Wait until Audrina, Heidi and the gang get a load of this. In an extended sit-down interview with Giuliana Rancic for an E! special, Kristin Cavallari looks back on her days as the bad girl protagonist on the final two seasons of MTV's The Hills.
"I had two lives," says Cavallari, now 26 and mom to son Camden, 7 months, with fiance Jay Cutler. "I had the public Kristin and then I had the real me." One way show producers maintained the villainous, hard-partying "public" Kristin persona? According to Cavallari, her costars — who included Audrina Patridge, Heidi Montag, Lo Bosworth, Stephanie Pratt, Brody Jenner and others — were encouraged to lie on camera and to the press about her drug use.
Cavallari even claimed to Rancic that one producer tried — unsuccessfully — to bribe her costars with $10,000 Birkin bags to fabricate stories about her drug problem. (She noted that MTV was unaware of the producer's bribery attempts.)
"I felt so used," says Cavallari, who denies any problems with substance abuse. "And I realized at that moment that I didn't matter. None of us mattered. It was all about ratings."
She first became a reality star as a teenager when she, Lauren Conrad and other classmates were hand-picked to star in Laguna Beach, the high-school predecessor to The Hills. "I was 16 when they first came," she recalls. "We were babies and we didn't know what we were signing up for. They literally came in and just manipulated situations," she reveals.