Key Points
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Disney Channel alum Christy Carlson Romano recalls trying cocaine for the first time and liking “the attention I got.”
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The Even Stevens actress had been trying to shed her wholesome image by “aggressively clubbing” in her early 20s.
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Romano’s new memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck, will be released on Oct. 6.
Christy Carlson Romano experienced a different kind of high the first time she tried cocaine.
The Disney Channel alum recalls her early-2000s party girl era in her upcoming memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star, and in a new interview on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOYhzpfJlk” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Not Skinny But Not Fatpodcast she previewed some of the wild times.
At 23, around the time she was the lead voice actor on Kim Possible, Romano said she experimented with cocaine at a party in Paris Hilton’s home. She didn’t enjoy the drug, but “what I liked was the attention I got for doing it in front of people,” Romano told host Amanda Hirsch. “Everybody’s like, ‘I got the Disney girl to do cocaine for the first time.'”
Representatives for Hilton did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment.
The actress, who has been sober since 2019, admitted she didn’t care at the time if the story got out in the press because she wanted to change her wholesome Disney image.
“I’d been clubbing for a while just trying to get noticed by paparazzi and it never happened,” joked Romano, who costarred on Even Stevens with Shia LaBeouf and Cadet Kelly with Hilary Duff.
“Before Instagram, you really didn’t have control over your image,” she explained. “It was whatever the paparazzi, TMZ, Page Six really saw of you… that was how you were able to change people’s opinion of you. And at that time, I had been clubbing since I was like, well, really since I was like 16, but I’d been really aggressively clubbing to try to get noticed since I was like 21.”
Another option was shooting the cover of men’s magazine Maxim, but Romano didn’t have a publicist to help make it happen.
As it turned out, the actress was living in the same Los Angeles apartment complex as The Hillsstars Lauren Conrad and Audrina Patridge. She often saw them filming the show at the pool, but convinced herself, “I’m not cool enough to hang out with them.”
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One night, while “wasted” at a club in New York City, Romano found the liquid courage to try to befriend Lindsay Lohan.
“Oh my god, I was such an idiot,” she recalled to Hirsch. “I said something about Hilary Duff,” Lohan’s enemy at the time. “And then she was like, ‘Well, you should hear what she said about you.’ And I didn’t say anything all that mean… It was like, ‘I guess we’re not going to be friends.'”
All these years later, it’s still “an embarrassing story,” Romano lamented.
Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star is out on Oct. 6.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
