New York Man Charged with Stalking Sheryl Crow

[TexasStooge]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former Navy diver was charged on Wednesday with three counts of stalking and harassing Grammy Award-winning singer Sheryl Crow.

Bail was set at $15,000 cash or a $45,000 bond for Ambrose Kappos, 37, of New York, who was also charged with burglary for breaking into the Hammerstein Ballroom near New York's Herald Square on Monday when Crow was rehearsing for a benefit show. If convicted, Kappos could face seven years in prison.

Security officers at the ballroom told police they turned Kappos away after he told them he wanted to see the singer. They said he returned a few hours later and said: "I'm her twin. We're spiritually connected. I am going to meet her," according to the complaint.

Crow's bodyguards, who held Kappos until police arrived to arrest him, told police Kappos had been following the singer-songwriter for several months.

According to the complaint filed in Manhattan criminal court, Kappos told detectives he "followed a bird to Sheryl Crow's father's house in Missouri and knocked on his door to ask for a date with her. Mr. Crow refused his request."

Kappos' court-appointed lawyer, Stan Hickman, said it was doubtful his client would be able to raise the money to be released. He is due back in court on Friday to learn if he has been indicted on the charges.

[GalvestonDuck]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... t=Abstract

Br J Psychol. 2002 Feb;93(Pt 1):67-87. Related Articles, Links


Conceptualization and measurement of celebrity worship.

McCutcheon LE, Lange R, Houran J.

Florida Southern College, USA.

Celebrity worship has been conceptualized as having pathological and nonpathological forms. To avoid problems associated with item-level factor analysis, 'top-down purification' was used to test the validity of this conceptualization. The respondents (N = 249) completed items modelled after existing celebrity worship questionnaires. A subset of 17 unidimensional and Rasch scalable items was discovered (the local reliability ranged from.71 to.96), which showed no biases related to age and gender. This subset was dubbed the Celebrity Worship Scale (CWS). The items also showed no celebrity bias, indicating that CWS applies equally to acting, music, sports, and 'other' celebrities. The Rasch nature of the items defines celebrity worship as consisting of three qualitatively different stages. Low worship involves individualistic behaviours such as watching and reading about a celebrity. At slightly higher levels, celebrity worship takes on a social character. Lastly, the highest levels are characterized by a mixture of empathy with the celebrity's successes and failures, over-identification with the celebrity, compulsive behaviours, as well as obsession with details of the celebrity's life. Based on these findings, the authors propose a model of celebrity worship based on psychological absorption (leading to delusions of actual relationships with celebrities) and addiction (fostering the need for progressively stronger involvement to feel connected with the celebrity).

PMID: 11839102 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]