Lana Del Rey Wants the Paparazzi to Stop Stalking Her

Lana Del Rey doesn’t like the paparazzi. In fairness, who does? But Lana is especially candid in her hatred of the many photographers who have followed her around for years. She called out some paparazzi for intruding upon her wedding in 2024, alleging that they wouldn’t stop ‘flying drones into our windows every morning and following us with a tracker.’ That same year, while on holiday in Paris, she confronted a group of people following her around, claiming they had threatened to ‘alter the pictures to make me look bad after we got into the fight.’

Being trailed by people eager to make money from their invasion of your personal space and privacy is easily one of the worst things about being famous. And, when Lana found out that a paparazzi was taking pictures of her and sharing them to social media in real time, she fired back.

And tyou know what? She’s right.

I’ve already seen people claiming Lana was overreacting or that she should have a greater tolerance for the paparazzi, but I thoroughly disagree. Yes, being a celebrity means you have to accept that some of this will be your new norm, a side-effect of your highly public job. But let’s not pretend that this practice is somehow acceptable because of that. Having someone take a picture then immediately post it online, letting the world know your exact location? How is that not terrifying as all hell?

I feel like we greatly underplay just how risky it can be to be a beloved celebrity with obsessive fans, hardcore haters, and potential stalkers on your tail. A lot of the most infamous cases of celebrity stalking happened because of publicly accessible information. Both Theresa Saldana and Rebecca Schaeffer were attacked, and Schaeffer was killed, by their stalkers who found their locations through private eyes tracking down their home addresses via DMV documents (this led to a massive change in the law that made such details private.) Kim Kardashian was attacked and kidnapped by thieves in Paris who found her through her social media posts. Remember when you could get maps to the stars’ homes on every street corner in Hollywood?

I wanted to highlight Lana’s tweet because I feel like it’s a much-needed reminder of how we need to take these people more seriously when they open up about feeling unsafe at the hands of the paparazzi. Chappell Roan has called them out numerous times and been derided as an ungrateful diva for it, even when we’ve seen videos of these photographers berating her for a more profitable shot. Recently, a woman was arrested for shooting at Rihanna’s home while she was inside with her kids. How is it that one of the most famous people alive was targeted at her own house by a crazed stalker, who now faces charges of attempted murder, and we’re just not talking about it?

Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the mass entitlement towards celebrities has gotten worse over the past few years. There’s a distinct lack of empathy on display here, a brazen pride in making other people’s lives worse and justifying it by saying they deserve it because they’re rich and/or famous. It seems like every lesson we pretended to learn in the aftermath of reassessing people like Britney Spears was a cheap shield to dispose of before returning to the status quo. It’s so bizarre to me that people make money from tracking someone like Lana Del Rey’s every move in real time and shares it with the world with no concern for how it could be used. We have too many examples to count of celebrities who were stalked, attacked, and even killed by people who found it all too easy to track down their targets. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for Lana or any other celebrity to want to protect themselves from creeps. Surely, we all want that right?