Reacher star Alan Ritchson is breaking his silence four months after viral footage showed him in a physical fight with his neighbor over a complaint about excessive noise from his motorcycle.
“I got the rights to [sports league] MotoGP. I love motorcycles. They’re so fun,” Ritchson, 43, explained during the Monday, July 27, episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, recalling what led to the brawl in March. “And I want to tell stories about it. I want to make a cool, Fast and Furious kind of thing for motorcycles, like international. I love it.”
Ritchson added that he had just “set up” a film where he would be “riding every bike in that thing and riding it in crazy scenarios. So I really got to know how to do every kind of stunt.”
“So I have every kind of bike you can imagine, all levels of stunt bikes, dirt bikes, and I practice on these things all the time,” he continued. “And the bike that I was riding that day, I had just received. It was custom built for me, and it’s exceptionally loud.”
Ritchson then recalled riding his motorbikes with his sons, Calem, 13, Edan, 12, and Amory, 10, when an angry neighbor — who previously identified himself as Ronnie Taylor — confronted the group about the noise from the vehicles.
“It was our first time around. I’ve never met that guy ever in my life,” Ritchson claimed. “I’ve 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. He wasn’t even there when we went up his street. … And then all of a sudden, he steps in front of me. And I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ And that’s when it got weird.”
Ritchson made headlines in March when Taylor told TMZ that he had gotten into a fight with the actor over the noise from his bikes. Taylor claimed that he initially spoke to Ritchson about excessive speeds and revving the bikes’ engines in their Nashville suburb. The pair flipped each other off, and that was the end of the interaction. However, Ritchson later returned to the area with his kids, at which point Taylor claimed that Ritchson punched him and kicked him in the face.
Ritchson was wearing a bodycam at the time, which later proved that he acted in self-defense after Taylor shoved him twice. No criminal charges were filed against the former model, and he declined to pursue reckless endangerment charges against Taylor.
Ritchson claimed on Monday that Taylor had been “coming at [him] pretty aggressively.” When Ritchson tried to leave the area, he claimed that Taylor shoved him off the bike, so Ritchson retaliated.
Ritchson said that if it weren’t for the bodycam, he would likely “still be in jail.”
“It was a gift from God, I think, that I had that premonition or that intuition that I put [the camera] on, that I had it, that I could wear that. It changed the course of my life forever,” he added.
Ritchson also called the incident the “scariest thing [he’s] ever been through.”
“And then my kids had to experience that. It was really hard,” he continued. “I’m like, that guy doesn’t know how much my kids won’t ride with me anymore. He robbed me of that, man. Like, f*** that, dude. … Sometimes I have so much anger, I have so much resentment that I just can’t quite let go of. And I have nowhere to go because there’s no real resolution there. I just decided to let it go. But he still took a lot from me.”
Additionally, Ritchson said he was concerned about how the incident would impact his career.
“I was terrified because I thought my entire career tanked,” he explained. “You know, I had CEOs of studios calling, going, ‘What is this tape? Are we OK?’ Because I had deals everywhere. … [I thought,] ‘Oh dude, I’m never gonna work again.’ So anyway, it was a lot.”
