In 2011, Courtney Stodden rocketed to tabloid infamy as the child bride of actor (“actor”) Doug Hutchinson, best known for playing stretchy serial killer Tooms in the first season of The X-Files. 2011 doesn’t seem like THAT long ago, and when we talk about pop culture history, we often point to the 2000s as the stand of disgusting tabloid treatment of celebrities and line-crossing behaviors, but the early 2010s were just as bad. There was a pivot point around 2013-14 where things notably began to shift, but 2011 was, for all intents and pop culture purposes, 2009. Nothing demonstrates that better than the absolute circus that exploded in 2011 around then sixteen-year-old Stodden when they (Stodden uses she/they pronouns) married Hutchinson, who was forty-five years their senior.
The coverage was sordid and, as is usually the case, Stodden, who was just a teenager, came in for as much, if not more, online hate as their mother and Doug Hutchinson. People were perfectly fine lambasting a teenager for participating in a marriage that was literally only legal because Stodden’s mother signed off on it. If left to their own devices, Stodden would not have been able to marry Hutchinson at sixteen, but with parental consent, it was deemed acceptable in the eyes of the law. Few spectators made that distinction at the time.
No one stopped the tabloid coverage or the paparazzi stalking Stodden’s every moment, and no one curbed the vile language aimed at Stodden online, including bullying DMs revealed from Chrissy Tiegen, at the precise moment social media came to dominate the pop culture conversation. And it persisted for years, including a Funny or Die sketch with Seinfeld star Jason Alexander in which he examined a still-underage Stodden’s breasts, “looking for a signal”. This week, Stodden posted about the sketch, writing, “How did so many adults look at a minor and decide this was acceptable?”
For his part, Jason Alexander has apologized openly to Stodden, calling the sketch “inappropriate” and saying he “truly regret[s] it”. He has also reportedly donated $15K to Unchained At Last, the survivor-led non-profit working to end child marriage in the US. Stodden works with the group and suggested Alexander put his apology into action with a donation. For a man who made $1 million per episode back when TV series made over twenty episodes a year and residuals were still flush, $15K is pocket change, but it is better than nothing.
Now, Courtney Stodden is working to get AB 1267 passed in California, which would effectively end child marriage in that state by making eighteen the legal minimum age to wed. (Child marriage is still legal in 34 states, yikes.)
Some will find Stodden an imperfect vessel for the message because they are still judged as tacky and because they were trying to get a singing career off the ground before Hutchinson entered their life, and so they must have been totally copacetic with everything that happened during that time. But Stodden is part of the first generation of online kids exploited by the emerging digital economy, many of whom are now fighting for better protections for minors featured in family vlogs, reality shows, and within influencer spaces.
Does it matter if Stodden is still viewed as a complicated public figure, at best, if they are part of a larger moment of kids exploited online growing up to draw boundaries to protect future generations from similar exploitation? I don’t think anyone would really argue against Stodden’s cause, they have one of the more clear-cut cases of “yeah, that’s f-cked up and laws should be changed about it”.
It’s been interesting this week watching Stodden discuss her exploitation and the reaction to it. As bad as the world can seem right now, the public and online reaction to Courtney Stodden is way better than it used to be. Sure, some people are always going to judge them for how they look, for being “fame hungry” (an accusation that must also be leveled at their mother and ex-husband), and for the general tabloid atmosphere that surrounded them in the previous decade. But there is definitely more recognition now that what happened to Stodden was a failure at every level, from parental to legal. And as they say in many of their posts, they can’t change what happened then, but they can advocate for better now.
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