Just when we thought the Miley Ray Cyrus incident concerning a Vanity Fair photo shoot had completely blown over, father Billy Ray breaks the silence and gives us his take on the controversy that took place months before. The star of Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana caused quite a ruckus when she posed “partly naked” for an issue of Vanity Fair magazine. The photo in question was a portrait showing her back with just a blanket to cover the rest of her upper body. Photographer Anne Liebowitz was mostly on the receiving end of the whole issue. She defended her unfortunate position saying, it was “a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup.” Sadly, not everyone shared her sentiments in seeing the photo as art for art’s sake. Many offended individuals, including Disney Channel representatives, blamed Leibowitz as well as Vanity Fair for manipulating a teenager in order to sell magazines.
Miley’s father, Country Singer Billy Ray, has finally revealed his stand. In a recent segment in The Today Show with Meredith Viera Billy Ray mentioned, “I didn’t know they were gonna strip her down and wrap her in a blanket.” Even though he was present at the earlier part of the shoot, as he also posed with his daughter on one photo that day, he said that he had to leave because of prior engagements. “I had just finished a movie down in Florida [and] I was scheduled to be in Washington state the next day to play for the troops returning from Iraq and then the next day in Anchorage, Alaska.” he told Meredith.
When asked about his silence around the time when the issue had spread like wildfire, the Country Star, frankly replied with a saying taught to him by his father, “The more you stomp in poop, the more it stinks.” It seems that Billy Ray holds no resentments towards Leibowitz. “She’s a great lady. She’s a good person, a great photographer…I have worked with her before,” he said. As for his relationship with his daughter, he tells Meredith that he was always there by her side, consoling and comforting her. The controversy also brought him back to his roots, as he took Miley for a walk one day and told her something fellow Country singer Kris Kristofferson shared with him when he was only starting out in the industry, “It’s just one of those things. You gotta kind of stand back and let it run its course,” he said quoting Kristofferson.
In light of the other photograph taken by Leibowitz, showing Miley resting on her father’s lap, Billy also had a chance to defend himself by simply saying “he just loves his daughter a whole lot.”
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