‘I'm sitting behind the bench': Inside sports' escalating stalking problem

New York Times

15 hours ago

On Valentine's Day 2023, Latyr Thiaw, a 19-year-old maintenance worker living in Washington, D.C., saw a picture of UCLA women's basketball player Kiki Rice on Instagram. He then watched interviews with her on YouTube and felt something 'magnetic' between them. She reminded him of a character from 'Avatar: The Last Airbender.'
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In the months that followed, Thiaw sent Rice dozens of unanswered messages on social media, and he changed the background screen on his phone to a picture of her.
Then, in mid-December 2023, Thiaw flew to Los Angeles, rented a U-Haul van, parking near the UCLA campus for days and sleeping in the back.
On several occasions, Thiaw stood outside of UCLA's practice facility waiting for Rice. Once, he sat on a bench for hours alongside a glass vase of white and red roses and a handwritten card that read, 'Kiki Carroll Rice once upon a time you caught my sight through a life full of strife…you got me through the night…I want do something kosmik with you that will be enough till the end of time.'
On Dec. 21, as Rice warmed up for the UCLA/Hawaii game in Pauley Pavilion, she felt eyes on her. It was Thiaw — in the second row, standing up, wearing a suit, and staring intently at her. Soon after, UCLA banned Thiaw from all its facilities and events, and the athletic department posted a flyer with a photograph of Thiaw that read, 'Please do not engage with this individual or allow entry into any athletic facility.'
Despite the ban, Thiaw attempted to attend another UCLA game by entering through the student-only section and, according to a police report, he pushed past security in an attempt to make contact with Rice. He was arrested and charged in Los Angeles Superior Court with stalking and two counts of resisting a police officer.
He pleaded not guilty to those three charges, but his behavior continued.
'I do not know Latyr, I do not have any relationship with him, and his incessant efforts to track me down and confront me cause me to worry for my safety and are deeply disturbing,' Rice stated in her request for a restraining order in January 2024. 'I have no protection when I am off campus or at away games.'
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More American athletes and other celebrities have been stalked and attacked in the last decade than in all previous U.S. history, said Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist and one of the first to study the stalking of public figures.
Dietz made that proclamation in 1994, the year after tennis player Monica Seles was stabbed during a match by a fan obsessed with her opponent, Steffi Graf. More than 30 years later, the trend line Dietz spoke of has continued to spike.
'I do know with certainty that new media have increased dramatically the number of threats and stalking incidents' of athletes and celebrities, particularly women, Dietz told The Athletic.
There are currently no scientific studies around the stalking of athletes, and no law enforcement agency is publicly tracking such cases. The Athletic identified at least 52 stalking cases involving athletes, male and female, since 2020, but that list is incomplete. Many stalking cases go unreported in the media and even to police.
But even a partial list indicates an alarming pattern.
Female tennis players Iga Świątek, Yulia Putintseva and Emma Raducanu dealt with stalking incidents this year. Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and other women's basketball players were subjected to stalking that led them to fear for their safety. Gymnasts Gabby Thomas, Simone Biles and Livvy Dunne have been targeted; American hurdler and bobsledder Lolo Jones had someone break into her training facility and attempt to do the same at her home, one of three men she said have stalked her in recent years.
Among the male victims are former Los Angeles Rams star Aaron Donald; a woman has harassed and stalked him and his family for years. Another former NFL player, T.J. Houshmandzadeh, was stalked by a woman with a 'bizarre and extreme obsession,' according to a restraining order application. She changed her last name to his and used it to access the gated community where his family lives. A woman nicknamed 'devil baby' pleaded guilty to stalking then-Chelsea players Mason Mount and Billy Gilmour.
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Stalking has become part of the sports landscape: Matches are being interrupted, players are acknowledging that fixated strangers are impacting their mental health and performance, leagues and colleges are directing more money and resources toward security. On social media, athletes share stories, ask for advice, connect and commiserate. Consider what Rice said in March about her ordeal:
'It's unfortunate that a lot of us players have to go through that. … I think just knowing that as the sport continues to have a bigger platform and is broadcasted on a higher level, those instances are gonna increase.'
That Thiaw's fixation with Rice began after he saw her on social media is consistent with many stalking incidents. As athletes chronicle their careers and lives, often to promote their sport, they increase the odds that someone will become dangerously obsessed with them.
A string of strange posts and comments on Facebook and TikTok was one of the first indicators that 40-year-old Robert Cole Parmalee, a resident of Grants Pass, Ore., had become fixated on Bueckers, then a University of Connecticut senior.
On social media, Parmalee professed his love for Bueckers and his desire to marry her. One TikTok caption read: 'And if I cannot live with a woman of my choosing, (Paige), then I will choose to die, and I will choose to take all of you that pose me, oppose us, to hell, and return, king…I love you (Paige), if you allow them to touch you, you allow them to die.' Online fan accounts began tagging Bueckers in an attempt to warn her.
