Spencer Pratt’s villain era may have started long before “The Hills” cameras ever rolled.
In his new memoir, “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain,” Pratt reveals that as a teenager, he leaked private photos of Mary-Kate Olsen—years before his rise to reality TV fame.
Pratt grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., alongside a tight-knit circle of celebrity kids that included Olsen, who at the time was dating Max Winkler, the son of actor Henry Winkler. While Pratt dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, he admits he didn’t have the resources to make movies—so he turned to a creative alternative.
That alternative came in the form of Winkler’s post-breakup “photo shrine” dedicated to Olsen. The wall was covered in snapshots of the former couple, which Pratt described as “young love documented in European hotels, Hollywood parties, stolen moments.”
“I asked Max if I could take the photos off his wall — you know, for his healing process,” Pratt said. “He didn’t say no, so I took that to be a yes.”
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According to Pratt, helping his friend “heal” meant selling the photos to a photo agency for $50,000—an amount that made him feel “rich” at the time. The images soon surfaced in a tabloid story in 2004.
“Less than a week later there it was, evidence of my entrepreneurial genius staring back at me from the InTouch cover at a gas station: ‘TEENS GONE WILD!’ across the cover,” Pratt wrote in his memoir. “A shot of Mary-Kate with a constellation of empties— ‘LOOK AT ALL THE EMPTIES!’—and there I was in the background, frozen mid-shaka. I hadn’t sold that frame. Someone else was shopping, and now I wasn’t just the seller, I was part of the merchandise. My face was now forever linked to Mary-Kate Olsen’s supposed wild phase, preserved in grocery store checkout lines across America.”
Looking back, Pratt doesn’t express much regret over the incident. “When you really think about it, it was a win-win. Mary-Kate got her rebel rebrand, Max got closure,” he wrote.
Released Jan. 27, Pratt’s memoir is packed with confessions from his pre-fame years and chronicles his transformation into one of reality TV’s most notorious figures. “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain” is out now.
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