Melissa Joan Hart had a career to die for in 1999. She was on the hit show Sabrina the Teenage Witch, she was doing movies, she had endorsements – the whole deal. Then she did a risqué photoshoot in U.S.- based lad mag Maxim, and everything almost went away.
Hart recently appeared on the Pod Meets World podcast, and revealed that she almost got kicked off the show over the incident. Hart was at the premiere of her teen romcom Drive Me Crazy when she got a frantic call from her lawyer.
The incident, she said, was the “worst day of my life.”
The impetus for the story was a photo Hart took with Britney Spears, where she said she had been crying.
“My lawyer shows up and goes, ‘You did a photo shoot for Maxim magazine?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, I did.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you’re being sued and fired from your show. So don’t talk to the press. Don’t do anything.’”
Next came a phone call from her mother and producer, who heard she was losing her cushy sitcom job over posing in her underwear. Things kept getting worse, she said. The movie producers then “flipped out” and she had to find solace in her dad, who gave her a hug even though he’s not usually “warm and cuddly.”
“He lived in New York while I lived in LA so he wasn’t really around for the emotional stuff, and he comes up to me and goes, ‘You OK?’ I was like, ‘No!’ I’m like crying even harder because my daddy’s hugging me,” she continued. “I’m being fired from my show. I was just fired from the movie. I just broke up with my boyfriend.”
Around the time when she felt her life was falling apart at the scenes, she posed for that photo with Spears, who sang the song “(You Drive Me) Crazy.”
“I had been crying,” she said about the photo. “If you look at my eyes I had been crying all evening. At the time I thought this was like the worst day of my life.”
Fortunately, it didn’t end up being that big of a deal.
“Nothing came of it,” she said on the podcast. “But of course, in the moment, I didn’t know what was going on.” It turned out that the threats to remove her were dropped because production had “no ground to stand on.”
The issue turned out to be that Maxim used the name Sabrina instead of her actual name.
“What happened was the magazine wrote ‘Sabrina, your favorite witch without [a stitch]…’” she said. “I’d never heard of someone being on the cover of a magazine and not using their name, they used Sabrina.”
Sabrina the Teenage Witch aired from 1996 to 2003.