♪ Comin' at you crazy ♪
[energetic hip hop music continues]
-[crowd cheering] -[camera shutters snapping]
♪ So hot, so hot ♪
[cheering continues]
All celebrities need their fans.
But there's a thin line between fan...
and stalker.
You know, there's a negative side to
everything we do in life.
With all of the good stuff, there has to be some
bad stuff going on.
[unnerving piano playing]
[Ashanti] He started sending pictures of my car.
Like, that is like, OK --
this is getting serious now.
[Scaachi] The problem is of a larger scale than I think
we hear about.
[Dana Martin speaking]
[Scaachi] He wanted to marry Miley Cyrus, and she was only 16.
[Dr. Pinsky] Selena was killed by the president of her fan club.
My brother believed Taylor Swift was his soulmate.
He wrote forty letters.
"I'll have one goal in mind, to push Taylor to kill herself."
[911 operator] 911 emergency.
[caller speaking]
[woman] He's in love with this girl named Sandy.
[911 operator #2] What's your name, ma'am?
[caller speaking]
There are still holes in the law.
[woman] My stalker appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
[court official] Counterman versus Colorado.
These are messages that came to me for six years of my life
that were clearly threatening.
Are they serious right now?
[incoherent cheering]
-Calm down -- -[camera shutters snapping]
[man] Ashanti!
[man #2] In his mind, thought he was married to Sandra Bullock.
Murder-for-hire plot targeting pop star Justin Bieber.
[investigator] You only seen her on TV?
[Sandra] I hear someone banging on the door.
[camera shutters snapping]
[crowd cheering]
A lot of people think fame is gonna be
fun, interesting, glamorous, whatever.
They're gonna be -- find happiness, right?
One of the downsides, however,
when you're out there in public so long,
people can get strange obsessions.
[crowd cheering]
[Scaachi] When you're famous, you have to have fans.
That is what sustains your career, and it sustains
the longevity of your career.
But there's a wide spectrum of what kind of fan you can be.
You can be a casual viewer.
You can be someone who likes them.
Then you can be fans that defend their favorite celebrity
tooth and nail.
They harass other people if they feel like their
preferred celebrity has not been taken care of.
And then you keep moving along that spectrum,
and then you have people who become obsessive
about a celebrity, stalking,
sometimes physical violence.
As a physician, it never occurred to me that I would be
even well-known enough to have a stalker.
[man] Hey, Dr. Drew, how are you?
In 2010, I had discovered something on MySpace.
This guy was sort of actually accessing my MySpace thread,
accusing me of things that seemed bizarre, so I went
downstream into his MySpace.
There was all this material about me, how I was tormenting
him, and I thought, oh, this poor guy, he's psychotic
and he's sort of delusional about me.
Fast-forward probably nine months, I get a summons from
the Santa Monica court to go to small claims court because
somebody claimed that I put a device in his tooth
through which I could communicate with his body
and cause him to have erections whenever I wished.
I don't know him.
I never met this man.
And I looked at that summons, and I thought,
"Are you kidding me?" And I just threw it away.
Then I got another summons
saying, "If you don't show up next week,
"we're gonna find you guilty
and fine you to the full extent."
And I go home to my wife,
and I go, "I guess I'm gonna have to go to Santa Monica."
She goes, "You're not -- the guy's crazy.
"You're not gonna go to Santa Monica.
"He could attack you.
Who knows what he's got planned."
She goes, "Let me look at this."
Found a website with his name on it.
She found...
lengthy, elaborate descriptions of where we lived, coming to
get my children and kill them
and eat me and my children in front of my wife.
So she called the police. Local police came to our house.
My wife goes to the detective -- she goes,
"Do you see what this is? Do you see?
"He's talking about killing my children.
You have to get him because if you don't, I will."
They did arrest this man.
He was a homeless person, meth addict,
was spending the nights at the library using
their computers at night to develop all this stuff.
No idea why he got fixated on me.
And he's not my only stalker. I've had other stalkers.
I've had legal problems because of stalkers.
And I think generally the public doesn't understand
it has real dangerous potential.
The stalking episode that really changed how
we approached celebrity stalking was Rebecca Schaeffer.
[Scaachi] Rebecca Schaeffer was an actress.
She was on a soap called "Guiding Light"
and a sitcom as well that was on CBS.
Rebecca Schaeffer, when she was
in the TV show "My Sister Sam"...
I used to live with my aunt and uncle in Oregon,
but a few months ago I changed that.
...she had this very innocent, very lovely
ingenue-type character.
What if this makes up for the haircut you gave me when I was three.
[Traci] And very sweet and innocent,
and she just was America's sweetheart.
But Rebecca had absolutely no idea that there was somebody
that was wanting to meet her.
[Dr. Pinsky] Robert John Bardo was a loner, had a history of having been
placed in foster care. He never finished high school.
He became a janitor, and in 1985,
he was psychiatrically hospitalized and received
a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
[Traci] So Robert Bardo, he just fell in love with this character
in the TV show, "My Sister Sam."
And he thought, this is who she is.
"I need to meet her."
So he started sending letters to the studios.
And she actually answered one of them and wrote back saying,
"Yours was one of the nicest letters I got."
[Traci] But that's back in the day where, you know, those
press kits were sent out and, you know, a full 8x10 picture of
her with her signature.
So he believed that she was reading the letters that
he was writing.
And so he decided to come to visit her.
And when he couldn't get on the set,
he hired a private investigator
to get her personal information through DMV.
So Robert Bardo decided he was gonna go to her home,
and he was going to introduce himself.
She was gonna recognize him from the letters, and they were
gonna live happily ever after.
So he knocked on her door.
She opened it, but she didn't know who he was.
She told him, "This isn't appropriate.
You have to leave."
And he was very surprised by her reaction.
And that seemed to mark a turning point for him
and how he felt about her.
[Traci] And he did leave.
But he came back about an hour or two later,
and she opened the door,
and he shot her point blank in the chest.
And she died on her way to the hospital.
So Robert Bardo was arrested, and he was brought back here
for trial, and he's still in prison in California.
And what was so tragic about this
is that people knew about it.
Prior to him coming out here, Robert Bardo had written
a letter to his sister.
You know, and his sister didn't know,
you know, what to do with it.
He had his brother purchase a firearm for him.
His brother just thought he was gonna do
some target practice.
Found the management company that was, you know,
receiving the letters.
You know, nobody knew what to do at the time.
In response to Rebecca's murder,
California established the first anti-stalking laws.
Multiple other states took this up as well.
LAPD formed a threat management unit to be able to better
respond and assess these sorts of threats.
But celebrity stalking is still incredibly pervasive.
There have been a lot of celebrities
who've had stalkers.
[Dr. Pinsky] Six years after Rebecca's murder,
Selena was killed by the president of her fan club.
Another performer has a ton of stalkers --
that's Taylor Swift.
Justin Bieber has had a number of stalkers over the years.
[officer] Do you know whose room that you entered?
Yes. No.
[Dr. Pinsky] Including one, I recall,
who was in his bed in his hotel room when he arrived home.
