Miley Cyrus is looking back at one of the biggest scandals of her career with fondness. The “Malibu” singer, 29, marked the 11th anniversary of a video being leaked online of her taking a hit from a bong with a hilarious suggestion. The former Hannah Montana star, who had just turned 18 five days prior to the 2010 scandal, shared a still from the video that blew up her clean-cut Disney image to Instagram Monday with a smoke puff emoji, writing simply, “11 years ago. Can we petition for a national holiday?”
Cyrus’ fans in the comments called the video leak “the bong rip heard round the world” and “a moment in history.” One person wrote, “This picture broke the internet, queen,” while another added, “I wrote my college freshman English paper on this moment that’s how iconic it was.” Smoking legal salvia would be one of Cyrus’ least controversial actions over the next decade, but at the time, the video sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry, leading dad Billy Ray Cyrus to even offer a public apology at the time.
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Cyrus has embraced the moment in recent years, however, sharing the full video last year for the leak’s decade anniversary. “Happy 10 year anniversary to the groundbreaking video of a teenager smoking a bong & saying dumb s— to their friends. (Not so sure the director of this fine film should be considered a ‘friend’ but….),” she tweeted.
Cyrus has embraced sobriety as of late, revealing in June 2020 she was six months sober. “It’s really hard because especially being young, there’s that stigma of ‘you’re no fun,’” she said during The Big Ticket podcast. “It’s like, ‘Honey, you can call me a lot of things, but I know that I’m fun.’ The thing that I love about it is waking up 100%, 100% of the time. I don’t want to wake up feeling groggy. I want to wake up feeling ready.”
In November 2020, she admitted during an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music that she had “fallen off” from her sobriety amid the pandemic, but was once more looking to the future with hope. “It’s never easy, but it’s pretty easy for me to be sober or in and out of sobriety because it’s like the day I don’t want to f—ing do it anymore, I don’t,” she said. “The day that I do, I do.”
