In a 2016 video, The Good Place actress Kristen Bell was seen slapping a reporter across the face. The incident took place on the red carpet during the premiere of her 2016 movie with Melissa McCarthy, The Boss. The reporter, Kevin Donnelly of The Fix, appeared visibly drunk in the video and tried to grab Bell’s arm while calling her baby.
Bell has actively fought against the harassment of celebrities by paparazzi. The Veronica Mars actress herself was a victim of several disturbing incidents and publicly expressed concerns about the paparazzi attempting to photograph her children.
Kristen Bell Slapped A Reporter At The Premiere Of Her Movie
Kristen Bell encountered a drunk reporter during the 2016 premiere of her new movie and was caught slapping him on video. In the footage published by Just Jared, the Frozen voice actress was giving interviews about her movie, when Kevin Donnelly of The Fix posed a silly question, “You’re in this. You’re the boss. Who’s the boss in this?”.
A confused Bell didn’t know how to respond, and someone off-camera suggested moving on to the next interviewer. She tried to move away, but Donnelly grabbed Bell by the arm and called her “baby”. Bell slapped him across the face, causing the drunk reporter to fall over. As the House of Lies actress walked away, the reporter got up and climbed over a barricade, only to fall again, saying, “Kristen, it’s really okay.”
The comments under the video saw fans immediately taking Bell’s side. One fan wrote, “He was drunk and called her baby. Like obviously he earned the slap.” Another user’s comment appears more recent as he compared the slap to Will Smith’s Oscar slap, stating, “This makes will smith’s slap seem like a baby slap.”
Some fans also expressed doubts about whether the whole thing was staged. However, one fan didn’t care as she wrote, “i’ve been watching this on repeat. i don’t care that it’s staged i am addicted.” The appreciation from fans was partly in response to her continuous fight against paparazzi. Interestingly, she and her husband, Dax Shepard, have been pushing #pedorazzi to encourage a No-kids policy in the news.
Was Kristen Bell’s Awkward Interview Staged?
Fans who expressed their doubts about the video were proven right when it was revealed that the video was part of Comedy Central’s Junketeers episode. Kevin Donnelly and Kristen Bell were enacting a segment that made fun of reporter’s experiences with celebrities. The segment features Donnelly getting drunk after discovering that he was fired.
Bell’s real-life experiences may have contributed to many believing that the video was real. Bell’s major incident with the paparazzi occurred in 2013 when she was a new mother. The paparazzi shoved cameras in her and her baby’s faces at the LAX airport. It got so out of hand that the Forgetting Sarah Marshall actress had to wait in the restroom for her ride.
Despite her calling them out several times, including one time on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, they continued to stalk her and her family. Bell even keeps her children’s faces out of her social media pages.
