For some celebs, price of fame getting too steep

Jeannette Walls Entertainment columnist • E-mail

Cameron Diaz and her boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, were leaving a friend’s Hollywood Hills home in September when a photographer jumped out of the bushes and tried to take their picture. It didn’t go well for either the photographer or the stars.

Diaz filed a lawsuit accusing the photographer with “assault with a deadly weapon, a vehicle.”

The photographer also is suing, accusing Diaz’s entourage of verbal and physical assault and entrapment when he tried to flee.

The confrontation itself was unremarkable — just the latest skirmish in the long- running battle over how far is too far when it comes to chronicling the lives of stars in pictures and in print. But it clearly illustrates the escalating nature of hostilities between the celebrities and those they consider threatening stalkers.

While most Americans don’t have a media horde following them every time they set foot outside the house — and possibly even photographers crawling through the bushes when they’re home — celebrities’ privacy is being eclipsed by the same technologies that are eating away at everyone’s ability to be left alone: long-lens cameras, listening devices, pretexting, etc.

In some ways, stars can be considered the canaries in the privacy coal mine, feeling the effects of intrusions into their already-diminished private space well before the rest of us.

High profile an invitation to crooks
Because of their high profiles, for example, they may be more vulnerable to identity theft.

Several years ago, a Brooklyn man used the information in an issue of Forbes’s "400 Richest People in America" to obtain financial info on a number of celebrities, including Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey. (This case is chronicled in detail in the book "Your Evil Twin," by MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan.)

Golf legend Tiger Woods and other sports figures also have been hit by identity thieves in recent years.

Perhaps more surprising, the celebrities aren’t above committing identity theft themselves.

This year, Beverly Peele, a former top model from the 1990s, was convicted of identity theft after pleading guilty to buying $10,000 worth of merchandise with someone else’s credit card.

According to investigators, Peele — who appeared on more than 250 magazine covers — found a purse and returned it to the owner, but not before she copied down the credit card numbers and charged more than $10,000 worth of merchandise.

She was sentenced in August to three years' probation and 300 of hours of community service and ordered to pay $5,000 to the victim and American Express.

While Hollywood’s elite are occasionally victimized by a regular-joe sort of crime, however, their greatest privacy fear is unquestionably the ever-more-aggressive media.

It’s a central dilemma for the famous that to remain on the A-list, you have to be in the public eye. But increasingly, celebrities complain that — in a world filled with online celebrity blogs and aggressive tabloids that traffic in embarrassing candid shots and scandalous stories — their privacy is being invaded in ways that were inconceivable even five years ago.

“There’s a level of familiarity with celebrities that’s implied by this tabloid world,” says Catherine Olim, a publicist with the PMK-HBH agency who represents such stars as Nicole Kidman and Glenn Close. “It’s very scary. And it can literally put celebrities’ lives in danger.”

No quarter from paparazzi
Many observers believed the tragic death of Britain’s Princess Diana and two others in a 1997 car crash in a Paris tunnel while being chased by photographers would lead the paparazzi to back off. But there is no indication that’s happening:

• Mayhem erupted learlier this month in the western Indian city of Pune when Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and their children fled in a motorized rickshaw to escape a media horde. A few days earlier, reporters and a photographer complained that they were manhandled by guards protecting Pitt and Jolie.
• Jennifer Aniston last year sued a photographer who she said used “invasive, intrusive and unlawful measures” to take topless pictures of her in 2005 at her Hollywood Hills home. The suit was later settled.
• A photographer’s minivan plowed into Lindsay Lohan’s Mercedez Benz in May 2005 when she made a U-turn while trying to escape pursuing paparazzi. Authorities said that the photographer was “most likely driving carelessly” but did not file charges. 

The celebrities aren’t the only ones endangered by the media’s aggressive behavior or the stars’ evasive measures:

A photographer was charged with assault after allegedly hitting a 5-year-old girl with a camera and shoving two other people at California’s Disneyland in September 2005 when he tried to take pictures of Reese Witherspoon and her 6-year-old daughter. Britney Spears — whose mother Lynne once tried to run over a gaggle of reporters and photographers — drove off with her infant son in her lap in February after being surprised by paparazzi outside a Starbucks in Malibu, Calif.

Those celebrity chroniclers who defend their aggressive coverage argue that stars make a Faustian pact in which they trade away their privacy for the perks of fame, then cry foul when they realize the price they have paid.

And they reject the notion that in the “good old days,” celebrities were able to cavort and carry on without press scrutiny. As long as there’s been a movie business, they say, writers and photographer have been feeding the public’s fascination for the people who appear on the silver screens.

That argument is partly true.

Print this Email this Blog this  IM this

MORE FROM CELEBRITIES

Celebrities Section Front

Drew Barrymore unhurt in hit-and-run   Madonna adoption case nears conclusion   Rapper Remy Ma gets 8 years in prison At least 3 jurors selected for R. Kelly trial Neverland Ranch foreclosure auction canceled Actor apologizes for airport gun arrest K-Fed and Britney working it out? Judge issues preliminary divorce for McCartney Hulk Hogan’s son to serve 8 months in jail Access Hollywood section Celebrities Section Front   Add Celebrities headlines to your news reader: