Lily Allen admits: 'I feel like a caged animal'
Pop singer reveals her anger and distress at being 'followed by 20 men with cameras all day'
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Independent Minds
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Photographers vie for a picture of Lily Allen as she walks through Paris last year
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As one of Britain's most precocious and photogenic musical talents, Lily Allen has rarely been out of the public eye since she shot to fame with her first album in 2006. But today, the singer reveals how the intense glare of paparazzi photographers over the past few years has left her feeling like a "caged animal".
Speaking in an interview with The Independent magazine, Allen described being "followed by 20 men with cameras all day", culminating in a car accident this month during which she was photographed in a distressed and angry state.
The 23-year-old expressed her relief at obtaining a court injunction which protects her from paparazzi harassment, granted shortly after the car accident.
"I already know that it's going to change my life ... I'm beyond happy. It's like I've been allowed to have success and a life, because sometimes it makes you feel like a caged animal," she said.
Days before the accident, Allen was cautioned by the police for assaulting a photographer outside her home. Some time later she was photographed kicking a photographer who had apparently driven into the back of her car. After obtaining a court injunction against two picture agencies, Allen's lawyer, Mark Thomson, released a statement stating: "My client has faced constant harassment over the last few months from the paparazzi." Allen described the moment the accident took place as her breaking point in which she thought: "I've had it with the press, I can't do this any more."
She said: "Seven cars had been chasing me since I left home. I turned into a T-junction and they all ran a red light, then tried to overtake on the inside. A woman had to slam the brakes on her car as they cut in. She had two children in the car, a baby in the back seat, a six-year-old in the front. I braked too, of course, and this guy ran into the back of me. I got out of the car. I was shaken up. There was a lot of force. I was really angry. I went up to him and said, you know, 'What the fuck are you doing? You can't do this'.
"Instead of talking to me like a decent human being would at a decent human level, he got his camera out and started taking pictures, and I just thought, 'I've had it with the press'... It was mental. And I got back into the car and called my lawyer."
Allen went on to describe the trauma of losing her unborn baby – by her then boyfriend, Ed Simmons, of the band Chemical Brothers – and the press intrusion she faced during that difficult time.
"It was a really weird, horrid time. What was worst about it was that I didn't engage with what was really happening on an emotional level, because I was dealing with the press side of it.
"I couldn't really comprehend what was happening, because I was concentrating on trying to control the story. People shouldn't have known that I was pregnant anyway. When it became obvious that they knew, we had to say to them, 'I'm not three months yet, please don't write the story because it's too early and we don't know if it will go wrong'. Of course, they ran it, and it did go wrong, and that was really ... just ... not a nice time."
The singer has recently released her second album, It's not Me, It's You, to critical acclaim.
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Comments
There has to be a time when people stand up and say enough is enough! There is no need to tail gate anyone or to climb the fence to their private property...what is this bollocks?
The extent in which the media are prepared to go to get an exclusive story is really boderline retarded at times. What happened to the truth?
Lets face it, it does not matter when there are huge profits to be made...and at the end of the day that's wrong!
It's bad enough that profits are made courtesy of other people's misery, but to constantly invade somebody's privacy and to print blatent lies and get away with it, is downright pathetic really.
Stars so inconsequential that they don't even deserve "inverted commas"
We used to have great stars (Bowie, The Stones, Beatles, Led Zep, The Clash, etc. etc.) and people used to be more interested in their lyrics and music (which presumably is why they are famous!) than the colour of their hair or whether they were really lesbians, or maybe once kissed a girl, or maybe fell out of a nightclub at 3am, or maybe got married for 3 weeks, or maybe went out commando or whatever!
But then once upon a time we used to fight wars for justifiable reasons, we used to have safeguards on unfair and unreasonable detention and questioning etc. In fact we used to have a great many things we have let fall by the wayside. And that is our collective negligence. The rise of the mediocre due to our laziness in objecting.
The children of famous people who are famous principally becasue of their parents fame don't really deserve much sympathy, but that being said, I support the use of injunctions against people found to act in a harassing manner, particularly where it potentially causes risk to others - as appears to be the case here.
Perhaps we should be looking at stronger media regulations which can a) impose penalties on media reporting on matters outside the public interest except when b) the individual agrees to being photographed etc outside a professional environment. If such regulations were imposed we'd soon see which celebrities are really anti-paperazzi, and which are desperate for the oxygen of media. The media penalties could be dropped for those who waived regulatory protection, as they obviously require media intrusion for their own reasons, whatever they may be. An interesting side effect of such regulations could be the end for such endlessly annoying publications as Heat, OK, Hello, etc (oh please, please, please!).
I would like to add two things; a) I am not remotely interested in what either Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera do - they are merely uselful examples, and b) I don't like controls on the media, but it has become obvious since the mid-1980s that the media has little or no restraint except that imposed by judicial regulation. If they are going to act like children, then we have to treat them as such...
I'd buy an island if i could...