Read the actress' full statement regarding her run-in with overly aggressive photographers.
Scarlett Johansson is offering a response after her security team was overpowered by paparazzi on Monday.
In the new statement, the Avengers: Endgame actress is offering a warning that, if laws don’t change regarding the way photographers pursue celebrities, it could once again end in tragedy.
"The paparazzi consistently go to increasingly dangerous lengths to stalk and harass the people they are photographing," she wrote in a statement obtained by ET. "Even after Princess Diana’s tragic death, the laws were never changed to protect targets from the lawless paparazzi. Many paparazzi have criminal pasts and will perform criminal acts to get their shot."
"Yesterday, after leaving the Jimmy Kimmel Show, I was followed by 5 cars full of men with blacked out windows who were running red lights and putting other drivers and pedestrians at risk so they could follow me to find out where I was staying and subsequently stalk me and my young daughter for the duration of my stay," she continued.
"The paparazzi put people's live at risk, so they can wait for days in quiet neighborhoods in blacked out cars, and try to follow me to the playground and photograph my child and other people’s children in a safe place that should be off limits, but isn’t," the 34-year-old actress added. "All of this is perfectly legal. After yesterday’s incident, I felt it was my duty as a concerned citizen who was being pursued dangerously and stalked to go to the local precinct and seek guidance there. I would encourage others in a similar situation to go to the police."
"Women across the US are stalked, harassed and frightened and a universal law to address stalking must be at the forefront of law enforcement conversations. Until paparazzi are considered by the law for the criminal stalkers they are, it’s just a waiting game before another person gets seriously injured or killed, like Princess Diana," she concluded.
Diana, Princess of Wales was riding through a tunnel in Paris in 1997 as her car was being pursued by paparazzi. The vehicle crashed and she died from her injuries. So did her companion Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul.
On Monday, Johansson appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! alongside a number of Endgame co-stars Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Paul Rudd. Afterward, as she described in her statement, she was allegedly aggressively followed by photographers, which prompted her to go to a police station.
"Last night, Scarlett Johansson was at Jimmy Kimmel. At some point in time, the paparazzi overpowered her security and for her security reasons and for her security team, they were taken to the Hollywood police station," the spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department told ET. "At that point, she was later able to leave the station. There was no crime report taken. She was just a little spooked."
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