As one of the most famous people in the world, you might figure Adele could use the old “Don’t you know who I am?” line to pretty much do anything, right? Well, during her British TV special on Sunday night, she admitted that her fame once helped her escape a traffic ticket in L.A., though she was ready to face the consequences.
As People reports, during her ITV concert special An Evening with Adele, Samuel L. Jackson asked her if she’d ever used her “Adelity” — that’s ‘Adele celebrity’ — to get out of “a precarious situation, like a ticket.” Adele then told a story about being pulled over on LA’s 401 freeway shortly after moving there.
According to Adele, she was driving her rental car too slowly in the fast lane. When a police car pulled up behind her, she didn’t know what to do, so she simply stopped. The police officer started yelling at her with a megaphone, so she pulled over.
“I wind all my windows down as I’ve been taught to do before, especially if you get pulled over in America, you never know what they’re going to do,” she continued. “I handed him my British driver’s license, which might as well have been, like, a Blockbuster card, like he’d never seen one before. Also it looks nothing like me — it was me when I was like 17.”
The officer took the license back to his car, but when he came back, he was on the phone with his wife, who was, Adele said, “screaming at him…for pulling me over.”
“He’s like ‘I’m so sorry Adele, sorry, do whatever you need to do,'” she recalled. “It was hilarious, but yes, I did [use my celebrity]…I didn’t mean to! I was ready to go to jail.”
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