Aubrey O’Day says she was mislabeled as the 'sexy girl' in Danity Kane: 'To play that role was weird'
Aubrey O'Day is pulling back the curtain on her experience in Danity Kane, sharing that she and her four former bandmates were "extremely affected" by the archetypes they were expected to play as members of the girl group spawned by MTV's Making the Band.
"There was just such a desire to put women in boxes. You're the pretty one, you're the this one, you're the talented one, you're the this. So like everybody had always felt so much pressure," she shared on Call Her Daddy. "So, the girls that weren't considered the pretty ones ended up getting tons of plastic surgery and changing their whole look. The girls that were considered the pretty ones never really felt like worthy and talented to be in a room."
According to O'Day, she was one of the latter who very early on was made out to feel like a vital part of the group's look, not valued for her talent. She said that despite the hard work that she was putting into Danity Kane's music, she was perceived by her appearance and made out to be somebody she wasn't.
"They decided how I was gonna be viewed. That's the production company, that's the network and that's [the show's producer] Diddy. So, once you're presented to the world in a certain way, I had to spend many years in all kinds of twisted webs," she explained. "I got that sexy girl card so then I was getting Playboy offers. The crazy thing is I'm a huge nerd. I never was sexy, I never was cool, I didn't have sex until my like junior or senior year of college. I wasn't sexual, I wasn't anything, I just loved working and I loved being on stage. So like all of a sudden to play that role was weird and I took it on and owned it as mine because that's where my opportunity, the direction of the opportunities I was getting at that time. And that has likely set a course for me in life that is very specific and not necessarily authentic to me."
She also became victim to body shaming at a young age as a result of how she was presented in the spotlight.
"Everybody in my group was tiny. I was 100 pounds when I first did Making the Band. I had no boobs, nothing ... But then when my body started to change in front of the world ..." she said, noting that the scrutiny has followed her. "I mean people still take photos of me at 17 and then photos now and they're like, 'God look at what happened to her.' And I’m like, you guys can't take a photo at 17 and put it next to a 38-year-old [person's] photo. Like, there's obviously going to have been all kinds of changes in that period of time."
Looking back at that portion of her life, O'Day said that she was also being subjected to "mind games" at the hands of the men running the group. She called the objectification of the young women's beauty and bodies "traumatic," and shared that it's been difficult to heal from it all.
"Diddy would be like, 'You're not hot anymore, what happened? You don't have anything like you don't have any curves. You're not looking like... I can't get people to think that you're my good-looking person,'" she said. "And there was no #MeToo at that time, there was no protecting anyone at that time. You signed a million NDAs and a million contracts that took away all your rights, so you really were operating in an environment that you had no control in."
O'Day ultimately was fired from the group during the show's sixth season. "I wasn't willing to do what was expected of me. Not talent-wise, but in other areas," she said. "I don't think I would've been able to be so successful in so many other areas had I not been trained under Diddy. He was the hardest person that you can work for and it was torture."
Wellness, parenting, body image and more: Get to know the who behind the hoo with Yahoo Life's newsletter. Sign up here.
