The myth of the `stalkerazzi'

'I WAS TERRIFIED that this time the physically aggressive paparazzi would put both me and my baby in danger," Britney Spears announced last week after getting caught driving with her unsecured infant son on her lap. Back in the halcyon days of 2005, this excuse might have gotten a sympathetic response from the public, the media and even law enforcement officials. But age and wisdom have made us all more skeptical of blaming the paparazzi -- the last acceptable prejudice.

It was just last month, as a troubled nation was beginning to cope with the crisis of Lindsay Lohan's rapid weight loss, that an important piece of Lohania vanished right before our eyes. Criminal charges against Galo Cesar Ramirez, the celebrity photographer who in May was arrested after an automobile accident with the star of "Herbie: Fully Loaded," were dropped.

Considering the abysmal driving record Lohan has racked up (including a previous accident that resulted in the starlet being sued by an injured driver, and a subsequent fender-bender that she also tried, without success, to blame on a paparazzo), it's no surprise that the case against Ramirez turned out to be baseless. But the young photographer's hair-breadth escape from the law also signaled a turning point in the trumped-up war against "stalkerazzi."

For a brief, shining moment in 2005, Lohan's accident was the centerpiece in an anti-paparazzi campaign waged by celebrities such as Cameron Diaz (who in midyear settled a suit by a shutterbug she'd assaulted and robbed of his camera), Reese Witherspoon (who filed a false-imprisonment charge against photographers that later turned out to be bogus) and Halle Berry (who in 2000 pleaded guilty to a lesser charge related to a non-paparazzi hit-and-run accident in which another driver suffered a broken arm).

Celebrities and paparazzi make strange antagonists, and not only because of their symbiotic professional relationship. In any disinterested reading of the accident reports, these actors come off as a gang of dangerous, lead-footed rageaholics, while the hardworking photographers appear guilty only of the crime of giving the celebs too much of the attention they crave. So how did the pampered multimillionaires briefly manage to garner public support, attract fawning media attention to their cause and eventually push through an anti-stalkerazzi law in California?