Or at least, we hope this is as far down as she goes, because any lower than this and she’ll be entering Lindsay Lohan territory.
Here’s the dish:
Former Nickelodeon star Amanda Bynes was arrested in her New York apartment last night for marijuana procession, reckless endangerment, and tampering with evidence—because she also tossed her bong out the window during the arrest. Literally.
According to NBC New York, the doorman at Amanda’s building on W. 47th St. called police to report that she was smoking pot in the lobby. By the time the cops arrived, she had returned to her apartment on the 36th floor. Naturally, they headed upstairs to check things out; when she opened the door to them, they noted a “heavy” smell of marijuana and smoke inside the apartment. They also saw a bong inside the apartment, which is when she allegedly grabbed it and threw it out the window.
The cops put Amanda under arrest and took her to Roosevelt Hospital to undergo a psychiatric evaluation; then they took her to a Midtown police station to be processed. She’s expected to have spent last night in Manhattan central booking and will likely appear in court today.
Read Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Dishes on Her Power Color, the ‘Transformers’ Audience + More
It’s sad, really; Amanda has been spiraling out of control for the past year. What began as a fairly minor driving offense—talking on her cell phone while driving—escalated into more serious issues: Driving under the influence and two hit-and-runs. Her license eventually got suspended, which got her into trouble yet AGAIN last weekend when she was rejected from a private jet for not having ID. Amanda, you see, hadn’t bothered to get any other form of government-issued ID to replace her suspended license, so when she was asked to present ID to board the plane, she ordered the pilot to Google her name and screamed “I’M AMANDA BYNES!” at him. Oh, and she’s under three years’ probation already, too.
Classy.
It’s not hard to draw the parallels between Amanda and Lindsay Lohan; I think the big difference between them, though, is that LiLo, as far as we could tell, had a pretty bright and glittering future ahead of her when she started to implode. Amanda, on the other hand, fell into relative obscurity after her Nickelodeon days were over. True, she made a handful of notable appearance post-Nick—Penny in Hairspray is arguably the biggest of them—but ultimately she announced that she was quitting acting in 2010. She said it was because she didn’t love doing it anymore, but a large part of me can’t help but think that the reason she “retired” was because she hadn’t achieved the stardom she had hoped for and was no longer relevant in the entertainment world. In any event, she changed her mind a month later and did Easy A; she hasn’t acted in anything since then, instead focusing on her “fashion career” (and yes, that’s in quotation marks for a reason).
I may have never been a huge Amanda Bynes fan myself—I liked her on All That, but The Amanda Show was a year or two after my time, and her post-Nickelodeon flicks were never the times of films in which I was interested—but I hope she gets the help she so desperately needs. Otherwise she’ll just join the ranks of those who got chewed up and spat back out again by showbiz, and let’s face it: We’ve already got more than enough of those than we need.
Tell us: Do you think Amanda will be able to turn her life around? Or will she just turn into Lindsay Lohan 2.0?
Lucia Peters is BettyConfidential’s senior editor.
