Photo: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images
Months after Alan Ritchson’s neighbor reported him to the tabloids for riding his motorcycle too loudly, he’s explaining it all on a level playing field: a podcast. He told Dax Shepard on Armchair Expert what actually happened in the fight with his neighbor, Ronnie Taylor. “I’ve never met that guy ever in my life. Never seen him before. He lied to TMZ about us, like, ‘I told him the day before, Hey buddy, you should really slow down.’ None of that was true,” Ritchson explained. Taylor then stepped in front of the Reacher star’s motorcycle to confront him, and he caught it all on his personal body-camera footage. The two got into a physical fight, and someone shared the home-security-camera footage of the altercation with TMZ. Taylor had several interviews with the outlet, claiming his innocence and that he didn’t provoke the actor.
When the police got involved, Ritchson was able to show he acted in self-defense using body-camera footage from his cell phone, disproving his neighbor’s story. “If I hadn’t had that, dude, I’d probably still be in jail. The cops came to arrest me that day, and they only had [the security-camera footage] to go off,” he said. “Thank God. It was a gift from God that I had that premonition or that intuition that I put [the camera] on.” He says that the backlash he initially received from the news felt like “the scariest thing I’ve ever been through.” Now his sons, who were with him during the confrontation, won’t ride with him anymore. He concluded, “He robbed me of that, man … I have so much anger. I have so much resentment that I just can’t quite let go of.”
