When Alyssa Milano stepped onto the set of Who’s the Boss? as the quick-witted, big-hearted Samantha Micelli, she was eleven years old, completely unprepared for what was about to happen to her life, and surrounded by adults whose interests were not always — or even often — aligned with her own. The show became one of the defining sitcoms of the 1980s, Alyssa became its youngest and brightest star, and the machinery of fame moved in immediately and without mercy — the merchandise,

the fan mail, the public appearances, the scrutiny that followed her from the set into every corner of her private life — and not a single page of any contract she or her family signed covered what it actually costs a child to grow up inside that machine, what it takes from you in the years when you are still forming the most fundamental ideas about who you are and what you are worth. What Alyssa Milano has been willing to say publicly about those years, about the people who were supposed to protect her and the ways that protection quietly failed, is the kind of testimony that lands differently once you understand that the smiling little girl on the poster had no idea what was already being taken from her.