Jessica Biel: Reformed Vixen?

Talk about misspent youth! 7th Heaven starlet Jessica Biel, 19, still feels haunted by her scantily clad appearance on the cover of Gear magazine last year. "It was really, really a bad decision on my part," she tells TV Guide Online. At the time, her provocative posing may have made the youngster appear all grown-up, but it also tarnished her relationship with her family, fans and Heaven boss Aaron Spelling.

"I got involved with the wrong people," says a newly blonde Biel, who plays a girl pitching woo to Freddie Prinze Jr. in Summer Catch (opening Friday). "I won't say they took advantage of me — because I absolutely participated in it — but I made a really bad choice."

Biel says she wrong-headedly chose to pose out of anger toward someone, whom she opts not to identify. As she recalls: "I was just being a little brat, going through a really tough time in my personal life. It was such a huge learning thing, and it's too bad I had to learn it in front of everybody. I know it was a blessing in disguise from up above. He was telling me, 'You're going to learn this now so you don't do it later.' But if I could take it back, I would take it back for sure."

The actress/college coed — who's taken a year off from Tufts University to work on Heaven full-time — now feels she has a moral responsibility to her young audience. "I do feel an obligation to be a role model," Biel says, "because there really aren't that many girls on TV that your parents can go, 'This is a really cool person. Look how she lives her life. Look how she handles this.' It's scary to think that I might have hurt a girl [in] some way by saying something or wearing something [inappropriate]."