[Dr. Pinsky] Sonya Deville, a WWE superstar, had a stalker who broke into
her home and waited for hours with a knife, plastic zip ties,
duct tape, and mace to try to kidnap her.
[Dr. Pinsky] These are common problems,
but we got to do something about this.
It's important for people to understand
the consequences of fame,
because it can drift into real trouble.
Every person that is in the public eye...
if they are famous enough,
will have stalkers.
Give it up for Ashanti!
[Ashanti] My name originates in Ghana.
It means "the women," like, "women of strength."
In this particular tribe, the Ashanti tribe,
the women kind of, like, run things.
So I was like, yes!
You know, my mom named me something really cool.
I never, like, woke up and said, "Hey, I want to be
an artist -- I want to be a musician."
That was just never my thing. I went to college.
I was majoring in business
and minoring in forensic science,
so music really wasn't, like, the focus.
Music kind of happened accidentally.
I was singing and doing chores in my living room, and my mom
came downstairs, and she's yelling at me,
and she's like, "I thought I told you,
"don't listen to the radio while you're vacuuming
and while you're doing your chores."
And I'm like, "I wasn't listening to the radio.
I was singing," you know?
And she's like, "Wait, that was you singing?"
And I'm like, "Yeah."
And she called my dad and just came into this thing.
And I just started doing, like, local talent shows.
You're gonna love this next person that I'm about to bring out here.
So please, let's get to our seats. Can we get --
And it kind of introduced me to the world.
You know, I've been doing this since I was about 14,
just working, you know, with Ja Rule and Fat Joe and Big Pun
and J-Lo and things like that.
When I'm with Ja Rule and with Fat Joe and, you know, all of
these records and, you know, I'm like the little sister
and I'm kind of like
creeping up in the -- you know what I mean?
So my first album, "Ashanti," it just came from a place of me
being a young girl going through
all young girls go through.
You know, I was just able to write my thoughts out to
create an emotion for people, kind of like a catalyst.
When you can't really put the words together,
you can put on an Ashanti song and say,
"This is how I feel." You know?
I am so overwhelmed with just the reaction to the music.
And went number one on the Billboard Indie Chart --
is amazing.
You know, the fact that we came in top 10.
[crowd cheering]
[Ashanti] It makes me feel like, wow.
You know, I've accomplished so much.
I have a lot of family love and support.
My mom is my manager.
Is that right? Is that mom right over there?
That's mom over there.
[reporter] Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
I have to say, I have some of the most amazing fans
in the world. So I always try to be gracious.
I always try to be courteous.
But sometimes it does get a bit...invasive.
So in 2009, I was actually playing Dorothy
in "The Wiz" on Broadway.
And my mom was getting, like, these pictures.
[notification sound]
-Texts. -[notification sound]
It just progressively turned into something deadly.
First time that I heard I had a stalker,
my mom was getting, like, these pictures and texts.
[notification alert]
And it was just like, "Wait a minute.
Well, that's weird."
[Det. Mead] With the advancement of social media and the internet,
it has allowed individuals a lot more access to
a person's personal information.
You can find out that person's cellphone number,
where they live, potentially find out relatives.
If you try hard enough, you can find out pretty much
anything about anyone.
So Ashanti doesn't know the person,
but he was sending messages to her mom.
[Ashanti] Some of the messages were really just about
wanting to be with me and meant to be together.
Some of his messages include what sounds like some
mild delusions about having had a previous relationship,
even though they had not.
[Scaachi] A parasocial relationship is when somebody has
a relationship with a celebrity, effectively they feel like
they know this person and they understand this person,
but that person who's on screen or on your Spotify playlist
or on TV, they don't know you. And so they're not having
a relationship with you. It's just entirely one-sided.
[Ashanti] So he was sending...
lewd photos.
It makes you feel a little...
scared.
This is like another line being crossed.
[Traci] For somebody that is not a celebrity,
our advice is to say, you know, "I don't want this."
You know, "Stop this."
But at a celebrity level, that is actually not something
that we advise. We advise no contact.
You think that, "Oh, well, I can just block them on a phone."
Well, you really can't do that because they just create new
memberships and new numbers.
It spiders out.
Stalking has been characterized and categorized
various ways over the years.
Two common categories from the past
is simple stalking and erotomania.
And erotomania is a very specific syndrome
of a high-profile female being pursued by a man who's not
in her social circle, who believes she's in love with him
and that they're gonna get married
or he's in love with her.
Another tale of this is what happened to one of Hollywood's
highest-paid actresses.
[911 dispatcher and caller speaking]
[Traci] On June 8, 2014, Sandra Bullock came home
about 1:00 in the morning, went to sleep...
-[banging] -...and then she kept hearing more commotion.
So she got a little nervous, and she got up.
She walks out of her bedroom,
and she realizes somebody's in the home.
[suspenseful music playing]
She runs back into her bedroom.
[Traci] When officers stop the man on the stairs,
he identifies himself as Joshua Corbett.
He's 39 years old, from Los Angeles.
And he tells them that he's --
he's not a threat. He's not there to harm her.
Detectives learned that he'd actually
been there several days,
walking around the house, looking at the layout.
He wanted to show her that her home wasn't safe.
So he jumped over, you know, the gate and tried to
open the windows, open the doors, and then a lot
of patio doors are not particularly secure, and he was
able to pop it out, and he got in.
The fact that Joshua Corbett actually scaled a wall,
made it through security, came into the house
really shows potential for serious consequences.
What was more interesting was he had a little notebook,
and he had pictures of her.
He had writings to her and poems.
He had a letter for her, and the letter was really just
his love for her, and that it was, you know,
written in the stars, and that he wanted to take care of her
and her son.
[Scaachi] And the letter was signed, "Always and forever,
love, your husband."
But he is not her husband.
She doesn't know who he is. He is a stranger.
The fact that Joshua Corbett actually believed he was
married to Sandra, that's erotomania.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[Scaachi] Authorities went to Joshua's house,
and they found that he had
a lot of ammunition, several rounds of ammunition,
and several weapons,
including an illegal machine gun.
[Traci] We also found out that he had a hanger at Burbank Airport,
and we found pictures of her everywhere.
He cut out pictures, and he put them in frames with the family.
[Scaachi] He'd also been writing on the walls and on his furniture
about his plans to sexually assault her.
[Dr. Pinsky] On one hand, he claims he's married to Sandra Bullock.
On the other hand, he's going to violently
sexually violate her.
He had appeared at her house for three nights
before he actually made entry.
[Dr. Pinsky] This is like Unabomber stuff.
This is a severe psychosis.
It's delusional.
But this really shows that adulation and adoration
flips into "I want to be with that person,"
or "I believe that person wants to be with me" --
we're in big trouble.
And Ashanti could end up in a similar situation
with her stalker.
This man initially was sending sexually explicit messages
to her mom, which included a photo of
his exposed genitalia, along with details about him
masturbating to Ashanti videos.
[Ashanti] And obviously my family, along with me,
it's kind of affecting everyone.
They didn't ask to be a part of this, you know?
A lot of people often counsel women in every context,
famous or not, to just ignore men when they harass them,
and that doesn't work. That often makes them angrier.
