Posted on 11/17/2025 11:22:07 AM PST by pnz1
Melissa Gilbert has a new perspective about her “Little House on the Prairie” experience.
While clapping back at Megyn Kelly’s recent comments about late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the actress, now 61, reflected on the 8-year age difference between herself and Dean Butler, who played her on-screen love interest in the NBC series.
“So, I debated posting this but, I feel compelled to share. After seeing many women’s posts with the hashtags #iwasfifteen #imfifteen #iwasachild, I decided to google search myself at that age and see what came up,” Gilbert wrote on Instagram on Saturday, alongside photos of her younger self.
“And this is some of what I found…and now, at this age, at this time, I am actually nauseated,” the actress added. “The girl on vacation in Hawaii with her family, is the same girl who was expected to ‘fall in love with’ and kiss a man on film who was several years older than she was.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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You're right. My maternal grandparents were 10 years apart. Grandma was 15 when she married Grandpa in the old country. They had 4 kids, one died as a toddler, which was not uncommon during the early 20th century. Unlike too many of today's generation - my grandparents focus was faith, family & work.
Truly don’t understand what she is talking about except that she’s probably seeking attention.
My maternal grandmother was 14 when she got married. My grandfather was 20. This was a century ago. It was a different time.
CC
She married Bruce Boxleitner in real life and he was 14 years older than her.
20 and 12 is bad....30 and 22 isn’t really bad.
this was 23 and 15...
In reading more of she was 15 when she played the part and they did have to be careful to protect her from all the Creeps in Hollywood that makes sense.
However there’s also a movement criticizing someone because they said that Epstein liked 15-year-olds they didn’t excuse his behavior but they said that’s different than if he liked 5-year-olds.
So she also was criticizing someone else.
I never saw the show, but the actress sounds like she's retarded now, especially if she knew nothing about the actual historical person she was hired to play in all the years she played her, and doubly so if she's complaining 40 something years after the show's run.
Gilbert has way too much time on her hands if this is the kind of nonsense that gets in her head. Try volunteering at a soup kitchen or veterans charity and get real.
I guess she just hasn’t gotten much attention lately. Plenty of girls got married very young in those days, and eight years isn’t that much of a difference. As someone pointed out here, that was the age difference between the real Laura and Almamzo
8 years, not a big deal. My parents were 10 years apart, and my mother never regretted it. Both sets of grandparents were also 10 years apart. Never heard any complaints. Sounds to me like Melissa is just getting her name out there again. She was playing a character, I think it’s called acting.
This is stupid. More of the “metoo” douchebaggery.
In the time of “Little House on The Prairie”, a 13 year old girl marrying a 35 year old man was not unheard of. Granted, the screenwriters should have been sensitive to it if she or her parents made an issue of it, but it sounds like she took the money and ran, or her parents did.
Women subjected to inappropriate sexual practices of any kind deserve to be listened to, but giving money and legal power to people like those who inhabit the grievance industry has been repeatedly shown to be a terrible mistake.
The way you survive on a farm is to have lots of children, who provided free labor. Women often died in childbirth, so the husband was frequently older than the second or third wife.
She’s exhibiting “presentism.” The act of judging the past with the values of today because “those people should have known better.”
By-the-way, I had an Arab employee who was forty. He wrote home and had his mother pick out some potential wives. He came home with a pregnant 12-year-old. You’d have thought he’d have had a problem in customs as she was a child and listed as his wife. Nope. All cultures are alike, don’tchaknow.
If Melissa Gilbert had such an issue with the age gap, she shouldn't have taken the role. What was she doing promoting a 8-year age gap marriages by taking such a role on television anyway? She could argue that she was only 15 but she could have refused the role on her 18th birthday.
Typical Schrodinger's Feminist - A woman who is simultaneously a Victim and Empowered until something happens, and then chooses which state benefits her the most.
What about “love interests” Bill Belicheck(73) and Jordan Hudson(24)??? Is that kinda OK??? /s
The rule for adults is "Half plus 7" So 30 and 22 is OK.
Yep. I recall hearing about a couple who got married about then, in the mid-1920s, when she was 14 and I think he was 23 or 24. They were still married at the time I knew the youngest of their 15 children in college around 1975.
“She dresses and looks like a 70 year old grandma.”
She b*tches about ‘Little House’ but cashes in on her role as Laura with her clothing company, ‘Modern Prairie.’
https://www.modernprairie.com/
But you don't make headline news unless you use extreme language.
It would not have been a news story had she said, "Looking back now, I feel mildly discomforted."
As I’ve written before, in the 18th Century in Europe males had compulsory military service at age 21. After a year or two in the military, they returned to their villages and would usually marry a teen age girl. So there was nothing unusual about a 23 year old male marrying a 15 year old girl. The idea was to keep the girls chaste for their husbands and let them start having families, because many babies didn’t survive past age two. The U.S. being settled by European immigrants, largely followed that tradition of husband being at least five years older than the wife. For the girls, it was about finding a husband who could provide for her, not some boy her own age. They may have courted with a chaperone, but dating wasn’t accepted. The idea was to marry people off relatively quickly, not have long romances with modern drama.
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