A female client lifts the curtains of her multimillion-dollar home in the Hollywood Hills, notices a telephoto lens aiming at her kitchen window from across the canyon, and closes them again. This is a scenario that many people in celebrity security circles describe in very identical terms. She doesn’t open them. After that, the house, which she pays more than $25,000 a month for, becomes an extremely costly and uncomfortable bunker. Eventually, she begins to wonder why she is still there.
For a few years now, there has been a steady increase in the number of well-known women leaving Los Angeles; however, this trend rarely makes headlines because the departures are often presented as lifestyle decisions rather than as deliberate withdrawals from a setting that has become genuinely challenging to live in. Tennessee, upstate New York, Montana, and portions of Colorado are frequently mentioned in real estate deals associated with female performers who were formerly part of the Los Angeles ecosystem.
The drivers overlap and are specific. The tools available to professional paparazzi have significantly increased. The infrastructure for ongoing celebrity surveillance has advanced, but the legal restrictions surrounding it have not kept up. Examples include drones that can hover over gated compounds at legally dubious altitudes, long-range lenses that can resolve detail through a first-floor window from hundreds of meters away, and coordinated tipping networks that track restaurant reservations and airport arrivals. There are anti-paparazzi laws in California, but they are not consistently enforced, and lawsuits take a long time.
The harassment that occurs on the street has also changed. Despite its erosion, professional photographers follow a few rough guidelines. Regular phone users don’t. Due to social media’s direct incentive systems, the amount of footage of female celebrities being filmed in public without their permission—at coffee shops, grocery stores, or while walking to a car—has increased dramatically. by some people, going viral by photographing a celebrity in the middle of an errand is a real goal, and the ensuing conduct goes beyond what seasoned security experts characterize as truly destabilizing for the subjects.
The misogynistic aspect is not coincidental. Compared to male celebrities, female celebrities frequently report verbal demands from photographers, such as pleas to turn around, display more, or move in a particular way. By seeing the subject as an object to be photographed rather than a person, the photography interest is frequently overtly predatory. Repeated across years of errands and public appearances, that experience builds up in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to comprehend.
The financial justification for departing has also changed. Real estate in Los Angeles has grown so costly that it is difficult to justify paying top dollar for a home where basic privacy requires the drapes to be closed all the time. There is a music business in Nashville. Everything a New Yorker could possibly need is available in New York. The practical need to reside within driving distance of a studio lot has diminished due to production schedules that are based on remote casting and virtual rehearsals. The city’s control on the physical locations of careers has relaxed.