There are many perks to being famous, but being in the public eye can also make you
a target for illegal activity. With that in mind, here are some real-life stories of crimes
committed against celebrities that are truly stranger than fiction.
Beyoncé has been hailed as one of the biggest musical talents of her generation by both
fans and critics alike. But a British man named Bassey Essien saw things differently,
as he believed that the "Single Ladies" singer was an imposter. In 2013, her security team
was on high alert when she played at London's Twickenham Stadium. Essien thought that the
current Beyoncé had killed the real Beyoncé and was pretending to be her, which he communicated
in threatening letters. This harassment had actually started years earlier, when he tried
to give the singer a book full of notes about his religious beliefs.
Back in 2011, a High Court in the United Kingdom slapped Essien with an anti-harassment order,
but that didn't stop him. Two years later, when the Twickenham show was set to happen,
the threatening letters continued, hence the tighter security. As a source relayed to The
Sun,
"Staff have been briefed on the situation and pictures of him have been passed around.
They've been told to keep their eyes open and be extra vigilant."
Since then, Beyoncé has remained the real deal.
In 2017, Kevin Hart's career was soaring. He had a number of successful films and stand-up
comedy specials under his belt, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was about to hit theaters
that December. But trouble is often looking just around the corner to disrupt good fortune.
Hart tried to get out ahead of such trouble that year when he took to Instagram to apologize
to his wife Eniko Parrish and their son for making a, quote, "bad error" in judgment,
though he didn't reveal exactly what he did.
But Hart did reveal that someone was threatening to extort him. As it turned out, he'd cheated
on Parrish while she was pregnant, and his now-former friend J.T. Jackson was allegedly
the one behind the criminal scheme. In May 2018, Jackson was charged with two felony
counts of attempted extortion and extortion by threatening letter, although those charges
were eventually dropped. After news of Jackson's alleged actions surfaced, Hart tweeted,
"Mind blown...Hurt...at a loss for words and simply in complete disbelief at the moment.
WOW"
Many celebrities have been targeted by stalkers, including Gwyneth Paltrow. A man named Dante
Michael Soiu reportedly sent the Shakespeare in Love actress hundreds of letters and packages
between 1999 and 2016. Some of the items were innocuous gifts, but then there were the adult
toys, pornography, and pictures of lewd acts on which he wrote Paltrow's name and his own.
Soiu also repeatedly said that he wanted to marry Paltrow, and he discussed her death
in bizarre religious contexts.
In 2000, Siou made two trips from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio to the home of Paltrow's
parents in Santa Monica, California. He was arrested the second time. In 2001, he pleaded
guilty, but a judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity and sent him to a mental
institution. The bizarre letters continued though, and Soiu was arrested again. Nevertheless,
he was acquitted of stalking charges yet again in 2016. During her testimony, Paltrow said,
"I felt very upset by it. It defied logic, and I found it very, very upsetting. This
was something I had been through a very long and traumatic experience with already."
On February 24, 2021 in Hollywood, California, Lady Gaga's dog walker Ryan Fischer was shot
in the chest while walking the singer's three beloved French bulldogs. Thankfully, Fischer
survived, but two of the dogs, Koji and Gustav, were stolen by thieves who peeled off into
the night in a white sedan. The third dog ran away but was later retrieved by Gaga's
bodyguard.
Gaga was shooting a film in Rome during the incident. She offered a $500,000 reward for
her dogs' safe return. They were recovered unharmed just a couple of days later, as a
woman reportedly uninvolved with the theft brought them to the LAPD's Olympic Community
Police Station. On March 1, Fischer detailed on Instagram what happened to him and thanked
his supporters, as he shared,
"The gratitude for all the love I feel from around this planet is immense and intense.
I felt your healing support! Thank you. I am humbled and grateful that attention and
focus from the police were enough to get Koji and Gustav back to safety."
"Lady Gaga called Fischer a hero, saying he risked his life to fight for her family."
British soul singer Joss Stone was the victim of a strange plot in 2011 involving Junior
Bradshaw and Kevin Liverpool, two British men who were convicted of trying to behead
her with a samurai sword. The men traveled from Manchester, England to Stone's home in
Devon to carry out the deed. In addition to the sword, they also brought gloves, bags,
and knives. But their plan hit some serious snags right from the beginning, as they got
into a car accident on the way.
Bradshaw and Liverpool then got lost and showed a local mailman a photo of Stone and asked
him where she lived. Residents called police after seeing the men just miles from Stone's
home, and they were soon arrested. Police later found notes in the suspects' shared
apartment about Stone that called her the, quote, "devil in flesh," who needed to be
beheaded and have her body thrown into a river. The men were convicted of conspiracy to murder
and conspiracy to rob. Liverpool was slapped with a life sentence with a minimum of 10
years and eight months, while Bradshaw received a sentence of 18 years. Stone later laughed
the whole scary incident off in a chat with CNN.
"I mean, really, what can you do but laugh? Really!"
Car theft is a far too common problem in the United States. According to the Insurance
Information Institute, there were over 873,000 auto thefts in the country in 2020, a 9.2
increase from the previous year. One famous person who knows about this problem all too
well is Sylvester Stallone, whose 1950 Mercury was stolen from his garage in 1994. The car
was the same one that he drove in his 1986 action film Cobra, and it was gone for so
long that he probably gave up hope of ever getting it back.
