Dina Lohan’s Disastrous Interview on Dr. Phill

While LiLo has been busy fueling her new feud with Amanda Bynes, her mother, Dina, has stirred up a whole bunch of controversy due to a recent interview she conducted with Dr. Phil in which she appears visibly intoxicated. Lohan appears fidgety, sweaty, mumbling and downright sloshed for the entirety of the 15 minute segment during which she repeatedly asks an increasingly frustrated Dr. Phil whether or not the cameras were rolling, becomes irate, erratic, and downright difficult to understand. To his credit, Phil attempts to continue on with the interview despite Lohan’s unintelligible behavior, frequent crying spurts, and unwillingness to answer his questions (which, Dr. Phil points out, had been approved by Lohan prior to the interview.)

Lohan, who has since denied the claims that she was intoxicated, apparently came on to “set the record straight” about her reputation as an enabler in Lindsay’s party lifestyle. Instead, the mouth-droppingly awkward interview only serves to reinforce her reputation as a catalyst for some of Lindsay’s worst behaviors, and a major part of the problems in her daughter’s life. While many are rushing to denounce and ridicule Lohan for what is, honestly, a pretty ridiculous interview, others, like myself, see it as a peek into the psyche of a clearly disturbed woman who has, as she half-heartedly describes at the beginning of the segment, suffered psychologically damaging abuse at the hands of her ex-husband Michael Lohan.

While my initial reaction was to join the masses laughing at Lohan, I couldn’t help but come away from the interview with a sense of sadness. The interview itself is the product of years of abuse and sadness that have worn this woman down into the caricature of herself that we see today. At the start of the interview she describes (albeit drunkenly) how she had attended NYU as a dance student and was hypnotized by the handsome, charismatic Michael Lohan who was working on Wall Street at the time. In a rare moment of clarity she even describes how she “didn’t know how to recognize the signs of abuse” and if she had she never would have married Lohan in the first place. She then goes on to describe a series of abusive behaviors that plagued her 19 year marriage (10 of those years her husband spent in prison for insider trading) and have most likely led to some of the substance abuse problems that we are seeing from both herself and her daughter.

Dina Lohan is clearly no saint, and nobody would be wrong in saying that her influence in Lindsay’s life has been less than positive but when watching this interview maybe it’s best to take a step back and see the effect that years of abuse and public scrutiny can have on what was clearly an already fragile and unstable woman. I, for one, can’t help but feel sorry for her (even if the interview is kind of hilarious). Watch the interview below and let us know how you feel about Dine Lohan’s appearance: