Paula Abdul once sang a duet with a chainsmoking cartoon hip-hop cat, so she knows weird when she sees it.
But when a woman who a) looked like Paula, b) painted lifesize pictures of Paula and c) appeared on the TV show that Paula judges died outside Paula Abdul’s house surrounded by pictures and CDs all bearing Paula Abdul’s image in a car with a licence plate that professed her love for Paula Abdul, that may have tipped things to a new level.
Apparently Paula Abdul hasn’t slept in her own house since any of this happened. Well, duh.
Usually when a celebrity gets a stalker, it tends to confuse us a bit. For instance, we’ve had two and a half years to reflect on the fact that John Cusack has a stalker and we still can’t make head nor tail out of it – there are billions of people in the world, so why pin unattainable hero status on the bloke out of Con Air? It just doesn’t make sense.
But Paula Abdul, we’re sorry to say, seems like perfect stalker fodder. She ticks all the boxes. She’s pretty, she’s friendly, she used to be a popstar so people see her as a lost fragment of their youth and she often seems fairly incomprehensible, so people want to try and fix her when they meet her. Plus, if rumours are correct, she’s possibly OK with sleeping with people she barely knows.
But the main reason why Paula Abdul appears to be a likely victim for stalking is because she’s the nice one on American Idol – not only do thousands of deluded idiots pass in front of her eyes day after day, but Paula Abdul is often the only one who’ll cushion them from Simon Cowell‘s withering put-downs and stop them feeling like total failures.
It’s a dangerous mix, which is why it was horribly unsurprising when Paula Abdul’s number one fan Paula Goodspeed was found dead near her house three weeks ago. The blame for her death could be laid at any number of doorsteps – but that doesn’t hide the fact that a young woman died, and that’s terribly sad.
And now Paula Abdul has decided to talk about Goodspeed’s death and how it affected her. It’s probably no surprise to hear that Paula’s been avoiding her home as much as possible since the incident, as People reports:
“I’ve been staying in different homes and hotels, and I have security with me… It was very tragic and very upsetting to hear. She had tried to do this before, and it was just heartbreaking … It was in the middle of Hollywood week, and it happened while I was actually working at the Kodak Theatre, and it was devastating to hear.”
The superficial knock-on effects of Paula Goodspeed’s death are obvious – Paula Abdul’s house is now inevitably on the market – but what’ll be interesting is seeing how Paula copes with this event in the longer term. Will she be frostier to the American Idol contestants?? Will she continue to judge American Idol at all?
Ultimately, though, we hope that Paula Abdul realises that this was an isolated – though unfortunately extreme – incident, and that not everyone has the same mental issues that Goodspeed appeared to suffer from.
As we’ve said before – it’s when Randy Jackson gets an obsessive fan that we’ll realise that the world has turned to shit. When that day comes, you’ll find us cowering in the bottom of our cupboard clutching a bottle of gin and a cricket bat.