateful that they had her back.

“I’m so grateful I had that ability to stand up for myself at that age,” she said. “I’m amazed, actually. I had that ability at that age.”