The stars' most infamous stalkers

Bullock has had multiple stalkers, but one really crossed the line. It was 2014 and she was inside her house when a stalker, James Corbett, broke in. The actress was home alone and hid in her closet. “I’m in the closet going, ‘This doesn’t end well,” she recalled on Red Table Talk. She added that she was extra scared because she had just watched '48 Hours' and 'Dateline'.

Bullock successfully called the police, who arrested the man and found he had eight guns registered to his name and had been stalking Bullock for days. “I wasn’t the same after that. I was unraveling,” Bullock said. In 2017, he was sentenced to five years probation and a ten-year protective order. But in 2018, he ended his own life in his home after an hours-long standoff with police.

Ricardo López was the stalker of the Icelandic singer, He worked as a pest exterminator in the US and eventually became obsessed with Björk. He didn’t want to be with her but he was furious about her brief relationship with a Black musician. In 1996, he made video diaries about her from his apartment.

One day, he mailed a letter bomb rigged with sulfuric acid to Bjork’s home in London. She was unharmed. But that same day he filmed one last video talking about her, which ended with him taking his own life on camera. According to his diaries, he hoped that he and Bjork would be united in heaven.

Schaeffer was a 21-year-old actress most famous for starring in the CBS comedy ‘My Sister Sam’ in 1986-1988. She had a fan two years younger than her, Robert John Bardo, who had been stalking her for three years. She replied to one of his letters and he was stopped by security trying to approach her with a knife once.

Bardo watched her in the film ‘Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills’ and was enraged about one scene where she appeared in bed with another actor. He wanted to punish her. He got a gun and hired a private detective to find her house. One day, he rang her doorbell and they had a short conversation. An hour later, he came back and he shot her point blank, killing her. The death helped lead to new California legislation to prevent stalking.

When she was still a teenager, fresh from her role in the seedy movie ‘Taxi Driver’ when she was just 12, a man called John Hinckley Jr developed an obsession. He identified with the outcast protagonist of the film, recently expelled from a white supremacist group for being too extreme. By 1980, Foster enrolled in Yale to pursue a normal life…. But he followed her to Connecticut.

Then, she started delivering handwritten notes to her doorstep. And in 1981, he wrote a final letter promising how he would do a “historical deed” in her name — killing Ronald Reagan. “I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you,” he wrote in the final letter. Indeed, he then fired a gun six times at the US President, but he was not a good shot.

The Welsh pop star, best known for her 2008 hit ‘Mercy,’ kind of fell off the map. Then, in 2020, she let fans know the horrifying reason why she had taken a 10-year hiatus. In a blog post, she revealed she was close to changing her name and moving to another country to become a florist due to the trauma.

“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country. I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a travelling vehicle. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and [violated] me,” she wrote. He later drugged her back at her home, but she can’t remember getting there. She explained the deep trauma of trying to recover from the kidnapping and abuse and never feeling safe.

In 2012, an uncle and nephew were arrested for plotting to kill and m u t i l a te Justin Bieber with garden sheers. They were operating under the instruction of a 45-year-old "super fan" called Dana Martin. He is serving two life sentences for violating and killing a 15-year-old girl, according to the Atlantic.

The Atlantic reports that Martin, who has an elaborate Bieber tattoo on his leg, wanted to keep Bieber’s private part as a trophy. But he was also mad at the singer too. "It isn't just so people will know who I am. It's because he changed, and that made me angry," Martin told journalist Kevin Gray. "He's a phony now.”

The singer and ‘American Idol’ judge had a female stalker for years. The woman, Paula Goodspeed (who was originally named Sandra but changed her name), even showed up for an audition at 'American Idol'. Speaking on Sirius XM, Paula Abdul said she begged producers not to let her on. “I said, ‘This girl is a stalker of mine. Please do not let her in.’ I was shaking,'” she said. But she claimed producers let her audition because it would “be fun for them to cause me stress.”

Then, in 2008, Adul got flowers with a note from Goodspeed. Sources told People magazine she had received more than 100 letters, phone calls, and unwanted visits, but the flowers really shook Abdul. Three days later, her stalker was found dead in her car in front of Abdul’s house. She appeared to have had an intentional overdose.