[Dr. Pinsky] And that's what happened here.
Ashanti's mom ignores the texts, and even calls, from the stalker
until she tells him to not call again.
But then he started sending pictures of my car,
you know, parked in the front of the theater.
He started sending pictures of my house, like aerial shots
and shots of the front door.
[notification alert]
Okay, this is serious, serious now.
And that can turn into something deadly.
We made the decision, my team, my parents, my family,
to kind of get law involved.
[siren wailing]
[Dr. Pinsky] They did arrest this young man.
He was an employee in the gym in Indiana
and described in the media as a wannabe rapper.
The way that the story goes is I was doing a show in Chicago,
and he felt like I locked eyes with him, and that was
his open door.
In 2009, this goes to trial.
He claims that he was just sex texting and joking
when he sent the graphic images.
But I seriously doubt that.
And even if it started that way,
doesn't mean it will end the same.
There is no way to predict when a man will turn abusive
and if some superfan is gonna lose it on them.
Part of why they're trying to get to this person is because
these men seem to believe that they have an ownership over
these women romantically, and they want to own a piece of
them, and they want to break into the body.
It's a larger kind of ownership and a larger entitlement.
So this man's found guilty and put in prison for two years
for unwanted sexual messages and stalking.
So Ashanti did exactly the right thing.
Get out of there, get law enforcement.
Because if you're waiting for the violent crime, it could be
way too late -- for everybody.
[Caitlyn] You look at, you know, John Hinckley, for example.
He attempted to assassinate the president because he wanted
to get the attention of Jodie Foster.
Like, that is a delusional thought that led to
an incredibly dangerous behavior.
You know, Chapman, same thing, wanted to get attention
and ended up killing John Lennon.
Justin Bieber is another pop star
who almost lost his life to a stalker.
[Sgt. Pinon] I worked for the Department of Corrections for ten years.
Dana Martin, he was serving a life sentence.
He had actually strangled, with a necktie,
a 15-year-old girl in Vermont.
Dana Martin, he's not just a murderer, he's also a huge
Justin Bieber fan.
One morning, he wanted to talk to me personally in private.
Right away, he started talking about his tattoo
of Justin Bieber.
And he went on and on about how he's been trying to make
contact with Justin Bieber.
He said that he had written letters to Bieber were before
and that he hadn't answered.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Dr. Pinsky] Because he doesn't get the response he was imagining
from these letters, he feels rejected
and upset and irritable.
And that's when he started telling us a story.
[Sgt. Pinon] He had arranged for two individuals
to travel to the East Coast, and he gave them a hit list.
[Dr. Pinsky] Dana persuaded a former inmate who was released and his nephew
to go and kidnap Justin Bieber...
...and castrate him.
And murder him.
The perpetrators accidentally crossed into Canadian territory,
and when they were trying to come back through the US border,
they were stopped and taken in.
[Sgt. Pinon] Their vehicle was searched.
They were able to find shears and some neckties.
Those were the tools necessary to commit the murders.
In my opinion, I don't think Dana wanted to actually murder
Justin Bieber, right?
Because if he does, you know, he can't get no more
music from him, no more news on what's going on with him.
My impression is that Dana wanted...
Justin Bieber to know who he was.
He wanted him to, like, "Hey, you know, I am here,
I am a huge fan.
That is psychopathic.
So psychopathic thinking is also hard to follow.
So in his mind, in the history books, Justin Bieber's name
and his name would be aligned.
That's as close to a union as he's gonna get.
And since he's a psychopath, any union is kind of the same.
[Dana Martin speaking]
Celebrities are a common target of stalking.
but they are by no means the only people that are stalked.
[Det. Mead] We see the whole gamut.
We see people that are extremely famous, like Taylor Swift
and Usher and Miley Cyrus, but we also see people
trying to make it into the music industry as well that
have developed stalkers as well.
If you don't have that level of stardom, I think sometimes
it's not always on the forefront of their minds
that this is a possibility that could occur to them.
My name is Coles Walen. I'm a musician,
singer, songwriter, and performer.
Coles Walen is a rising star.
This next song is a love song.
It's called "Romeo and Juliet."
I performed as a child.
I play piano and guitar and was singing, so I've been doing it
a long time.
So when I graduated from college, I bought a camper,
I moved into it, and I toured around the country in it for
six years, just playing show after show, day after day.
I got to go on tour with Pat Benatar,
which was so awesome.
I also played Akon.
-Just so y'all know... -[crowd cheering]
...she's the shit.
[Coles] I opened for Joan Jett in Phoenix.
So when my career was really coming up, social media was
our primary means of advertising.
Here we are, on our way to the music video shoot.
We're headed to Pasadena, California.
Now we are on our way to Nashville.
Yeah.
Not just the shows that you were advertising,
but it was more like yourself
that you were advertising on there.
[laughing]
People were consuming any little detail that they could get
about your life as a musician.
And I remember we would make these videos that we would post
to social media about, like, our day on the road
and our green room backstage, all the way out until the show.
Now we're tired, see?
[Coles] The more personal you got, the more people would come out,
because they -- more people felt they knew you.
We just finished the bathtub scene for the music video, and...
[Ashanti] I think social media is awesome.
I think it's awesome to be able to let millions of people know,
"Hey, I'm gonna be at this concert, you know, make sure
you get your tickets. I'd love to see you guys."
But also understanding that there are a lot of cons.
Unfortunately, in the day of texting and social media
and DMs and the way anybody can access celebrity now,
that is just as powerful as back in the day actually seeing
somebody face-to-face.
And it gives the fan the illusion of a relationship,
and that's how people can start to...
misconstrue what's going on and then stalk.
[Coles] I actually had some people in the industry that were
pushing me to be more open about my personal life
on social media.
It just felt so foreign to me, you know?
But it worked. You could see it.
You could literally see the number of fans rising.
At that time, my Facebook friend requests were set to
automatic accept because we were getting hundreds a day.
And it would have been totally impractical for me to weave through them.
So I accepted everybody, gratefully.
You don't actually know the people that you're
communicating with.
[notification alert]
[text message swoosh]
I started to receive messages...
[text message swoosh]
...from a man that I'd never met claiming that he was a promoter
in Denver, which is where I live.
And he's putting together a concert for relief
from a natural disaster.
And he wants to ask me to be a part of it.
The first time he contacted me, his profile did not have
a photo attached.
And then he had messaged some other things
that turned me off.
[multiple text message swooshes]
They did not feel alarming enough to me at that time
to do anything other than ignore it
and hope that it would go away.
-[guitar playing] -[crowd cheering]
Thank you so much.
[Paul] Coles was moving forward with her life, and then he began
sending messages on Facebook and these kinds of
social media platforms.
[text message swoosh]
[Coles] The messages weren't about music.
They were more like we were in a relationship, and we were
chatting back and forth about daily things.
"Can I pick you up a coffee on my way home from work today?"
"Oh, you've been out of touch for too long.
"We decided we weren't gonna, you know, play this
game anymore." These kinds of things.
[Dr. Pinsky] The stalking research is pretty clear that even negative
contact or any contact will inflame the stalking
and can reinitiate it in somebody who's stopped.
The advice is to not add oxygen to the fire
and hopefully it dies out.
But then the messages seemed to indicate
that he was following her.
[text message swoosh]
[Coles] The longer that I went without responding, the more
clearly aggravated and upset he was getting at me.
It was very scary to receive messages like that.
[text message swoosh]
[Paul] Of course, you could say,
"Well, I'm gonna block this person."
But this person then would move to another platform or another
identity and continually try to get messages through to
Coles successfully.
[multiple text message swooshes]
The messages extended for weeks, months,
ultimately years,
and these messages became very, very threatening.
I was performing all the time then, so my whereabouts were
public knowledge.
[Paul] She didn't know what this person looked like,
he could have been any man out there in the audience.
There might be somebody out there who wants to see her die.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Scaachi] Thirty years ago, it was a lot harder to get access to
somebody that you liked, an actor or a singer.
There were more steps to find out where people live.
Now you can find all that a lot easier.
If you post online,
you know, there's often metadata about where you are.
If you're a celebrity and you have a tour schedule,
then I know exactly what city you're in all the time and I can
probably try to figure out what hotel you're at.
It is scary because it's really easy.
And part of harassment online
is in trying to push into the real world.
I have been harassed on the internet for 15 years.
I've had people try to track my IP address so they can see
where I'm posting from, so they can find where I live.
And you don't know which online threats will manifest in
reality, so there's always a lingering threat of violence.
[Coles] I was getting pretty fearful.
It was scary enough that I should ask for help.
So we called the police.
When this cop showed up, he only saw one screen,
one screen of messages,
and immediately called his supervisor and was like,
"This is a serious case of harassment."
And everything after that moved very fast.
[Paul] Law enforcement officers were able to piece together that
he had a criminal record.
His name is Billy Ray Counterman.
He was prosecuted federally for interacting with another woman,
threatened to kill her, to rip her throat out.
[Coles] He was still on supervised released from his last arrest
from the woman that he was harassing before me.
Now like cold reality sets in and I am just like, paralyzed by
shock and fear.
I learned that law enforcement calls stalking "slow homicide."
And the detective said, "I'm really worried for you.
"I'm really worried for your personal safety.
Do you carry a weapon?" And I said, "No."
And she said, "We offer a concealed carry permit class here.
"You should enroll right away.
"I've been through this before. I've seen victims.
You don't want to be one of those."
They went to his house that night,
and they told him that he was under arrest for harassment.
And he said, "Is this because of Coles Walen?"
And when I heard that, it was just like bone-chilling.
[Paul] Counterman was charged with three counts of violating
a Colorado anti-threat statute.
[Coles] The detective said that Billy Ray Counterman
believed that we were in a relationship for many years.
He thought that I was the one who was mentally unhinged
and that he was saving me from committing suicide, that we had
been married a few times and divorced a few times.
And that every time I went off the cliff, he would have to
talk me down for my suicidal tendencies.
And he had tried to leave me several times, but every time
he tried to leave me, I would, you know, claw him back.
It's ridiculous.
And then the detective told me that he gets let back out
onto the street while he awaits trial.
[Paul] They were able to help Coles get a restraining order
forbidding Countermen from going to any of her shows,
but the enforceability of something like that, I think,
is really open to question.
Restraining orders, at the end of the day,
are famously pieces of paper that somebody can just
walk right through.
They require him to wear an ankle bracelet so they know
where he is at all times.
So he gets out. He's on the street.
I'm on the street.
Within the first couple of days, I get a phone call
from the police station.
[phone ringing]
And they're like, "Ms. Walen, are you at home?"
I said, "No, I'm not."
And they're like, "You cannot go home.
He's at your house."
And when I heard that, I mean, just like all the air
leaves the car. Like, I cannot breathe.
I do not know what to do.
I don't live alone at this point.
There's someone else. I have a roommate.
Like, I've got to go home.
Like, I've got to...help, you know?
And while I'm sitting there trying to figure out
what to do, they call me back.
And it turns out they had misnotated our addresses.
They had his home address as my home address.
So he's at his house,
not my house.
But the -- the damage is done by that point, you know?
I mean, I am, like, on high alert at this point
and I start to develop
this fearful awareness of my surroundings,
always looking over my shoulder, always looking out the door
before I go out of the car, always trying to
see what's around me. Where's the nearest exit?
You become afraid to shop for groceries.
You become afraid to walk to your car.
Like, you cannot go through normal life without fear.
Think about trying to be on a stage when there are hundreds
of people there and you don't know many of them.
You're totally exposed.
I have a really hard time at this point being in places
where I can't see what's around me,
like on a stage with stage lights in my face.
And it's just getting harder and harder for me to
post where I'll be and at what time.
And it all just came to a head
at the show that we were playing in Dallas.
I'm playing and I'm just
like starting to...
sweat and, like, see spots.
Can't really breathe well, and I'm just, like,
freaking out. And I...
just left -- I had to leave the stage,
which I've never done in all my years of performing.
And...I go back there,
and I just sobbed for, like, hours,
like, a couple hours, because it just felt so terrible.
And I thought, like, maybe it's not worth it.
Like, maybe nothing is worth feeling this terrible.
Yeah, it sucked. It was terrible.
[producer speaking]
Thanks, yeah, it was terrible.
I canceled all my shows.
I canceled all my public appearances.
I couldn't -- I just couldn't do it.
And I was very quickly just sort of dropped off the circuit
that I had been performing at.
So it was really hard.
♪ Years go by in fear, and joy gets small. ♪
♪ I'm too tired to sing or play at all. ♪
When it becomes impossible to live the life that you've been
living for so long, you know, what do you do?
It's insane that one person could have that much power
over somebody they don't know.
♪ It would have been easy ♪
♪ to fade away. ♪
[Caitlyn] Cases generally very rarely go to trial.
In stalking cases, it becomes a little bit more difficult
because you have to convince the jury that, like, this is
a terrible thing that happened to a person, not a terrible
thing that happened to this faceless, nameless celebrity.
♪ I'm not the... ♪
[Caitlyn] This is a person who was deeply affected by the behavior that
the defendant committed.
But ultimately, the best person to say these things and to
convey these things to a jury
is the person who they happened to.
♪ A little stronger ♪
[Caitlyn] It is hard because, you know, sometimes you're
being re-traumatized by seeking justice for yourself.
[Coles] The state of Colorado wanted to press charges.
They thought that this was stalking.
And they were pretty sure that they could prove that it was
stalking, but not if I did not agree to testify.
So I had this choice in front of me.
Do I participate in the trial, or do I not?
And I decided, ultimately, I decided to do it.
But if you asked me now,
after everything I've been through
to do it,
I unfortunately would tell you no,
because it's just too painful.
[gentle piano music playing]
So finally, we go to trial, and they put you in this
protected little area before you actually
walk into the courtroom.
You're not supposed to actually see
this guy until you get into the courtroom.
But they didn't do a great job of that.
So as I'm walking up in between, like,
the police officer and the lawyer
who's pressing the charges for the state of Colorado,
he's also walking down the hall.
