The 'Sabrina: the Teenage Witch' star explains she refused to pose nude for Playboy when she's younger because her family had already suffered from bullying over her raunchy pictures.
- November 11, 2023
AceShowbiz - Melissa Joan Hart decided not to do Playboy to protect her family. The 47-year-old actress - who is now wed to Mark Wilkerson and has Mason, 17, Braden, 13, and eleven-year-old Tucker with him - was at the height of her fame in the title role of 1990s sitcom "Sabrina: the Teenage Witch" when she did a riqsue photoshoot for Maxim magazine but decided not to do the same when Playboy asked her to pose nude to stop her younger brothers getting bullied at school.
"There's a good reason why I never did like Playboy or anything like that, because when Maxim came out, my brother, who at the time was a teenager, and my father were kind of tortured by people showing - shoving it in their faces."
"My brother in high school, all his friends go, 'Look at your sister', So, when Playboy came around and asked, I was like, 'Nah. I'm not going to do that to them.' And thank God, because now I have boys," she told Fox New Digital.
The former "Melissa and Joey" star - who has siblings Emily, 35, Samantha, 26, Trisha, 45, Alexandra, 29, Brian, 39, Elizabeth, 43, Mackenzie,25, - went on to add as the oldest of a large brood, she doesn't want to "embarrass" her younger brothers and sisters and claimed she had "built [her] career" around them and her own children.
She said, "My siblings have always been my sort of, my guiding light. … What do I want to portray for them? And, you know, I don't want to embarrass them. I don't want to hurt them. I want to be able to share things with them."
"So, you know, I've always kind of built my career based around my siblings, which then leads to my children. Right? So, kind of in a careful way of crafting things so that, you know, I never am embarrassed about anything I've done or said or shown."
