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Hilary Duff is a protective mama bear to her two kids [3], 7-year-old son Luca and 1-year-old daughter Banks. At a recent football game of Luca's, Hilary confronted a paparazzi taking photos of the kids playing, and even though he technically wasn't doing anything wrong, she asked him to see her perspective as a mother trying to keep her kids safe.
"Hey, who are you here with?" she asks at the beginning of the video, which she posted on her Instagram. After asking if he knows anyone on the team — he doesn't — she asks if he could please stop taking photos of the kids on the field. "It's making me feel really uncomfortable."
The pair go back and forth for a bit — he tells her it's not illegal to be taking photos and that he's "practicing photography," and she asks him "human to human" and "as a mother" that he stop taking photos as a courtesy to the parents and children present. "It's just an uncomfortability factor that these are 7-year-old children and you don't have a child here . . . we would like to protect them. So if you could take pictures and practice your photography somewhere else?"
Eventually, the man ends up putting his hand over her phone's camera and the video stops midargument, so it's unclear how long the conversation continues. However, based on Hilary's caption of the photo, it's clear she left the altercation with a bad taste in her mouth. "Paparazzi shooting KIDS," she wrote. "Go 'practice' your photography on ADULTS! Creep! Laws need to change! This is stalking minors! Disgusting!"
Some may argue that Hilary "signed up for this" in being famous and that because the man in question wasn't technically doing anything wrong, she had no right to ask him to leave, but as she's also just a parent trying to keep her child safe, there are certainly many layers of this issue to consider.
Hilary isn't the first celebrity parent to contest the laws in place for paparazzi — in 2013, Jennifer Garner [5] and Halle Berry [6] testified before California lawmakers after being consistently harassed by paparazzi when out with their children out in public. On Jan. 1, 2014, new legislation making it a misdemeanour to photograph or video a child [7] in a harassing manner, regardless of their famous parentage, went into effect.
No matter which side of the argument you fall on, it's hard not to appreciate that Hilary put herself out there to speak on behalf of all of the parents at the game who are subjected to paparazzi because of her fame.
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