Kanye West Explains Paparazzi Arrest

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FIRST PUBLISHED: November 15, 2008 7:06 PM EST
LAST UPDATED: November 16, 2008 2:21 PM EST

LONDON, U.K. --

Kanye West lashed out against the paparazzi on Saturday, taking to his blog to explain his arrest in London for a scuffle with a photographer after leaving a club earlier this week.

“I put my hand up to the camera in self defense!” he wrote. “I didn’t assault him but merely [put] my hand up to cover his lens. My security yelled, ‘Get the camera off him.’ I guess in all the commotion, the camera scraped his nose.”

The rapper claimed to have arrived back to his hotel room hours later to find the police waiting.

“The cops were very cordial but told me they had to arrest me because a complaint was filed,” he wrote, noting that they called it “obviously a publicity stunt by the photographer” but that they had to go through the motions.

Kanye was not charged with a crime and was shortly released.

In his blog, Kanye called for a law to force paparazzi to ask permission rather than continue with what he termed “by any means necessary” behavior.

“The fact that he could get me arrested off a mere complaint but I can’t ask him to stop taking pictures of me is very lopsided,” Kanye wrote. “I am not a celebrity. I’m a normal person that’s just famous. I refuse to sneak in and out of back doors and kitchens of hotels… I am protecting my personal space since there are no laws to protect that for me.”

He also brought up Princess Diana, the British royal who died in a car crash after being chased by paparazzi photographers in 1997.

“Let us not forget the paps killed Princess Diana,” he wrote. “Right now the paps are above the law and the people they shoot are below it.”