And I come face-to-face with this guy
who's been harassing me for years of my life.
I just felt like, god, he just won.
Like, he's right here.
He has access to my actual physical self,
in this tiny room, like, he -- he did it.
He got to me, finally.
It is...
totally undescribable what that does to you as a person.
When a particularly delusional stalker receives any sort of
contact that he believes is personal and specific
between the celebrity and he or herself,
that inflames the stalking.
Any contact.
[Coles] And then, like cherry on top, he gets to listen to me.
For a day and a half, I'm on that stand.
He's sitting at a table right here, and I'm on
the witness stand, and we're facing each other.
And I'm talking about how much he got to me,
how affected I was.
And then here comes my sister, who also has to talk about
how affected I was and how it affected her life.
And he just gets to listen to all this stuff about my life.
I just kept thinking, "God, like this is so unfair."
[Paul] At the trial, the defense was saying, "Oh, you're distraught
and you're going overboard," trying to suggest that Coles
had been some crazy woman who couldn't stand the heat
and needed to get out of the kitchen
or something like that.
[Coles] She's trying to make it seem like I am
overreacting, you know?
Did he send some creepy messages?
Yeah, he did.
Were they, like, maybe a little inappropriate?
Yeah, they were kind of inappropriate.
But was it scary? Of course not.
It wasn't scary. Like, she's just overreacting.
There's no reason to get the law involved.
The burden is all on me, all on the state of Colorado.
And the jury goes out, and we're waiting,
waiting, waiting, waiting.
It's taking a long time, like, longer than we had hoped.
And so they finally say, "OK, we got a verdict."
We all file back into the courtroom,
and the jury comes out, and the judge says,
you know, "Have you reached a verdict?"
"Yeah, we have."
And like, as he's handing over this paper to the judge,
I'm watching it, and it's like, everything slows down.
And I'm just thinking like, "Oh my God, like that's my life
right there on that piece of paper."
Nobody else in this room has more to lose than me.
He just heard from me, from all my family,
from my best friends, like he knows me now.
He really knows me the way that he wanted to know me.
If that says innocent, like, we leave here together,
and we will just go back out on the street, equal citizens.
And, like, he's handing him the paper.
It took so long.
The judge finally gets the paper,
and he just unravels it.
[suspenseful orchestral music builds]
[music stops]
[Coles] The judge, he's like,
"We find the defendant guilty."
And I just remember, like, we just, like, sobbed.
We just cried.
And he got handcuffed, and he left,
and he went to jail.
Counterman was convicted of
making threatening communications.
He was sentenced to four and a half years
in prison in Colorado,
and that finally gave Coles some assurance that Counterman
couldn't be a threat to her.
[Dr. Pinsky] When we hear about these stalking cases,
we often learn about them from the perspective of the victim,
the pain and the suffering caused.
But I, having worked in a psychiatric hospital
for many years, I would say to understand a behavior,
you have to see it from the perspective of
the perpetrator, especially if you want that behavior to stop.
Probably the best way to get to know what's going on
in the mind of a stalker is to get to the people that
know them best and who see what's happening.
[Larilyn] I think it's important to understand how people get
into this situation like this and some of the behind scenes,
things that were not in the paper.
My name is Larilyn Adair.
I have five older brothers.
Mark is the youngest of the boys,
and then almost six years difference between he and I.
We kind of lived in a little bit of a country town
in Georgia. He was always very smart.
Never had to study for a test. Brought home straight A's.
Mark was...
the musician, the artist,
and he had a lot of girlfriends back in high school.
And they were like, "Oh, you're Mark's sister.
You're Mark's sister."
He was really into a lot of Jimi Hendrix music, a lot of
Lynyrd Skynyrd. He played really well.
I could hear the door closed in his room.
He'd have a couple of buddies in there.
They'd be jamming.
[rock music plays]
Their Friday and Saturday night get-togethers were pretty loud.
After high school, my dad told him that he had to go.
He stayed with one of my other brothers,
supposedly to get a job.
Over the years, we noticed that he was a little different.
He would come up with these conversations about UFOs,
and he was very believable,
but then it came a time where he said that he went up
into the mothership,
and they examined his body, and they sent him back.
I don't believe in that, but he did,
and so I just kind of went along with it.
The preoccupation with aliens and aliens coming is
sort of delusional, and I think it's important to
sort of point out what delusions are.
Delusions are thoughts that are not based in reality that
somebody really can't be convinced out of,
and they often involve what's happening in the world
in relation to me.
Some celebrity is speaking directly to me
through the radio or television.
And you can see, I mean, you can sort of reason
how that kind of distorted thinking can easily
start to preoccupy somebody.
And particularly when you feel that that person either
owes you something, or is causing you something,
or is gonna save you from something.
[ominous tones playing]
[Larilyn] In 2009, Mark lived in a little fishing cottage.
Somewhere along the line, he fell in love.
Mark comes over to the house one day and says,
"I need Mom's diamond ring." And I said, "Whoa."
So I said, "Why do you need it?"
He said, "Well, I'm gonna get engaged."
And I was like, "Oh, really?"
And kind of excited for him because he was in his 50s
and finally gonna get married.
And that's when he told me that he had been talking to someone
online and that he wanted to send her something in the mail,
send her a ring.
So I asked Mark, I said, "What is her name?"
And he didn't want to tell me at first,
and finally he said, "Miley."
And I was like, "Well, what's her last name?"
And he didn't want to tell me at all.
And then I kind of figured it out.
[ominous chord strike]
It was Miley Cyrus.
[Scaachi] Miley Cyrus is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus,
and she used to be a mainstay on the Disney Channel...
[upbeat music plays]
...on a show called "Hannah Montana."
I love her show. It's so, like, inspiring.
[Scaachi] She was on every backpack
in every middle school for a while.
Yeah, she's, like, a really good role model.
Disney Channel played that show on a loop.
-[reporters, yelling] Miley! -[camera shutters snapping]
You know, there are rappers who've made songs
about Hannah Montana. I mean, she was everywhere.
[indistinct yelling]
[Larilyn] Mark has always been into music.
He was in a fan base chat room with Miley,
which he thought was Miley.
And somewhere along the line, he was really thinking that
he was talking to her, which we know
he probably was not.
It was just an infatuation with her music and with her.
In 2009, Miley Cyrus came out with a song
called "Party in the USA,"
and there was a lot of controversy.
People were up in arms that she was pole dancing,
and she was only 16.
But the reality is that when you're a famous girl,
your adulthood starts earlier, and people start looking
at you differently already in your late teen years.
-[reporters, yelling] Miley! -[camera shutters snapping]
[Scaachi] I mean, when Miley was like 12, 13, people were already
talking about like, "Ooh, I can't wait till she turns 18."
So this was true for Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez,
the Olsen twins.
They were doing this with Millie Bobby Brown
like, five minutes ago. -Gosh, it's so gross.
In Mark's case, this man's in his mid-50s at the time,
and Miley is a young adolescent, 15, 16-year-old,
and he does not perceive the age difference
or the fact that this is pedophilia.
I thought that it was just another one of his things that
he was, you know, excited about, whether it be
the UFOs or the mothership.
