Blake Lively opened up on Instagram yesterday about a horrifying experience she had while out with her three daughters James, Inez, and Betty. A tabloid ran photos taken by a paparazzo of them all together—shots that were taken, Lively wrote, in a scary, nonconsensual, and morally wrong way.
The tabloid ran the shots on its Instagram in a post seemingly since taken down. It included a photo of Lively with her daughters (whom she and Reynolds have purposely kept out of the spotlight to give them privacy) and a shot of Lively alone, smiling and waving.
This misrepresented what was actually a terrifying day, Lively wrote to the publication on its Instagram:
You edit together these images together to look like I’m happily waving. But that is deceitful. The real story is: My children were being stalked by a man all day. Jumping out. And then hiding. A stranger on the street got into words with them because it was so upsetting for her to see. When I tried to calmly approach the photographer you hired to take these pictures in order to speak to him, he would run away. And jump out again at the next block. Do you do background checks on the photograph[er]s you pay to stalk children? Where is your morality here? I would like to know. Or do you simply not care about the safety of children? The photographers who would speak to me, I was able to agree to smile and wave and let them take my picture away from my children if they would leave my kids alone. Because it was frightening. Tell the whole story….At minimum, listen to your followers. They too understand this is dark and upsetting that you pay people to stalk children. Please stop paying grown ass men to hide and hunt children. There are plenty of pictures you could’ve published without the kids. Please delete. C’mon. Get with the times.
Many publications, including ELLE, have policies not to publish paparazzi photos of children. Lively commented on Comments by Celeb’s post (which shared a screenshot of her comment), telling fans to encourage any publications still publishing photos like that to stop.
“One simple thing people can do is stop following and block any publications or handles who publish kid’s pictures,” Lively wrote. “Feel free to report them. Or send a dm sharing why you don’t follow them. But it’s a simple way of only aligning with publications who have morality. And so many do. All are trying to service an audience. So if that audience makes it clear they don’t want something—like photos of children obtained by men frightening and stalking them—the publication or account will do what the audience wants. It’s the only way that so many have already stopped. Because the people demanded it. So thank you to everyone who’s made that difference already. And thank you again for sharing. It’s fucking scary.”
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