When Tara Reid’s boob slipped out of her dress, photographers high-fived each other.

Tara Reid was standing on a red carpet, smiling for the cameras, when she noticed heightened excitement among the photographers gathered in front of her.

They were laughing and high-fiving each other.

She stood there for at least 10 seconds, nervously smiling, wondering what was happening.

Then a publicist stepped into the frame and lifted the left strap of Reid’s black dress back up onto her shoulder.

Her left breast had been exposed to the cameras for at least half a minute. In that time, the laughing and high-fiving photographers had captured a series of now infamous photos.

WATCH: Surprise celebrity friends. Post continues below.

Within hours, those photos would be splashed on the covers of tabloid magazines and circulated around the internet.

“I just hated that the paparazzi were high-fiving each other and laughing,” Reid would later tell Access Hollywood. “It was so cruel.”

For years to come, Reid would be known as the nip slip girl. The party girl, the hot mess who’d had too much to drink and accidentally let a boob slip out. Some people would accuse her of planning the nip slip as a publicity stunt, whereas others would just write it off as the next logical step in Reid’s downfall from rom-com queen to party girl.

February 19, 2021
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It wasn’t just the fact Reid’s boob was exposed that made headlines; it was also that her nipple was unusual. Instead of her areola being a perfect round circle, Reid’s was misshapen, as if a chunk had been cut out. After the incident, Reid was labelled “Franken-nipple” and later had to explain that her plastic surgery had gone wrong.

“It looked like I got completely butchered up,” she told Today. “The areolas. they looked like goose-shaped eggs.”

It wasn’t the first time Reid was turned into an international laughingstock to sell magazines or advertising space, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Reid started out in showbiz at a young age, after being talent-spotted in a New Jersey shopping mall. As a pigtailed six-year-old, she was a regular on the game show Child’s Play, before shooting over 100 commercials.

Her movie career took off in her early twenties. She was in The Big Lebowski, Urban Legend, Cruel Intentions and then, in 1999, the hit teen comedy American Pie, where she played the virginal Vicky alongside other up-and-coming stars like Chris Klein and Alyson Hannigan.

Reid as Vicky in American Pie. Image: Universal Pictures.

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It should have been the beginning of a stellar acting career. But it wasn’t.

“At the time of American Pie my career was so high, it was blasting and then it dropped,” she told the Mirror in 2019. “All of a sudden you go from one extreme to the other.”

After American Pie, Reid made some unfortunate movie choices, including Dr. T & The Women and Body Shots. As her box office success dwindled, her appearances on the covers of tabloid magazines increased.

The media quickly figured out that Reid, and her nights out in LA, sold magazines and drove website traffic.

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“If I was staying home and I’m not gonna get the meetings anyway, then what’s gonna happen?” she told Time in 2014. “You feel like you’re in jail. You’re not going to get the parts. You’re trying to be on your best behaviour and no one respects it. So you might as well just travel the world, meet new people, have fun.”

Soon, it was impossible for the media to mention Reid without the words “party girl” in front of her name. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly announced she was joining Scrubs.

“At last, Tara Reid has found something to keep her busy for a while when she’s not dancing on tables or complaining that fellow party animal Colin Farrell benefits from a sexist double standard,” the article began.

Then the wardrobe malfunction happened.

After that, Reid starred in her own travel series, Taradise. Which further cemented her image in the media as a laughable, party girl. The butt of the joke.

“Instead of playing down her image as a boozing blonde, Reid has embraced her inner Jacuzzi floozy, and this fiasco is quickly shaping up to be the biggest public meltdown since Chernobyl,” one reviewer wrote.

It’s important to note that during her time as the tabloids’ favourite cover girl, Reid never broke the law. She didn’t drive under the influence or attack the paparazzi, cause damage to public property or shoplift, or commit any of the minor offences that got other famous women of her generation “cancelled”.