You know, I did not put any red flags.
Nothing came up in my mind at that point until he decided
that he wanted to marry her.
Mark was stubborn, and you couldn't
change his mind.
If he believed that that was her talking to him,
that was her talking.
So he decided to go to a pawn shop,
pawned his favorite guitar, and got a ring
and sent it in the mail.
[ominous orchestral music builds]
In Mark's case, he's pretty clearly erotomania.
But it's also, I think, a biological phenomenon we call anosognosia,
where the sufferer literally can't see what's happening
and so delusional disorders beg no alternative
because they can't -- they can't step out of the delusion,
and they can't reason about it. -[Larilyn] It alarmed me but at that point,
I didn't realize the extent of his desire to try to
be with her or get closer to her.
A couple of his friends had told me that he followed her
to several concerts... and being that there was
not a lot of money, he said
he stayed in his car and that he would go to campgrounds
and take showers.
I believe there was a concert where she came
close to the stage...
[crowd cheering]
...and was singing with her mic and looking at the people
in the crowd. Mark was in the crowd.
And she made eye contact with him.
I'm sure that he was excited that she did that,
and so he decides to go and try to get on the tour bus.
They call security, and he was asked to leave.
Then there was another concert
where he tried to get on the tour bus again, and he said
that Billy Ray happened to walk by and say, "How you doing, man?
I'm praying for you."
In March 2009, Miley had a book signing in Manhattan.
She has a lot of fans going to be there.
He decided that he was gonna go to New York
to her book signing.
Takes a bus to New York, sleeps on the street
for a couple of nights. He wants to be first in line.
He decides to get some flowers and goes in
to the book signing.
There was a TV station that decided to film him
on the way in. -Hold me up.
[nervous laughter]
I'm a little bit nervous.
It's the first time I've ever actually been
face-to-face with her. -These stories of male stalkers
who talk to female celebrities like this,
it's so beyond creepy.
I mean, the age difference alone,
but he also doesn't know her.
[Larilyn] He goes in to the book signing
[suspenseful music plays]
and proposes.
And later he told me that she says,
"I'm flattered, thank you so much for the flowers,"
and she signed his book, and he goes on his way.
Miley is relatively new in her celebrity.
She's a young adolescent.
She would have no understanding of mental illness
and delusional disorders.
I'm certain she had lots of fan interaction
with particularly young people.
And she did it just the way she always does --
"Thank you," and then things move along.
[ominous chord strike]
But it's important to remember that in Rebecca Schaefer's case,
the stalker received a signed photograph
and a letter, and that was enough to inflame him.
And similarly, Miley engaged in an appropriate
exchange with him.
And just like in the case of Rebecca Schaefer's stalker,
it could be just yet more time
before this thing got worse, aggressive or violent.
[suspenseful chord strike]
[Stephanie] My name is Stephanie Vickers.
I have been an actor for many years.
In film, you will have stand-ins, photo doubles,
stunt doubles, body doubles.
Someone that is standing in for the actor and their body is
being used on camera,
and I was a photo double and stand-in for Miley Cyrus
on "The Last Song."
[Scaachi] In 2009, Miley Cyrus was filming a movie
with Liam Hemsworth called "The Last Song," which was based
off of a Nicholas Sparks book. -I was excited to make a film
that I think people would see me step away from what they usually
expect me to do and see me in a different light.
So when you are a photo double, your face
will not be on camera. The camera is always gonna be
over your back shoulder or to the side.
It's gonna be the back of your hair.
And that's me, so my hair had to match.
I had to have the exact clothes that she was wearing.
I had to have my fingernails painted the same color,
toenails, anything like that.
The movie was not filmed on a soundstage in LA,
it was actually filmed on location
in Tybee Island in Georgia.
[crowd cheering]
[Stephanie] We've got beach, we've got beach houses,
we've got big pavilions.
Making it safe for everyone to work is a massive undertaking.
On "The Last Song," we have a beach,
which is not private, but it has to
become that while you're shooting.
But you can't close off the entire island.
Set safety is for everyone, not just the people who are
working on the project, but also the people around it.
[producer] She's standing right there beside that blue thing.
Those kind of things matter, and they are paramount.
While they're still filming this movie,
Mark comes to the set.
[ominous chord strike]
[Larilyn] Mark goes out on the rocks
so he could get closer to her,
and he just wanted to profess his love.
He essentially is saying that he's going to
marry Miley Cyrus.
The security officers ask him to please come back
off the rocks, please come back onto the beach.
[camera shutter snaps]
Now he starts making lewd remarks to some of
the other people around the set.
[camera shutter snaps]
He starts screaming obscenities.
The police try to restrain him.
Well, he didn't like that too much.
The police try to restrain him.
[police siren echoes]
He headbutts an officer, and now he's arrested.
[ominous chord strike]
I was at work in the break room during lunchtime,
and all of a sudden,
I see my brother's picture on the TV screen.
I'm like, "Whoa, he's been arrested."
I've never known Mark to be violent.
I couldn't believe that he'd gone that far.
That was a lot.
He tells police that he has been watching Miley
from the street.
He's seen her on the balcony of her hotel,
and he tells the police that no one will be able to
keep them apart.
Mark also promised the arresting officer that
he would get an invitation to his and Miley's wedding.
Because of the head-butting, he was charged with
disorderly conduct, essentially, and he was put in jail
but released after one day because of overcrowding
and told not to come back to Tybee Island.
So I didn't think a whole lot about it.
I'm thinking, "He's out.
OK, maybe he's learned his lesson,"
but he went back to Tybee.
He went back in the middle of the night.
He felt like he knew approximately where
she might be staying. -[knocking echoes]
He was knocking on doors trying to find out where she was.
[knocking echoes]
And somebody called security.
-He's arrested... -[police siren echoes]
...and this time he was charged with disorderly conduct,
obstruction of justice, and stalking.
They took his computer because they felt like there
might have been more evidence on there,
because Miley was underage.
[Dr. Pinsky] In Mark's case, I seriously doubt this is pedophilia.
I think it's just delusion.
He doesn't even perceive that this is a teenager.
He doesn't see anything wrong with the whole affair.
And the police did have his computer, and if there was
any preoccupation with children,
it would have shown up there. -So to prove a stalking case,
there's like two elements that I find to be kind of difficult.
You have to prove a course of conduct, right?
So there has to be more than one incident, essentially.
And so, you know, it becomes really hard
because, you know, is two times enough?
Do we have to wait for something terrible to happen?
[reporters, yelling] Miley!
[Larilyn] Mark saw her in New York,
and he saw her at the filming,
and the concert. They're all public places.
You know, he didn't try to hurt her.
So the question becomes, how do you distinguish sort of
normal fan behavior versus Mark's behavior?
Then you have to prove that the defendant's conduct caused
reasonable fear to the person.
And it's like, does this actual person who this behavior is
being done to, are they afraid?
[Larilyn] When Mark was in court, I remember a time
where the lawyer asked if Miley was aware of Mark, if she knew him,
and the lawyer said, "No, she's not aware of him."
There had never been any contact with her.
