Highlights
- Alan Ritchson breaks his silence on viral neighbor fight during “Armchair Expert” podcast interview.
- Actor claims he punched Ronnie Taylor to protect himself and his kids on their street.
- Ritchson says his body camera footage kept him from facing arrest after the altercation.
Alan Ritchson is breaking his silence.
The Reacher star addressed his headline-making brawl with a Tennessee neighbor for the first time on Monday, sitting down with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on the Armchair Expert podcast to give his side of the story.
The altercation, which went viral back in March, showed Ritchson in a physical confrontation with neighbor Ronnie Taylor on a street in Brentwood, Tennessee. Until now, the actor had stayed largely quiet on the matter.
Ritchson told the hosts he was “putting along” and “hardly moving” on his motorbike with his kids when the confrontation began.
“That’s when it got weird,” Ritchson said, alleging Taylor “came at [him] pretty aggressively” and was “huge — the same size as me.”
The actor said he tried to defuse the situation before things escalated. According to Parade’s account of the podcast, Ritchson explained he was eventually “two-hand shoved off the bike” by Taylor.
“At that point, there’s no conversation. I’ve got to protect me and got to protect my kids and get us off the street safely, and that means getting the guy out of the picture. So I hit the guy,” Ritchson explained.
The actor also revealed a detail he credits with changing the outcome of that day entirely — he happened to be wearing a body camera for the very first time.
“If anything makes you go, ‘Maybe God is real,’ it’s [that],” he said of the footage, adding that without it, he believes he’d have faced serious legal consequences.
Ritchson didn’t hold back describing the toll the ordeal has taken on his family. He said his sons no longer want to ride motorbikes with him following the incident.
“My kids had to experience that. This was really hard on me. That guy doesn’t know how much — my kids won’t ride with me anymore. He robbed me of that, man,” Ritchson said.
He also disputed Taylor’s version of events, which had circulated in the press for months while Ritchson stayed silent.
“I’ve never met that guy ever in my life. Never seen him before. He lied to TMZ about [telling us] the day before, ‘Hey, buddy. Slow down.’ None of that was true,” Ritchson claimed.
Taylor, for his part, previously told TMZ he didn’t recognize the actor before the altercation and maintained he only approached him over safety concerns on the residential street.
“On Sunday, when I was cleaning my bike outside my house, he rode past once, twice, and on the second time, I walked out in front of him, and I said, ‘You got to stop. Someone’s going to get hurt.'”
Local police ultimately ruled Ritchson acted in self-defense after reviewing his body-cam footage. The actor returns as Jack Reacher when Season 4 of the Prime Video series premieres August 12.
