Updated report on Brad Pitt's motorcycle accident

Sometimes trying to get the full story about a celebrity item is like that old kid game, “Broken Telephone” – you know, one person whispers something to a friend, they pass it along, and by the time it reaches the last person, it’s completely different.

In trying to get more information about Brad Pitt’s motorcycle accident over the weekend, most stories pointed to Brad either being hit from behind or being clipped by someone who cut him off. I even wrote about the being cut off angle earlier today as some video and reports suggested that to be the most likely situation.

However, a video obtained from TMZ shows that in the end no one actually hit Brad at all.

It seems that what happened is Brad tried to maneuver in between a truck and a parked car, bumped into the car (causing the dent and scraping that we saw in the video I posted from X17), lost his balance, and toppled over. That’s a relief because at least we can see that it wasn’t as dangerous as it originally sounded, though he still could have been hurt, especially if traffic had started moving again.

Overall though, I still blame the paparazzi to an extent for causing this accident. I’ve seen video – taken from the sidewalk – of Brad driving his motorcycle before and it doesn’t seem that he makes a habit of weaving in between cars. Rather he appears to be a very safe driver from what I’ve been able to see in the past.

It seems – and this is just my opinion, of course – that Brad was aware that paparazzi were following him in a car and he was trying to escape them for the sake of trying to maintain at least a little bit of privacy. Unfortunately, in his hurry to lose them, he lost his balance instead.

This still tells a familiar story. Technically speaking, the paparazzi did not directly cause Princess Diana’s car to crash when she died. They did not ram her vehicle up against the tunnel wall. However, her driver too was trying to escape the paparazzi who were relentlessly chasing them, and it ended in so much tragedy that people all over the world mourned her death.

While Brad was ultimately responsible for toppling his own motorcycle, he would have had no need to slip in between two cars if he hadn’t been chased by paparazzi in the first place.

It still all comes down to needing laws that prohibit paparazzi from getting within X amount of feet of a celebrity (other than at red carpet events where photos are an expected part of the promotion package) and we certainly need laws to prohibit paparazzi from following celebrities in (or on) their vehicles, again within X amount of feet.

Regardless of the cause, I’m still so glad that Brad Pitt wasn’t hurt.

(Thanks to Faye and Angela for the video links)