Taylor Momsen, who shot to fame with her role as Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl in the late 2000s, recently took a deep dive into her life and career, opening up about what it was like feeling the sudden and immense attention that came with the show’s popularity.
In Momsen’s new interview with Alex Cooper for her podcast Call Her Daddy, the 32-year-old looked back at her career, starting with her breakout role in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and into Gossip Girl, her shift to music, and beyond.
With the popular teen drama series, Momsen recalled both good and bad aspects of the unexpected success of the show, saying, “The first impact is the paparazzi, and that’s something that I hadn’t dealt with before.”
She talked about how, at the time, paparazzi in NYC was very intense. Momsen still lives in the city, but she admitted, “Now there’s kind of rules to it. You know where to go, you know where not to go.”
“But they were coming to my house. They were going to my sister’s school. They were everywhere,” Momsen went on, talking about the paparazzi during Gossip Girl. “The feeling of kind of being watched and stalked is just intimidating. It’s unnerving.”
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As for what led Momsen to decide to step back from Gossip Girl and the attention, she noted that it wasn’t the paparazzi, but rather the press that would come out in reaction to the photos.
“They pick the one shot that looks bad and try to spin some kind of negative story around it. So I was getting a lot of negative press,” she went on. Momsen ended up leaving Gossip Girl, with her last episode as a series regular in 2010 in Season 4.
Explaining her decision, Momsen said, “I left. I said I can’t do this. It was a struggle there for years.” As for what helped her during this period, the singer credits songwriting as her outlet for stress or strong emotions as a result of the experience.
After leaving Gossip Girl, Momsen fully turned her focus to music and her band, The Pretty Reckless, which is still going strong today. In fact, the band just released a new holiday EP called Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas, which pays tribute to Momsen’s iconic role as Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
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This story was originally reported by Parade on Nov 5, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
