Don't hate her because she's beautiful, she dated a Backstreet Boy, and she could be the new Britney. Willa Ford has her detractors, especially online. Lauren Smith meets her in person and lets love rule.

"This is the story of a psycho bitch. Her name is Willa Ford. [on this Web site] we will expose...concrete evidence that Willa used her ex-boyfriend, Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, to attain her own selfish goals. We will ridicule and make fun of Willa as we see appropriate. We WILL NOT back down! We will show the world the truth!" (from spazekadet.homestead.com/Introduction.html)

"Willa...
-Likes to watch guys use the restroom
-Needs to wash her face more often
-Has hair, *actually, stubbly* pits"
(from www.pop-stars.net/willaford/index1/html)

Willa Ford is a nice girl with a bad reputation. At first glance, she's just a tough little pop singer who's working hard to release her first album next month. But she's also the ex-girlfriend of Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, and thats where everything takes a turn for the nasty. Thousands of jealous 14-year-old girls hate Willa Ford, ne้ Amanda Williford.

Passionately. They host web sites devoted to despising her. Ironically, they circulate online petitions in an effort to "Keep Willa from getting famous." When Willa was featured on MTV's video countdown show Total Request Live, and anti-Willa fan called in live to host Carson Daly and threatened to blow up MTV's Times Square studios. For a girl whose music is just barely beginning to be audible behind the booming chart-toppers of Britney and Christina, Willa's already well on her way to public notoriety, whether she deserves it or not.

But at least she's maintaining her sense of humor. Sitting across from me at a midtown pizza joint on a rainy afternoon, Willa laughs about it all. Petite and smiley, she looks about 16, but is actually 20, with long straight blond hair and big, light brown eyes that betray her tough-chick image. Still, she talks like a trucker. "If I had a web site," she says, twirling a long strand of mozzarella around her fork, "I'd call it Willa Don't Care. Or maybe, It's My Butt-Kiss It!", she laughs. After years of being taunted and abused by the teenage girls of America, Willa's ready for the ultimate revenge: a first-rate pop album they're all going to fall in love with. Or so Lava/Atlantic Records hopes.

Her album has been a long time coming. From her early performances as a member of Entertainment Revue, a local Florida kids' chorus, to her lost chance as a member of a now-defunct small-time girl group, FLA, Willa's been preparing for her solo moment at the mic all along. Even now, as we talk over lunch, she slides my Dictaphone closer to her side of the table. It's a smart, calculated move. She's been in the business for almost 10 years, and she's ready to finally be heard. Talking to Willa it's hard to think that she hasn't known since she was a kid that she would one day be eating pizza with a magazine writer, promoting the album that could either launch or extinguish her solo career.

Her earliest memory of performing was as a third-grader in Ruskin, Florida a small town outside of Tampa that she still considers her real home. "It was a Christmas-caroling show in the Cash and Carry convenience store parking lot," she recalls, grimacing. "We called it Cash and Trash, I think we preformed in front of a trailer. At the time I thought I was hot stuff." Right now she's staying in New York indefinitely, as she prepares for the release of her album, Willa Was Here. Between promotional events, she makes appearances on the downtown party circuit as often as possible and squeezes in lots of cardio work with her personal trainer, whose call she takes on her cell phone at lunch. She's a girl with a town car, and she knows how to use it. But New York doesn't feel like home yet. For now, her record company has put her up in a pre-furnished corporate apartment on the Upper East Side. "It's just a place to stay for now," she says, "but when I find somewhere permanent, it'll be in a trendier neighborhood. I'd really like to live in SoHo. Or even have a house in Jersey and commute in. "Jersey? She did grow up in the suburbs.

The waiter comes by our table with dessert menus. For Willa? "Oh yea, the chocolate mousse cake, definitely," she says, grinning at him and inadvertently flipping her hair. He's instantly bashful. Unlike some of her young blond contemporaries, Willa actually writes most of her own lyrics, and, while they're not particularly deep, they are telling. There's a song on the album called "I Wanna Be Bad," in which she repeats the line again and again, like she's trying to convince herself it's time to grow up and quit being a cutie. When I ask her what being bad means to her, she replies point-blank: "Using your sexiness as a weapon against men is the most exciting thing you can do." But then she softens and explains, "It's about being that awkward 16-year-old girl and looking at these older girls on MTV, and going, 'I want to be bad like that, but I'm just not there yet.' That was me. I was always cute. I was always small. I was never sexy. I wanted to be bad."

Growing up in a two-stoplight town, she had to settle for being mischievous. When she wasnt practicing her opera singing, she and her cousins ran around town on four-wheelers, wreaking havoc and raising hell. Her father, who still holds down the fort in Ruskin, according to Willa, has funded these first years of his daughter's career by farming. "First he grew tomatoes, and then strawberries, and now he grows grass for golf courses, just fields and fields of gorgeous grass," she says.

On the edge of 17, Willa moved in with her now ex-boyfriend Nick Carter. After meeting through a mutual family doctor, they dated for almost three years, crashing at her parents' house for a while, adopting five dogs and trying to live something resembling normal couple life. In the meantime, the Backstreet Boys rocketed to fame, leaving Willa with a boyfriend whose poster half the girls in America kissed goodnight before going to sleep. "When I first met Nick, it was amazing. He showed up on my doorstep and introduced himself. All day long people had made fun of these yellow shoes I had on, and he showed up and was like 'Hey nice shoes.' I was sold." His career took off, she got a gig opening for the Backstreet Boys, and the teen taunting started. Girls called their house looking for Nick and threatening her. They claimed she used Nick. They claimed she beat him up. They claimed she kidnapped his dog. "I wont lie. I hit him once, but he deserved it. He'd called me a bitch." As for the dog napping, Willa laughs and laughs. "I guess it's flattering that people care enough to take the rumor seriously, but no, all the dogs we had were dogs we had together."

The couple broke up last fall. "I still love him to death, but nobody else wanted us to be happy together. With that drama, it was probably the main reason we broke up," she says. They split up the dogs. He took two, she took three. She was 19 years old.

So now Willa's 20 and finally dating like a teenager. "I'm like a girl player," she says shaving off little bites of chocolate mousse and licking the spoon. "I've been a really bad player lately. I love getting dressed up and going out and being a bad girl. It's fun! She admits she has a crush on Craig David, the talented young British singer, but she leaves it at that. They were set up for dinner by people at Atlantic, and instantly the gossip pages were all over it. Willa insists it's nothing serious yet. "I think we're both kind of players at this point, and we both know each other's game, so it's like well, we can't even play with each other. I think were both like, OK, lets get this out of our system and be friends."

There's a song on Willa Was Here called "Prince Charming," and Willa says she's definitely in the market, but she's tough enough to set one hard rule: "For all the guys out there, if you meet me, and you don't call me the next day, forget it," she says pointing her finger. "Screw you. I'm done playing games."

She's done with caring about the anti-fans, too. This girl's got a record to promote, and she won't be spending much time on the web dwelling over any of the 65 anti-sites listed at www.virtue.nu/popskank/links.html. "Hey," she says with a shrug and a smile, "Did you know I have more web sites than Barbara Streisand?"