A recent DUI arrest for young actor Amanda Bynes has some celebrity watchdogs wondering if the former child star is following in the footsteps of Lindsay Lohan, another child star who struggled when she struck adulthood.
According to a recent report from the Huffington Post, Bynes was arrested for drunk driving on April 6 after she allegedly sideswiped a police car.
For curious readers, sideswiping a police car is perhaps the worst driving maneuver to make, especially if you’ve had a bit too much to drink.
After the incident, sources who had seen Bynes before her arrest claimed that the 26-year-old starlet had been drinking at a hotel before getting behind the wheel, but that she “seemed fine to drive” and “never seemed drunk.”
Bynes’ level of drunkenness, though, will be a matter for a court to decide, as a judge will likely look to her sobriety tests and blood or breath tests, if she took any after the accident.
Thanks to Bynes’ recent arrest, media outlets have been drawing comparisons between the star of “What I Like About You” and Lindsay Lohan, who has long dominated the front covers of gossip magazines due to her increasingly erratic behavior and notable encounters with police.
However, someone close to Bynes told RadarOnline that the comparison is “ridiculous” because “Amanda has never been arrested for drug possession or stealing anything.”
The source claimed that the DUI arrest was an isolated incident, and that there is little possibility that Bynes is “headed down the same road” as Lohan.
Interestingly, despite their similar age and geographic location, Bynes doesn’t know Lohan, and she claims that the media’s comparisons of the two reveal a certain amount of sexism in the way that women are treated in Hollywood.
According to the source close to Bynes, men in Hollywood who get arrested for drunk driving “don’t face the same scrutiny that women do.” This imbalance is reportedly what upsets Bynes more than any comparisons to other actors.
Nevertheless, other friends of the young actor are concerned about what they perceive as her increasingly strange behavior, and are worried that she could be headed in the wrong direction.
In recent months, Bynes has issued a series of bizarre tweets, including tweets that included racy photos of herself and ones in which she claimed to prefer “chocolate men.”
Bynes reportedly announced her retirement from acting at the tender age of 24 after starring in Nickelodeon’s hit show, “All That,” where she began working in 1996.
