“We all make mistakes,” Oscar winner says of 2013 blunder

Oct 14, 2014 14:50 GMT  ·  By
Reese Witherspoon says her drunken arrest proves she makes mistakes like any other person out there, she’s clearly not perfect
   Reese Witherspoon says her drunken arrest proves she makes mistakes like any other person out there, she’s clearly not perfect

Reese Witherspoon, along with the likes of Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Aniston, has always been America’s sweetheart, the kind of female star who can do no wrong – and of whom no wrongdoing is expected. All that changed in 2013, when she was arrested for being so drunk that she tried to interfere with a police arrest.

The person who was being arrested was her husband Jim Toth, by the way. They had partied the evening away and he decided to drive home even though he was clearly intoxicated.

In a new interview, Reese talks about the shameful incident and the backlash that followed, which cost her her much-prized America’s sweetheart crown. She’s not upset, though.

“People realized I wasn’t exactly what they thought I was”

That Reese got arrested for disorderly conduct and trying to interfere with an ongoing police action wasn’t the worst part about the incident, and it definitely wasn’t what cost her so many fans.

The worst part was that, during the confrontation with the police officer, Reese tried to pull the “don’t you know who I am card?,” suggesting that she should not be handcuffed because she was famous. She also lied that she was pregnant to get out of the arrest, and cried that she was an “an American citizen” who had the right to stand on American soil without being arrested.

Police video of the arrest emerged online shortly after the incident, painting Reese as a spoiled and annoying diva who believed she was due the moon in the sky only because she was some Hollywood actress.

As you can see in the video below, all she was asked to do was sit and wait in the car, while the officer conducted field sobriety tests on her husband.

So, when Reese is now telling the media that the arrest revealed a side of her that people had not known before, she’s not exaggerating one bit.    “I think it was a moment where people realized that I wasn't exactly what they thought I was,” she is quoted by Us Weekly as saying. “I guess maybe we all like to define people by the way the media presents them, and I think that I showed I have a complexity that people didn't know about.”

Drunken rants / disorderly conduct = complexity, FYI.

She made a mistake, she’s sorry, let’s move on

Reese is clearly still trying to shake part of the responsibility she shares in the incident, making it sound as if it was the world’s fault they considered her nearly perfect; hence the sense of disappointment after the arrest.

To her credit though, she knows she made a mistake and she promises she’s learned her lesson from it. “It's part of human nature. I made a mistake. We all make mistakes. The best you can do is say sorry and learn from it and move on,” she says.

And moving on she is. With all the backlash, Reese played the arrest like a true pro: she went away for a while and focused solely on her work, and is making her comeback in the spotlight now, when her reputation is nearly back to what it was before the bust.

If anything, she’s even more of a star than she was then, considering she’s also branched out into producing and is already getting excellent praise for it. She’s one of the producers on “Gone Girl,” the new David Fincher thriller starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, which has been no. 1 at the US box office for 2 weeks in a row now.

Reese also has 3 movies coming out this year, “Wild,” “The Good Lie,” and “Inherent Vice” (which will reunite her with her “Walk the Line” co-star Joaquin Phoenix), and she’s getting pretty significant Oscar buzz for these performances.