Renee Zellweger Denies Plastic Surgery

Renee Zellweger criticizes the media for legitimizing tabloid gossip about her looks in a blistering essay published in the Huffington Post on Friday. Zellweger, 47, has endured much speculation over whether or not she has gotten plastic surgery. She recently was the subject of a widely-criticized essay in which film critic Owen Gleiberman writes in salacious detail about how her face has changed in the last 16 years.

“Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” the actress wrote a blog for The Huffington Post published Friday. “This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality,” she added.

“I’m writing because to be fair to myself, I must make some claim on the truths of my life, and because witnessing the transmutation of tabloid fodder from speculation to truth is deeply troubling,” she wrote. “The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way.”

The essay comes less than a month after Jennifer Aniston wrote her own takedown of the gossip industry, also in the Huffington Post. Zellweger’s next film, “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” premieres September 16.

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