It’s been years since Paul Walker’s tragic death in 2013, but he is still a beloved figure among fans for his role in the Fast And Furious films and for being an all-around nice guy. So when his daughter, Meadow, shared a never-before-seen clip of her father and subsequently brought fans to tears, it dug up a complicated yet little-discussed aspect of Paul Walker’s legacy: his history of dating teenage girls.
Speaking of complicated legacies, the GOAT team talk about the part parts of Kobe Bryant’s life on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
While people may know Paul Walker for Fast And Furious, his bromance with Vin Diesel and his love of cars, many might not know about his personal life beyond him having a daughter with his ex-girlfriend, Rebecca Soteros.
At the time of his death, Paul was 40 and dating Jasmine Pilchard-Gosnell, who was 23. The 17-year age gap is a bit big but nothing we haven’t seen before in Hollywood.
But what does make this relationship problematic is when they first met. InTouch Weekly pointed out that Paul started dating Jasmine when she was 16 and he was 33, and the couple were living together at the time of his death.
Not only was Paul Walker dating a teenage girl, but the age of consent in California (where they lived) is 18, meaning Jasmine was a minor when they started dating. Make of that what you will.
Before Jasmine, Paul dated another woman, Aubrianna Atwell, when he was 28. According to a 2013 interview with The Las Vegas Sun when she was 28, the pair had known each other for a “dozen years” at the time of Paul’s death, had dated on-and-off for “several years,” and remained “in each other’s lives ever since.” Going backwards, this means Aubrianna was also 16 when she first met Paul.
While there’s no concrete proof of Paul having sexual relations with any of these women while they were underage teenage girls, it is worth pointing out why very little attention was given to these relationships beyond a few pieces from outlets like Study Breaks and Jalopnik.
This was particularly noticeable when the I Am Paul Walker documentary came out and dived into little more than his love of cars and being a good bloke. Surely his relationships are something worth looking into when putting together a documentary about his life.
It’s definitely worth asking why Paul Walker’s relationships with teenage girls was swept under the rug because this is just another example of people turning the other way when a Hollywood star is doing something incredibly suss.
It’s never easy to talk about the complicated legacy for a beloved celebrity who is no longer with us (see: Kobe Bryant), but leaving out darker aspects of someone’s past just to paint them in a good light does everyone an untruthful disservice. It’s complicated, and that’s okay.
We can remember Paul Walker for being a nice guy, for all the entertainment he’s brought to people with the Fast And Furious movies, and for what his daughter has done to preserve his memory in the years after his death, but we also can’t forget the more complicated parts of his past when he dated teenage girls or we’ll risk normalising this sort of problematic behaviour.
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