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YOU have to feel for Kristen Stewart. Just a little. After her admitted affair with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders, the 22-year-old was dumped by her dreamy onscreen and real-life lover, Robert Pattinson. Will Ferrell chimed in, dubbing her a ''trampire'' - which was nastier than it was funny.
Then Stewart was apparently dumped from a planned Snow White sequel.
Added to that, Sanders, 41, has also seemingly been dumped, by the mother of his two children, Liberty Ross (who, incidentally, played mother to Stewart's Snow White) - as she no longer wears his wedding ring.
The fallout casts Stewart as a cheater and a home-wrecker whose career is in tatters.
But is it really? And is it possible she has been treated too harshly?
Surely Sanders needs to be publicly barbecued as well - but, then, he isn't the world's highest-paid actress, as Forbes named Stewart in July. According to a story in The Hollywood Reporter by the award-winning journalist Kim Masters, Stewart's $10 million price tag (plus 5 per cent of the profits) is the reason the sequel to the under-performing Snow White will not go ahead. Masters wrote that a contingency plan had been in place long before the Stewart-Sanders scandal erupted.
''The film's $389 million gross was decent but not good enough to guarantee a sequel,'' Masters wrote. ''One executive was told that the sequel including Snow White would proceed only if the original grossed $500 million.''
It will now be replaced with a Wolverine-style spinoff about the Huntsman, given that Australian Avengers star Chris Hemsworth (aka the Huntsman) is seen as a hotter drawcard.
Despite everything, Stewart seems destined for a stellar career.
But it's unlikely the shy young woman who finally came out of her shell after playing her first grown-up role (in On the Road) will be as open as she was in interviews for that film. In our Cannes interview for the film she was vivacious and forthright and showed no fear of being pigeonholed, as she could have been after Snow White and Twilight.
Stewart received strong support recently from someone else who knows all about growing up a child star - Jodie Foster.
Having grown close to Stewart while playing her mum in Panic Room (2002), she lent her young friend support in an opinion piece on The Daily Beast website.
''Eventually this all passes,'' Foster wrote. ''The public horrors of today eventually blow away.
''And yes, you are changed by the awful wake of reckoning they leave behind. You trust less. You calculate your steps. You survive.
''Hopefully in the process you don't lose your ability to throw your arms in the air again and spin in wild abandon.
''That is the ultimate F.U. and - finally - the most beautiful survival tool of all. Don't let them take that away from you.''