I think the closest he got was the book signing.
[Dr. Pinsky] In my experience, celebrities usually don't know
they're being stalked,
and so one of the downsides is that when this problem comes to
the legal system, when it goes to court, the celebrity is
not able to honestly say, "I was afraid for my life
because I just didn't know."
So eventually a plea deal is made.
The attempted stalking is thrown out.
[Larilyn] Mark ended up pleading guilty to obstruction of justice
and disorderly conduct.
Mark got 24 months of probation and he was to get
a mental health assessment as well.
[Larilyn] He later was diagnosed with delusional disorder,
and he didn't agree with their diagnosis.
He refuses all psychiatric care during that time and is
essentially just checking in with a parole officer
and moves back in with his sister.
He stayed with me for about three months, and I helped him
find a place, and then he ended up moving to another state.
These days, I don't have a whole lot
of contact with him.
[Dr. Pinsky] The incident between Mark and Miley Cyrus happened
over a decade ago now. He's now in his late 60s.
He's living alone in a trailer.
He does little odd jobs on the side.
He seems to be pretty happy just by himself.
Makes music and wears crystals.
[Dr. Pinsky] According to Mark McLeod's sister, he is
no longer pursuing Miley Cyrus.
Certainly it's difficult for a family member to identify
stalking in somebody who appears just to be
an over-the-top fan.
We all have a certain amount of denial
in our close relationships,
and we might not see some of those warning signs
where it's crossing over into trouble.
Another example of this is what happened with Eric Swarbrick
and his obsession with Taylor Swift.
[Matthew] My brother believed Taylor Swift was his soulmate
and got out of hand.
He wrote 40 letters to Taylor Swift back in 2018.
The first one is not threatening, just strange.
But just a few months later, one of his letters references,
"I'll have one goal in mind, to push Taylor to kill herself
for knowingly abandoning me to my mother."
[Dr. Pinsky] Eric's letters become more bizarre.
He'd become more sexually aggressive.
He starts threatening in those letters.
He starts delivering them personally to people
at the record label, including comments like,
"I'm taking my gloves off.
"How am I explain to you that no matter how much you'll wish
"you could stop me, you won't be able to.
I'll be the cultural sword that runs through her heart."
In another letter to the record label,
he's saying, "Give her my letters
"or I'm gonna kill myself.
And I'm also gonna kill her, by the way."
[Scaachi] So three times, Eric drove from Texas to Nashville
to personally deliver these letters.
And at that point, it became a federal offense
because it was across state lines.
[Dr. Pinsky] On August 2nd, 2018, it is his third attempt to get
into the label office, and at that point, he's arrested
by the Nashville police.
He was eventually charged with interstate stalking and sending
interstate communication with the intent to threaten.
[Dr. Pinsky] We've got two cases of alleged stalking
with two very different legal outcomes,
which shows how challenging it is to legally define
what stalking is.
I'm also well aware that there are certain jurisdictions that
still do not have stalking laws, so this behavior still
continues to exist without any sort of legal repercussions.
Like in Vegas, I mean, if you text message somebody
a threat, there's no real statute for that.
Now there's a statute on the federal side that would apply.
[Matthew] I definitely didn't know he had been visiting her office
and that he wrote 40 letters.
In my family growing up, Eric spent a lot of time
with friends in high school. He was popular.
He led worship. He played guitar.
He was very outgoing.
I didn't see any signs at all in Eric.
There was nothing that was a red flag,
but then Eric started college. He didn't know a lot of people.
I felt like he started spending more time by himself,
and some of the isolation eventually got to him.
When he's 25 and looking at graduating college, Eric sent
a series of tweets.
The tweets referenced a soulmate.
It did not reference anybody in particular, but it was not
something that, like, a normal person would write.
It basically referenced being a prophet of God on the verge
of becoming the Antichrist,
and I remember feeling very desperate because we knew
he needed help, and we had absolutely no idea
what we could do.
I talked to Eric about it,
and he apologized for how they came off.
He deleted them, and as I talked to people about trying
to get him help, I know it was a very difficult thing
because there's no laws or systems for what you do
when that's happening.
I remember wishing there was a hotline that I could call,
and really just being helpless and not knowing what to do
was the worst part.
[somber music plays]
As a result of that visit to the record label, he's put
in prison for 30 months, and then he's put into mandated care,
mandated treatment. -It was sad.
It was depressing.
There's some people that need punishment and some people
that need treatment.
I certainly wish he was taken to a mental health hospital
earlier than they did.
After prison, he was seeing a psychiatrist,
and slowly, he was starting to become his old self
in a lot of ways.
We started hanging out every Tuesday.
We'd go get tacos together, bring them over to our house.
He was very playful and interactive with the kids.
[Dr. Pinsky] Eric Swarbrick is an example of how it can work.
He got care. He's doing fine.
Now he lives independently. He's not isolating.
He's with his family, and his symptoms are
completely under control.
It's just the way the courts deal with mental illness is
just the oddest thing to me.
There's something called assisted outpatient treatment
that some courts mandate for people with inappropriate
behavior because of mental illness,
and the outcomes are exceptionally good,
and the fact that most or not all courts do that is
profoundly disturbing to me,
and that's common throughout the land.
-[fan] Can I get a picture? -[Taylor] Of course.
[Dr. Pinsky] That gets into another dynamic that many people don't realize.
That in these dangerous obsessions, it's not just about
the celebrities and the stalkers.
There's a third issue, flaws in the law.
[interviewer] Has there been a negative side at all
to your success? -Um...
There's a negative side to everything we do in life.
You know, with all of the good stuff, there has to be
some bad stuff going on.
[Ashanti] In my situation, he was convicted,
and we were hoping and praying that it was done.
[gavel clacks twice]
We thought that that was gonna be it, but unfortunately,
it kind of kept going on and on.
[Dr. Pinsky] So in 2009, Ashanti's stalker goes to prison for two years,
but he's released a year later with a court order to
no longer contact Ashanti's family.
[Traci] Well, in court, unfortunately, juries are
more inclined to give a heavier sentence,
if, like, you know, somebody breaks into your home,
or somebody holds a gun to your head, or somebody,
you know, physically harms you, but with stalking, you know,
if you haven't experienced it, like, it'd be a little bit
difficult to wrap your head around how much damage is done.
Our victims usually all have PTSD.
[Ashanti] We have extra security.
I did, like, an appearance in Chicago a few nights ago,
and we had to have, like, three armed guys
because the stalker's originally from Chicago.
-So, you know, just... -[Ashanti] It changed my life.
Is he gonna come to the sign-in?
Is he gonna be at the show? Is he gonna be at the airport?
Is he gonna be at the hotel?
Not a -- not a good feeling.
[Dr. Pinsky] Despite the previous conviction,
he continues to stalk her.
He takes a picture with Ashanti's little sister.
He kind of popped out at an event that my sister had.
[Dr. Pinsky] He also tweets Ashanti, which is a violation of
his restraining order.
In 2014, he goes back to trial for stalking,
aggravated harassment, and contempt of court,
and other charges.
This time, Ashanti's stalker represents himself and even
gets to cross-examine Ashanti when she takes the stand.
