Law’s hounding by the press

Jude Law knows just how intrusive Britain’s tabloid media can be, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. For much of the 2000s, the actor was endlessly stalked by paparazzi, as reporters documented his troubled relationship with actress Sienna Miller and the affair he had with his children’s nanny. The tabloids seemed to know his every move in advance, leaving him paranoid and distrustful of friends and family. “You suddenly start to go, ‘Wait a minute. How do they know this? Where are they piecing this together from?’” he says. But he began to grudgingly accept it. “This is what my life has become,” he recalls thinking. “This is my lot and I’ve got to deal with it.” But in 2010, Law discovered that he was one of many celebrities whose phones had been hacked by private investigators working for tabloid journalists. The ensuing furor over media ethics was strangely comforting, he says. “To have other people go, ‘This is outrageous,’ meant that I didn’t feel like this sort of mad, paranoid, dystopian lunatic saying, ‘The world’s following me—what’s going on?’” Today, the tabloids largely leave him in peace—but not out of respect, he insists. “There was nothing left to write,” he says. “There is only so much laundry one has, in the end, to be washed in public.”

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