Warner Bros. Punished One Gossip Girl Star For Leaving The Show Early

Full disclosure: I love "Gossip Girl," the delightfully dishy and wonderfully silly teen soap opera that ran on The CW from 2007 to 2012. Based quite loosely on a series of young adult novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, the series, created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, focused on an über-wealthy group of Manhattan teenagers who cavort around the city and get into all sorts of dramatic romantic entanglements. According to one former cast member, though, she wanted to leave the show ... and was punished for it.

Former child actress Taylor Momsen, who played aspiring social climber Jenny Humphrey from the show's first season until its fourth, appeared on "Call Her Daddy" and revealed that she tried to abruptly leave the show to devote time to her band, the Pretty Reckless. "I kind of just Irish-dipped. I just wasn't on the script the next week," Momsen told host Alex Cooper.

While Momsen said it was an "easy decision" to step away from "Gossip Girl," there was a snag — "To actually get [out of] a contract was not easy," she clarified. "It was a very long battle of me arguing [with] everyone and going, 'Get me outta this. I can't do this anymore. This is killing me. I have something else I want to do with my life, and it has nothing to do with this, and I can't be stuck here anymore,'" she recalled before, according to her, totally blowing up.

"I just went, 'F*** you. You don't know what you're talking about. You're not in my shoes, so how dare you judge this?'" Momsen said. "I was very defensive, but it came down to they wouldn't let me outta the contract. The head of Warner Bros. said, 'F*** Taylor Momsen. No f***ing way.'"

Thankfully for Taylor Momsen, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage took care of her and respected her wishes when, apparently, Warner Bros. wasn't willing. The only stipulation, Momsen said, was that she couldn't act in another project, which was fine with her. "So I really have to credit them for doing that for me 'cause they did not have to, and they wrote me out of the show so I could go on tour and be in a band," Momsen said of Jenny's dramatic departure in season 4, where she chooses to leave New York after getting caught up in a scheme that nearly kills Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively).

I'll back up. Who is Jenny Humphrey, anyway? The younger sister of "lonely boy" Dan Humphrey ("You" star Penn Badgley) and daughter of '90s rocker Rufus Humphrey (Matthew Settle), Jenny is desperate to fit in with the popular girls at the elite Constance Billard prep school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The problem is, Jenny, Dan, and Rufus bear a real-estate scarlet letter of sorts; they live in Brooklyn. (The funniest part of this, by the way, is that the Humphrey loft is in DUMBO, an expensive waterfront neighborhood, and is enormous — meaning that it would probably cost millions of dollars in real life.) Throughout the series, Jenny figures out conniving ways to "befriend" queen bee Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) and her minions and even succeeds Blair as the "queen of Constance" after Blair graduates, but as she does so, she loses her sense of self.

Despite the issue over her exit, though, Momsen — and Jenny — returned for the series finale. As she told Alex Cooper, there was no bad blood after all.

Jenny actually kind of leaves "Gossip Girl" twice, which might have been due to her fight against Warner Bros. (That's purely conjecture on my part, though.) In the season 3 finale, as Blair tries to finally reconnect with her on-again off-again love, Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), Chuck, thinking Blair has abandoned him for good this time, sleeps with Jenny; a furious Blair then bans Jenny from Manhattan. In season 4, Jenny tries to sneak back into the city a handful of times to either see her family or accomplish professional goals — her other main character trait is that she's a young and wildly talented aspiring fashion designer — but after Jenny gets involved with some seriously vile people who genuinely harm Serena and take things too far, she decides to leave the city.

The "reason" Jenny reappears in the season 6 finale is that she's now a designer for Blair's family company, Waldorf Designs, and she's seen briefly in that capacity. "As a fan of television and a fan of the shows, I love it when you have the full cast together again," she said of the quick return. "You want to full-circle that and round it out."

As for people bringing up "Gossip Girl" all the time, Momsen is used to it. "The first year, you get it. The second year, you kind of laugh at it," she told Alex Cooper. "As it kept going, I was going, 'Oh, I'm never gonna outlive this character,' and that's a weird thing to come to grips with, so you just kind of ... I ignored it. You live your life."

"Gossip Girl" is streaming on HBO Max and Netflix now.