The Stalking Trial

On Wednesday January 3, 1996, Madonna arrived at a Los Angeles courthouse under tight security in a large black luxury car with tinted windows. She could be seen inside wearing dark glasses as the automobile was driven into an underground garage that is also used to bring prisoners into the building. Reporters were brought into the courtroom before Madonna was led in by a contingent of armed bailiffs and bodyguards. The new, toned-down Madonna was dressed in a smart, double-breasted charcoal suit with a calf-length skirt, simple jewelry, black pumps and red lipstick, her auburn hair pulled back into a French twist. She looked lovely, but appeared to be nervous.

The time had finally come for Madonna to testify in the case against Robert Hoskins, charged with stalking and threatening her. Because she had previously ignored a subpoena to be a witness in the case, she was now ordered to appear in court under the threat of being jailed on $5 million bail. From the witness stand, she testified that she had not previously appeared because she was afraid of Hoskins and did not want to give him the opportunity to see her up close. She proceeded to describe how she had been disturbed by his unruly appearance and “the look in his eye,” when she passed him one day as he stood in front of the gate at her entranceway. She said that she became terrified when Hoskins told Madonna’s assistant (Caresse Norman) that he was Madonna’s husband and would slit her throat “from ear to ear,” and then kill Norman and everyone else in the house if he was not allowed to see his “wife.” She said that she began to have “nightmares that he was in my house, that he was chasing after me.”

As her stalker stared at her from just across the room, Madonna, at first visibly nervous but then becoming increasingly angry, made it clear that she was perplexed by the judge’s decision that she be forced to testify in the trial. Her attorney, Nicholas DeWitt, had tried to convince Judge Jacqueline Connor to allow Madonna to videotape her testimony or at least to have Hoskins taken from the courtroom while she testified. The female judge ruled against both motions, saying that Hoskins had a constitutional right to face his accuser and that she did not want to provide him with grounds for an appeal. Madonna was amazed. “She’s a woman,” Madonna said privately. “Why would she be so spiteful?”

“I’m sick to my stomach,” Madonna said from the witness stand. Looking grim, she elaborated, “I feel incredibly disturbed that the man who threatened my life is sitting across from me and he has somehow made his fantasies come true. I’m sitting in front of him. And that’s what he wants.” She avoided making eye contact with Hoskins during her seventy-five-minute testimony; she glanced briefly at him, twice.

The following day, on January 4, Madonna’s bodyguard, Basil Stephens, testified that Hoskins had been at Madonna’s Hollywood Hills property (called Castillo DeLago) on three occasions. On his first visit, Hoskins threatened to kill the bodyguard if he did not give Madonna a note he had scrawled on a religious pamphlet. On his third, Hoskins brought his bags with him and “looked like he was moving in.” Although Hoskins’s lawyer argued that he was just an unfortunate, homeless person, Stephens disagreed, saying that he considered the stalker to be “extremely dangerous.” As further evidence, the jury was also shown footage from a security camera taken the day of the shooting. It showed Hoskins ignoring a “No Trespassing” sign, climbing the front gate, jumping from a wall onto Madonna’s property, and peering into her front door.

On his last visit to Madonna’s home in May 1995, Hoskins’s behavior had gone from bizarre to violent. Stephens testified that he was forced to shoot him during an altercation. Thinking Hoskins was dead after having fired three shots at him, Stephens left the scene to call the police. However, ten minutes later, he returned only to find Hoskins sitting up, near Madonna’s pool, with wounds to his arm and abdomen. Stephens told him that there was an ambulance on the way. In what sounded like a surreal scene from a bad movie, Stephens recalled having told the obsessed fan, “I’m sorry I shot you,” to which Hoskins answered, “No problem.”

When Madonna heard about what had happened at her home, she became so upset that she decided to sell the $7-million estate. She said, “How can I lie by the pool knowing this thing had occurred there? I felt it was an attraction to negative energy, and I had to get out.”

After the eight-man, four-woman jury found Robert Hoskins guilty of stalking, the judge gave him a stiff ten-year sentence, noting that “his apparent mental illness appears to increase the danger.”

After the trial, Madonna continued to have nightmares about Robert Hoskins who, if he intended to become her focus, was sickeningly successful. Madonna said that she couldn’t help but feel that her dreams were premonitions to tragedy. Still, to this day, she has not gotten over the Hoskins ordeal. Say those closest to her, she now can’t help but feel responsible for inciting this kind of potentially cataclysmic event in her life just by virtue of some of the overtly sexual publicity campaigns (such as the Sex book) she’s done in her career, many of which could be perceived by some less emotionally stable people as an invitation to harass her. It would seem that growing up has not been easy for Madonna, especially the part having to do with facing the repercussions of, and claiming responsibility for, her past actions. Still, as an adult — and especially as a woman who was evolving into a person who understood that, as she put it, “each of our actions has a reaction” — she couldn’t just dismiss the Robert Hoskinses of her life as merely a casualty of her celebrity. Perhaps he was just the inevitable result of some of the ways she went about achieving fame.