The clamor of voices, the snapping of shutters, the dazing glare of bulb after bulb. A celebrity is whisked into a waiting car by a no-nonsense staffer, holding back the throng so they can make their escape. But just how easy is it to cause this scene? This week, I put on my most refined accent and dialed the number of a photo agency to find out.
“Hi, I’m a publicist and I have a new client looking to move from London to LA.”
“What kind of client?”
“She’s done a lot of reality TV and she’s a fashion influencer, mainly on TikTok. I’d prefer not to name her at this point.”
“Ok. What are you looking for?”
“I was — we were — hoping to create some buzz around the move, something that’ll get her into the papers.”
“You can text me a location and time when you have it, on this number.”
Yes — hiring a paparazzo, or “rent-a-pap,” is as simple as that.
Harry and Meghan’s “near catastrophic” run-in with a pack of paparazzi in New York last week has brought fresh attention to the relationship between celebrities and the men who chase them with cameras. But that relationship isn’t always as antagonistic as the Sussexes would have you believe. Sometimes, it’s even collaborative. Consider this your introduction to the service known to PR pros, journalists, reality show contestants and other D-listers as “rent-a-pap.”
Even A-listers like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan have admitted to calling up their local snapper when they’re feeling a bit neglected. Others have been strongly accused of doing it — gossips have pointed their fingers Rihanna, Zendaya and (whisper) even the famously privacy-hungry Meghan and Harry. One paparazzo, who has photographed Meghan and Harry numerous times, was asked on a podcast whether he or other snappers had ever been tipped off by Meghan. “I’m going to have to say no comment,” he said. “You boys interpret that as you wish, but I can’t say it’s a categorical no and I can’t say it’s a categorical yes.”
If the relationship between pap and celeb is often parasitic, sometimes it is symbiotic. Being snapped means you’re pap-worthy. So, for somebody who wants to stay pap-worthy, there’s a way to make sure that keeps happening. Enter the rent-a-pap.
It’s no wonder such services are in demand. Thanks to social media, we’re now in a world where getting famous isn’t that difficult. The hard part is staying relevant. As the celebrity blogger Perez Hilton explained to me: “Every star, including Meghan and Harry, recognizes that their career has an expiry date. To extend this, there has to be a constant feeding of the machine. It’s constant maintenance.”
He says that every rent-a-pap relationship is different. “You have some celebrities that go through their team, or sometimes they directly tip off the paparazzi about their whereabouts. They might tip off a bunch of paparazzi, they might want there to be this buzz about them arriving at an airport or being spotted with a certain person.” Not only do the celebrities get free exposure, but some monetize the relationship. Perez tells me, “there might be a situation where celebrity will explicitly reach out to a photo agency and come to some kind of agreement with them, either participating in the sales of a photo, or it’s not unheard of, you know, the, they might just directly come to an agreement on a fee for pictures.”
I ask Hilton whether he thinks Harry and Meghan might have worked with photographers to stage a dramatic confrontation and stay in the conversation. While he doesn’t buy the rent-a-pap rumors whirling around the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, he does think that they are working tactically to keep themselves in the headlines: “They need to maintain that celebrity, or else it will fade away. Harry knows better than Meghan that there’s a deadline, a timeline, an expiration date. What’s going to happen in ten years? The eldest of the Waleses will be going to college and all interest from the media will shift from Harry and Meghan to Prince George and Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, like it did with Harry and William when they were late teenagers.
“Once they start dating, once they start clubbing, all our attention will go to them, so the Sussexes have got ten years to really play the celebrity game in the United States and make as much money as possible. At the end of the day, really what it’s all about is money. They might want us to believe it’s about philanthropy, or this or that or the other. But it’s all about money.”
How does Perez know so much about rent-a-pap? He was one. “I remember even the late Jade Goody [a contestant on British Big Brother] and I, we totally staged an entire afternoon of paparazzi moments around London riding a rickshaw and all of that. The London media works the same exact way and so does the paparazzi there. And so do all of the celebrities. They know how to set up a rent-a-pap — and if they say they don’t, they’re lying.”
You may have wondered, why is Kendall Jenner in full glam as she nips to the shops to buy a can of Coke? And why is that Coke held up with the label intentionally showing as she walks through a bunch of Hollywood snappers? Last year Kim Kardashian was pictured pumping her own gas in dramatic hair and makeup and a floor length dress. How do these scumbag snappers know where and when to be? Are they tapping phones or hanging out of trees to get the money shot? It’s often a lot less complicated than that: these paparazzi are being called up by the celebrities themselves, or their agents.
But the rent-a-pap trick depends on deception: if the public knows you’ve called the snappers, the illusion that you’re someone worth photographing goes up in smoke.
In the aftermath of the “car chase” debacle last week, the Sussexes sent a legal letter to Backgrid, the photo agency who had retained the services of the freelance photographers, demanding “copies of all photos, videos, and/or films taken last night by the freelance photographers after the couple left their event and over the next several hours.” This move would cut against the suggestion that the couple, or their new representation, had “rented-a-pap” on this occasion. Other instances are somewhat more suspect.
If I were to offer some advice to the couple, it would be that if they were calling the paps, it would be far more believable to wait until they leave restaurants, not enter them. It’s plausible that a fellow diner would snitch on you, but when you’re stepping out the house for the first time in weeks to grab a bite, there really only is one way the rat pack would know.
So next time you see a celebrity being hounded by the flashing lights of the press, think twice before feeling bad for them. There’s every chance they set it up.
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