But more than a decade later, Stallone spotted the $250,000 vehicle on an auction website
and tried to retrieve it. Alas, the owner of the company, who provides film sets with
cars, refused to give it back. So Stallone filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles in 2009, demanding
its return with a $3 million payment, as he accused the company of using his name and
likeness to promote the auction. Stallone eventually emerged victorious in 2011, when
he and the company reached a settlement in which the vehicle would be returned to him.
But it was unclear, as reported by TMZ, if the actor received any money in addition to
the car.
Fans of Keeping Up with the Kardashians may recall a 2015 episode in which Kris Jenner's
assistant Kat told her some very disturbing news. This was around the time that several
celebrities' iPhones had been hacked from the iCloud and their private photos were uploaded
to the Internet. Kat had been informed by their private investigator that someone had
procured a potentially revealing video from Jenner's closet camera.
"They said you were naked." "Oh!" "When they hacked your iCloud, I think they were still
able to access that camera that's in your closet."
Kat also informed Jenner that whoever hacked her phone demanded money to have the video
returned. The Kardashian matriarch was shocked that someone would do such a thing, calling
it, quote, "sick and twisted." Then she realized that she was going to be blackmailed unless
they did something to put a stop to it.
Fast forward to 2016, when a Newark, California woman named Christina Elizabeth Bankston was
arrested by federal agents for hacking into Jenner's iCloud and harassing her through
emails and text messages for more than six months. She was also reportedly alleged to
have obtained a sex tape that she was possibly planning on releasing. However, it wasn't
clear if Bankston was the same person who was accused of obtaining the footage from
Jenner's closet camera.
Harry Styles has made headlines for both his music and his fashion choices, so perhaps
it should come as no surprise that he's been criminally targeted for his footwear. While
being interviewed in 2017 by his friend Nick Grimshaw on the concert special Harry Styles
at the BBC, he revealed that one time as he was mobbed by fans while he was a member of
One Direction, he suddenly realized he was missing a key element to his outfit. As he
recounted,
"We got off the train in Paris and I was walking and I ended up feeling like my feet weren't
touching the floor. I was floating along and then I got in the car and was like, 'I haven't
got any shoes on.' That's why I started wearing boots."
While being mobbed and shoe-jacked is certainly frightening in its own way, Styles was also
once the victim of a decidedly scarier crime. During a March appearance on The Howard Stern
Show, he recounted the time he was robbed at knifepoint on Valentine's Day 2018 by a
group of men in the Hampstead [HAMP-stid] area of London. The assailants demanded cash
and the singer's phone, and while they were trying to get him to unlock the device, Styles
fled into the street and desperately attempted to flag down passing cars for help. When none
of them stopped, he sprinted away, which proved quite difficult, as he was wearing corduroy
flares and shoes.
"And this was the one night I'm wearing, like, corduroy flares and shoes." "Yeah, great."
Thankfully, the robbers didn't pursue him, but it's tough to overstate how much of a
recurring problem footwear has been for Harry Styles.
On December 8, 1963, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped by two men in Lake Tahoe, California.
One of the kidnappers, Barry Keenan, went to high school with Frank's sister Nancy.
"He knew I was dangerous. He knew I was just one crack away from killing everybody or not
killing, if he didn't know, but he could tell I was crazy."
Keenan's accomplice was his former classmate Joe Amsler, and their plan was ultimately
foiled from the inside.
Sinatra was just 19 years old at the time. He was starting his singing career, as he
played a show at Lake Tahoe's Harrah's Club Lodge. Keenan and Amsler burst in while Sinatra
was lounging in his dressing room, at which point they blindfolded him and sped off with
him in their car. They wanted $240,000 in ransom money for the famous son, which the
FBI told Frank Sinatra Sr. to pay, so that they could work on catching the men while
they were holed up with Frank Jr. in a Los Angeles suburb. But while Keenan and Amsler
retrieved the ransom, a third accomplice, John Irwin, let Frank Jr. go. Irwin then told
his brother about the crime, who phoned FBI agents in San Diego. Keenan and Amsler were
arrested and given life sentences. Irwin got 75 years after various sentence reductions,
though all three of them were released in less than five years.
The story of Washington D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy having his necklace stolen during a performance
at a Memphis club in 2015 is full of wild details. According to Glizzy, the chain wasn't
taken, he just lost it. But according to HipHopDX's reporting, the men who had the chain said
that they snatched it off Glizzy's neck because he wouldn't record a verse for their rapper
friend's song. As a man nicknamed Dmuney wrote on Instagram,
"I told u don't come to Memphis u need all securitys at [your] show."
The men also reportedly demanded that Glizzy pay them $50,000 to get his chain back. Glizzy
later responded on Twitter to the robbery reports and doubled down on his claim that
he lost it. As he put it,
"I [slipped] up and got comfortable [...] For every action, there's a reaction.. Chain-reaction!"
Later that same month, another reaction to all these actions occurred, as a video surfaced
that showed Memphis rapper Blac Youngsta supposedly buying back Glizzy's chain from the group
for $10,000 so that he could give it back to Glizzy.
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