[suspenseful chord strike]
[Ashanti] It's really weird.
It's kind of like, to get what you want done,
he gets what he wants, which is to be in your presence.
And it's like, why?
A juror becomes ill during the trial, and so it is
called a mistrial.
So the case is retried two years later, and that
ends in a jury deadlock.
So there end up being three additional trials in the height
of my career and having to go back and forth to court.
And actually showing up and sitting there and sitting
through all of that... is unsettling.
It's disheartening,
and it makes you question, "OK, who is the victim?"
So after the fourth trial, when he's convicted,
the feeling is hope
that the rehabilitation happens,
hope that he gets the message, and hoping that
everything is done.
[ominous chord strike]
[Dr. Pinsky] With singer Coles Walen, her case rises
to a different level.
[Coles] His maximum sentence was unfortunately not that long.
So he was released from prison a few years after he went.
I tried to keep performing and found that
I was still terrified.
I started to have panic attacks,
and I just felt I'm not gonna ever achieve full recovery
if I don't put some physical distance between me
and where this all happened.
I left the state of Colorado,
which was really difficult for me.
My whole family is there.
I moved to the East Coast.
After years of hard work on trying to identify
what had happened to me,
I met a great partner, I get married,
and finally I'm starting to feel some...
some happiness on stage in these smaller venues
where I feel really comfortable, and I...
feel like I'm healing.
But I was totally unprepared for what is going to happen next.
[ominous chord strike]
It's just like a regular Saturday, and I'm at home,
and this Google alert pops up.
[phone bloops]
And it says, "Stalking Case Going to the US Supreme Court."
It has my name in it.
[suspenseful music builds]
And I'm like, "What is this?"
And it turns out that...
he's appealing it to the United States Supreme Court.
[suspenseful chord strike]
[Dr. Pinsky] By 2023, seven years after his trial,
Billy Ray Counterman's sentence was over,
but it turns out, he is now determined to clear his name.
[Coles] It turns out that another lawyer has gotten a hold
of this case and he's trying to argue that the communications
to me were protected under the First Amendment right
to free speech,
and the Supreme Court has actually agreed
to hear this case.
I was just shocked.
I was totally shocked that this was still
ongoing, that there could be any question of whether or not
this guilty verdict was actually able to stand.
All of a sudden, Coles is now the face of what's going to be
a precedent-setting case for the enforcement of
stalking laws, not just in her county in Colorado,
but all over the country.
What seemed to have been a done deal that had been decided
by a jury in Colorado after hearing all the evidence was
now continuing to be reviewed by nine justices
on the United States Supreme Court.
[Coles] And I was actually very surprised because some
organizations that I actually am a fan of were on the side
of the defendant, the ACLU is one of them.
A lawyer told me that
a civil rights, like, law think tank had been looking for
a case where the boundaries might be blurred between speech
and stalking, where there was not any real evidence in
the case that proved that there was physical contact between
the victim and the stalker, that it had all happened
through speech of some kind. They found mine,
and they had been working on it for a few years
before they were able to get the Supreme Court to listen
to the case.
[Paul] The Supreme Court doesn't allow cameras in the courtroom,
but they do now have an audio feed where you can
listen to what's going on.
[court official] You'll hear argument this morning, case 22-138,
Counterman v. Colorado.
This case was Counterman v. Colorado,
and you can see immediately that Coles wasn't even
a party to the case.
Victims, they're not even represented.
The way that my case was tried in the state of Colorado was
tried under what they call an objective standard,
which means that if a reasonable person would
consider the messages that were sent to them threatening,
that's enough to convict someone of stalking.
What they wanted the Supreme Court to change that to
was that it's not enough that the person who's receiving
the messages considers them threatening, you have to be
able to prove that the person sending the messages actually
intended for them to be threatening.
So this could be a problem.
Oftentimes when people are delusional, what the stalker is
telling themselves can be various things, including,
"I'm just trying to get to you to ask you to marry me,
or I'm just trying to protect you."
It's all distortion.
It's all bullshit.
And so these delusional stalkers may not intend to be
threatening, even though they often are, or at least
they can be perceived that way.
And just like in the case of Rebecca Schaefer's stalker,
it could be just yet more time before this thing goes too far
and become violent very, very easily.
I am...
totally shocked by what I am hearing
because they're putting forward these metaphorical examples of
situations that they're trying to balance against the facts of
the case that I'm involved in
to try to make these arguments.
Are they serious right now?
I could not believe the way they were treating this issue.
I could not believe it.
The Colorado Attorney General's office was writing a very
powerful brief on the legal side of the case.
[Weiser continues] It would also allow devious stalkers to escape
accountability by insisting that they meant nothing
by their harmful statements.
They are picking out one message here
and one message there.
Like, this one doesn't seem that threatening.
There is a lot of laughter coming from the bench.
[laughter]
"I can't promise I haven't said that sometimes.
Ha ha ha."
Have you said it to somebody that was a stranger that you'd
also been messaging for years, following you around, never answered?
Then the hearing goes on.
And finally, the hearing wraps up.
[man] Thank you, counsel. The case is submitted.
It's pretty obvious to tell that they were already leaning
in one direction.
But I still hoped.
I was holding out hope that they would
uphold this conviction.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court released its decision.
There were seven votes for Counterman
and two votes for Colorado.
The Supreme Court concluded that the procedures that were
used in the case violated the First Amendment.
[reporter] The Supreme Court said that a conviction for online threats
violated the First Amendment.
I think the Supreme Court got this one wrong, too.
This is a super messy case.
Whole lot of threatening speech
now being protected.
So I guess you're allowed to harass someone if you can say
that you didn't know you were being threatening?
[Coles] And I was, um...
just...
so sad.
Because I knew at that point that it wasn't just me.
Um, that there would be a lot of victims who had gone through
something similar to what I had been through,
that would also have their convictions overturned.
That was really sad.
Unfortunately, I think the Supreme Court's decision
opens the doors for delusional stalkers, because maybe
they are so out of touch with reality that they're not
thinking through carefully what they're doing.
Those people are almost in some ways more dangerous
than someone who is thinking rationally,
and yet the Supreme Court's decision makes it difficult
for prosecutors to prosecute those kinds of cases.
So for Counterman, after years of litigation,
the conviction was undone.
The big takeaway from these stories is that the legal
system, in terms of being able to help and identify people
that have not yet perpetrated, needs a complete revamp.
I think one of the biggest problems that I've seen in
probably the last five years is that the laws are not
keeping up with the technology.
You know, a lot of times it's over internet,
it's over social media, it's over text message,
and a lot of times that is not applicable to the law.
[Scaachi] I think the courts still operate in a really outdated
mode of believing that anything that happens on the internet is
not tangible and therefore is not a real threat.
-[fan] Miley! -[indistinct chatter]
[Scaachi] But we see it all the time, I mean, we see how
online threats manifest in reality.
I feel like it is really important to create awareness
surrounding this entire topic.
-Calm down. -Back up.
[Ashanti] You can't cross the line with people.
We need to make this change and make that happen and get
your resources together and speak out.