Why Lara and Sam are hounded by the paparazzi. And how they can stop them.

Oh dear. Sam Worthington and Lara Bingle Worthington got in a spot of bother yesterday.

They are home in Sydney, bringing their improbably-named offspring Rocket Zot back to meet the grandparents, and they just want to get on with their day. You know, seeking out the city’s premium green smoothies, attending to outstanding parking tickets, normal stuff.

But they can’t. They can’t because everywhere they go, people want to take their picture.

Dodgy dudes trail them with long lenses, an ant-trail of cars crawl after them through the eastern suburbs’ narrow streets, rude men try to trip them up as they head into their Woolahra baby yoga class. It’s intolerable.

Sam has had enough. Yesterday he called the police – who were doubtless just sitting around, eating doughnuts and filing their nails – and asked them to do something about the men who were trying to snap his Rocket.

“They could be planning to kidnap my child, they don’t say who they are,” he is reported to have told the cops.

“This is provocation bordering on paedophilia. Because you can take those photos and put them on the internet.”

And to the paps?  “If you don’t know that that is akin to that, well, I don’t know what kind of humans you are.”

He really has a point. Worthington has just settled out of court with another dubious human being in New York. The actor had to pay NYC pap Sheng Li an undisclosed sum to go away and stop insisting that the movie star had kicked him, preventing the pap from earning a living stalking photographing other super-famous people who were just trying to go get an egg-white omelette and a cuppa cold-drip.

Judging by his growing impatience with the paparazzi, Sam Worthington is clearly wondering what has become of his life.

Before he fell in love with the beautiful, young rehabilitated WAG formerly known as Lara Bingle, Sam got around mostly un-noticed – unless he was in his full Avatar blue suit, OBVS – blending into a mostly indistinguishable melee of slightly boofy, rugged Australian males wearing flannel shirts.

But all that was over when Sam met Lara. Lara’s relationship with the paparazzi, and the media in general, was more of a dysfunctional love affair – she needed them, they needed her, and she sold stories to magazines and flirted with the practice of tipping off paps about where she would be doing what when and with whom. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.

Magazine covers were born:

Sam was not into that. And so Lara became not into that. She gave up on her busy career as  model/brand ambassador/reality star  and moved to Sam’s side. He flushed out her Instagram account, scrubbing all evidence of overshare. Wherever he went, she went too, and then along came Rocket, and suddenly, the cameras trained on her every move seemed to take on a predatory air.

Any parent will tell you that the idea of having strange people shoving cameras in your child’s face is un-nerving. I should know, it happened to my son once:

Some celebrities, like Elsa Kristen Bell have started campaigns against paparazzi being able to follow the children of famous people, which, in all seriousness, is completely fair enough. The famous people tried very, very hard to get where they are, making many sacrifices to be the kind of person that photographers chase down streets. But their babies, all they did was choose genetically-blessed creators.

But we have a plan. A plan that could merge the best of both Rocket’s mum and dad’s worlds and work for both of them.

No-one chases Pixie Curtis down the street with a long lens. That’s because we know what she looks like. We know what she looks like on a private plane, out for sushi with mum, wearing adorable bows in an ever-changing array of outfits that cost more than your car. We’ve seen it all, man.

Her mother, Roxy Jacenko, has monetised her daughter’s cuteness and early, providing the uncanny side-effect of complete paparazzi disinterest. The public’s appetite for Pixie is sated.

Witness Pixie Curtis’ Instagram greatness. 109,000  followers can’t be wrong:

Why can’t Lara and Sam do that with their Rocket? Let’s not pretend that Lara’s phone isn’t as packed with baby snaps as any other new mum’s. Just set them free, Lara, in a landslide of neutrally-dressed cool cuteness, and be done with it.

Just flood Facebook with all the firsts parents bathe in daily – look, here’s Rocket sucking a shoe, look, here’s Rocket eating ear wax, look, here’s Rocket’s incredible dribble-length, hovering above dad’s mouth. And we’ll be over him. The paps will dry up. The long lenses will retrain on someone from morning television drinking a milkshake outside the movies.

Sam will be much, much happier.

Yes, I am available for celebrity consulting any time. You’re welcome.

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Do you think the paparazzi should leave Lara and Sam Worthington alone?