When the paparazzi snuck a shot of Kristen Bell's baby daughter, the actress and Frozen star didn't go into hiding—she fought back, on behalf of children.
Just over a year ago, Kristen Bell was leaving her favorite brunch spot with her daughter, Lincoln, then only two months old, when a gang of men startled her. They surrounded the actress, crowding in as she struggled to walk to her car. Shaky with adrenaline, Bell fumbled with blankets and bottles, trying to shield her baby from the scene and buckle her in safely. The gang? No, not criminals, just a group of photographers hoping to make a quick buck on a photo they'd sell to the tabloids.
After that experience, Bell, now 34, learned to play the blanket game (spot paparazzi, cover baby). But in January, when a picture of 10-month-old Lincoln appeared online in the Daily Mail, she became incensed; she hadn't even seen the cameramen hiding outside a friend's house. "I signed up to be an actor, and I understand there are consequences," she says. "My daughter, on the other hand, should not have to accept that lifestyle because of the choices I made. There's a very big difference between a mother taking a photo of her baby and a kid coming out of school followed by 10 strange men with cameras. A child can't comprehend the media machine; she feels hunted."
Bell is a bold woman (she recently helped raise almost $6 million on Kickstarter to fund a movie based on her TV series Veronica Mars), so she decided to protest. She took to Twitter; her husband, actor Dax Shepard, wrote an impassioned op-ed for The Huffington Post. And together they launched their No Kids Policy. The aim: to convince magazines, newspapers, websites, and TV programs to stop buying photos of children taken without parental consent, and to encourage all of us to boycott publications and shows that use those images. "I have a tendency to get very fiery when I see an injustice, small or large," says Bell, who faced off with paparazzi in a live TV interview. ("Children...being spied on... makes me sick," she told them.)
Some have criticized Bell's campaign for infringing on free speech; others have remarked that tabloids and celebrities have long existed in a mutually parasitic relationship. True enough, but never before has there been such a hunger for seeing every aspect of celebrities' lives, including their kids. "The obsession with children of the famous really didn't begin until the late 1990s and early 2000s," says Anne Helen Petersen, Ph.D., a media studies professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and author of the forthcoming Scandals of Classic Hollywood. Bell's efforts, she adds, are the first to tackle the demand for these images head-on.
She's certainly getting results. After meeting with numerous editors and executives, Bell has convinced more than 60 media outlets to take the No Kids Policy pledge—among them People, Us Weekly, Access Hollywood, and yes, Glamour. Even blogger Perez Hilton promised to "raise the bar" and "NOT post even the most happy-looking 'paparazzi' photos of the children of celebrities whose parents object," he wrote. For Bell, the key is that all kids deserve to be protected. "No child," she says, "should be fair game."
BELL'S WORDS TO LIVE BY: "'We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.' I love that quote because it means we can all be a little bit better tomorrow than we are today, a little bit kinder."
