…that really attracts the crazies!
27 years a go yesterday John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assasinate then President Ronald Reagan following a speech at the Washington, D.C. Hilton. Check out the video…
The interesting part of this story is that Hinckley’s logic behind the assassination was that it would be a sort of tribute to Jodie Foster. Hinckley was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver, and apparently also with Foster’s character, a 12 year old prostitute. In the year leading up to the assassination he sent her numerous creepy letters. At the time she was a student at Yale and he went so far as to enroll in a writing course there to get closer to her. She turned all of his letters over to the University who tried to locate Hinckley but were unsuccessful. He was ulitmately sent to a mental hospital, where he remains today.
Were it left at that, it might just be a strange and funny story. Reagan was shot but not badly hurt. The famous Brady Bill gun-control law was named after White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was wounded in the incident.
It turns out, however, that Hinckley was not Foster’s only stalker. Michael Smegal, a 42 year old Massachusetts resident was charged for bomb threats earlier this month in U.S. District Court. For the past several years Smegal has been stalking Jodie Foster and sending her threatening letters. He also mailed out hundreds of identical letters as bomb threats to airports, celebrities, and business executives. All of these letters mentioned Foster’s name.
Gay people often are critical of Foster for her silence about her private life and her decision not to officially come out of the closet. Now that I know that she’s had this stalker out there I can’t say that I blame her. She and her partner Cydney have been together for 14 years and the couple have two children together, yet the family is practically never photographed together. If I were her I’d want to keep my family life as private as possible regardless of my sexual orientation.
Perhaps there is something about strong, no b.s. women such as Foster that makes these men go crazy. I am glad that she can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that this second stalker is behind bars. I wouldn’t mind seeing a made-for-tv movie about it, though.
I have to hand it to her that she’s kept her life a “secret.” It stretches the definition of “secret,” of course, but her orientation is so far off the map of regular or tabloid journalism*; it’s just something that a lot of people seem to know of.
I just wonder how she did it.
I dunno if you saw the obit-bios of Richard Widmark in the press last week upon his death. He simply refused to go on talk shows, I think awards shows too, or discuss anything about his life to the press, which seems pretty smart to me.
* at least that I’VE ever seen, walking past those horrid papers in the supermarket all my adult life. I’ve long proposed that supermarket tabloids are the most shameful tolerated thing in modern America, although I’m sure someone could pull out other, actual socio-political examples (i.e. enthusiasm for war, or decrepit communities like East St. Louis)… but as far as things that exist for no reason whatever, tabloids are up there.