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After-School Special
Mary-Kate Olsen and her fraternal twin, Ashley, the squeaky-clean, all-American duo who parlayed eight years of relentless cuteness on Full House into lucrative clothing and media businesses, had a banner year planned for 2004, including a movie release in the spring and college (NYU) in the fall. They were lauded on Oprah as paragons of young womanhood; they hosted Saturday Night Live; they were on the cover of this magazine (and many others). However, days before the twins' eighteenth birthday, their father and Mary-Kate's therapist committed her to a treatment facility for, they said, a severe eating disorder. "They didn't want to find her dead on the floor," a source close to the family told People magazine. The spectacle of a rich, pretty teenager slowly starving herself was sad enough. But the follow-up stories on Mary-Kate's role as a source of "thinspiration" to girls trading extreme diet tips on "anorexic pride" websites were particularly chilling. Anyone in entertainment or the media with a dram of conscience had to wonder about his own complicity in creating such warped self-images. Mary-Kate's illness, after all, was hiding in plain sight. Perhaps now the Olsen twins will have a chance to use ...