Image: American Idol, Fox

The actress, best known for ‘iCarly,’ had a truly deranged stalker as well. Speaking on Whitney Cumming’s podcast, she nonchalantly laid out all the gory details. It all started one a guy started burying things in her backyard over days, like a lunchbox, knives, and a rope. She didn’t notice at the time but he was pacing around back there with a gun as well, according to security footage.

Then, one night, she was out and police called to say someone had died at her house. He had ended his life. Cosgrove said police still haven’t “put together” what the man was doing there. “It freaked me out really bad,” she said. Shortly after, she moved out of the house.

In a sense, the Beatlemania phenomenon ended in tragedy due to stalkers. The most famous incident, of course, is John Lennon’s assassination outside of his New York apartment. Not that killer Mark David Chapman was a fan, but he became obsessed with Lennon’s statements and popularity.

Lesser known is that George Harrison was also attacked by a violent stalker. In 1999, Michael Abram broke into his home with a knife and also had a sword stolen from the singer’s garden. Abram stabbed him around 40 times, puncturing his lung but missing his heart by a hair. The attack was stopped when Harrison’s wife, Olivia, hit Abram on the head with a lamp and called the police.

This singer’s mega-success has also brought her a huge stalker problem. “The threats on her life have become so persistent that her security team installed facial recognition software at the venues she performs in to specifically distinguish her stalkers from her fans,” Jake Brennan, host of the ‘Disgraceland’ podcast said in 2022.

In 2024, the accused stalker David Crowe was arrested three times in the same week for harrassing her. Other violent mega-fans have broken into her luxury homes and driven hundreds of miles to send her love letters. “You get enough stalkers trying to break into your house and you kind of start prepping for bad things,” Swift wrote in Elle in 2019. At least six men have been charged with stalking her, according to the NY Post.

While this story doesn’t contain the same level of violence as the others, it is deeply disturbing. The ‘SNL’ alum was the target of obsession by a woman who sent him many letters. She was arrested for breaking into his home in 2021, which he shared with his mom. A few days before she was arrested, she had issued a press release saying she and Davidson had gotten married.

In his Netflix special, Davidson later shared some of the more disturbing details of the whole situation. Although he warned his mom he had a stalker, she tended to ignore the threat, he said. One night, the stalker rang the doorbell. "My mom answers and goes, ‘Hey, who are you?’ Stalker goes, ‘I’m Pete’s friend.’ My mom, of course, goes, ‘Well, come on in…' Stalker proceeds to watch Grey’s Anatomy with my mom and [her friend] Terry for three hours,” he said. The crowd laughed at the story, but it was scary enough for him to tell his mom to call the police that night.

It was a seven-year ordeal for this British singer, songwriter and actress. And it ended in a truly terrifying way. It started in 2009 when a man on Twitter claimed he had written one of her hit songs. From there, she started to get abusive letters and threats. “He would drop off these letters at my record company, my management offices, my sister’s shop, my flat,” she told The Observer. But she said the authorities didn’t really take the threats seriously.

Then one night, while she was fast asleep, the man broke into her bedroom. He later told police that he intended to s t a b her in the face. Thankfully, she had a friend over who managed to push him out. “There was this second outside my kids’ room when I was terrified to go in, in case of what I might find,” she said but, thankfully, they were fine.

This is an odd one. The late-night talk show host was the target of stalking by… a priest from Boston. Court papers showed menacing postcards and letters, some written on parish letterhead, by a Father David Ajemian, according to the New York Times. Both O’Brien and his stalker attended Harvard, and the priest admitted stalking O’Brien for 25 years since then.

Letters were quite violent and also referenced the priesthood. One of them said: “I’m told by some of those officious little usher people that you’re overbooked. Is this the way you treat your most dangerous fans? You owe me big-time, pal. I want a public confession before I even consider giving you absolution.” In 2010, the same priest was arrested for harassing a Boston TV news journalist.

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