In August 2024, Parmalee was arrested by Connecticut State Police while walking alongside a highway on an unrelated warrant out of Oregon. Prior to his arrest, he posted on social media that he was coming to propose to Bueckers.
Bueckers told UConn police she felt 'the need to look over her shoulder more often in large groups' and 'worried about the safety of herself as well as her family members and basketball teammates.'
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In September, Parmalee was rearrested and charged with breach of peace, electronic stalking, and harassment. In December, he pleaded guilty to a stalking charge and received a one-year suspended sentence and three years of probation, during which time he is barred from Connecticut and any arenas, hotels and practice facilities where the UConn women's basketball team is present. The WNBA also barred him from all arenas and practice facilities.
A protective order is in place until Jan. 4, 2064.
This January, a 55-year-old Texas man, Michael Lewis, was arrested and charged with stalking Clark, the Indiana Fever star. Lewis sent a series of sexually violent messages and threats to Clark via social media before he drove 13 hours to Indianapolis with the 'intent to be in close proximity' to her.
'Been driving around your house 3x a day,' one message read, according to court documents. 'But don't call the law just yet.'
'I'm getting tickets. I'm sitting behind the bench,' read another. An implicit or explicit threat was also made 'with the intent to place Caitlin Clark in reasonable fear of sexual battery,' prosecutors wrote in the Marion County Superior Court filing.
Clark told police she feared for her safety and had even begun to alter her appearance in public.
In late July, Lewis was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison after pleading guilty to stalking and harassing Clark. There is currently a no-contact order in place, and Lewis is banned from Gainbridge Fieldhouse, where the Fever play home games, and Hinkle Fieldhouse, the team's former arena.
'No matter how prominent a figure you are, this case shows that online harassment can quickly escalate to actual threats of physical violence,' Marion County prosecutor Ryan Mears said in a statement. 'It takes a lot of courage for women to come forward in these cases, which is why many don't.'
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Women's basketball has had to quickly adapt as the sport's surging popularity has increased the risk to its players. The University of Iowa, Clark's alma mater, beefed up security for women's basketball home games from 2022 to 2024 as Clark rose to become the most popular women's player in history. During Clark's sophomore season, security expenditures for women's basketball home games reached $153,780. During Clark's final season, it was $466,169, according to public records.
In 2023, the NCAA hired an outside firm to track social media interactions directed at coaches, referees and players.
'If the vendor who's running this program sees really nasty stuff coming at somebody, we notify the platforms,' NCAA president Charlie Baker said in March. 'And the platforms, generally speaking, will block those people and take them down.' In some cases, the NCAA has forwarded communications to law enforcement for follow-up.
But there are more than 90,000 female college athletes just at the Division I level, spread across 365 schools. It is impossible to institute all-encompassing protective measures across such a vast landscape.
How, for example, could the University of Colorado have prevented a then 43-year-old man from downloading images of some of its female cross-country runners and combining them with pornographic images, and then messaging those runners about how he was stalking them and planning to rape, torture and kill them? (That ordeal, which occurred in 2015-16, led to the man being sentenced to more than 14 years in federal prison.)
After swarms of young men with posters and a full-sized cutout of Livvy Dunne disrupted LSU's gymnastics season opener in 2023 at the University of Utah, LSU amped up its security at away meets, which included creating a perimeter when the team boarded its bus. But Dunne is also among several female athletes who recently spoke about men finding out their flight information and then aggressively accosting them at various airports.
You can't create a perimeter around someone's entire life.
Women's tennis and golf are perhaps the professional sports that have grappled with this issue the longest. While the tennis cases — involving Seles, Serena Williams, Anna Kournikova and others — have been well chronicled, golf's struggles with fixated individuals have been less spotlighted.
Among the incidents reported: A former caddie for Michelle McGann sent over 30 packages professing his love for her. Once, at Michelle Wie's sunrise practice session, security spotted a man in a powder blue suit and floppy hat who had taken a bus from Iowa to Portland to propose to the golfer. And, a man tried to break into Morgan Pressel's gated community in Boca Raton, Fla., after claiming Jack Nicklaus and the CIA had instructed him to speak with her.
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Historically, the LPGA has assigned plainclothes police officers to specific players, but more recently the organization has used specialized security firms, often run by former U.S. Secret Service agents.
It's not uncommon for photos of individuals of interest to be posted at all tournament entry gates and security officials look for red flags: aggression in the autograph area, requests for an athlete's used clothing and attempts to take up-skirt photos, according to Scott Stewart, who works for TorchStone Global, an international risk mitigation firm used by the LPGA and other sports leagues.
'Golf is different than the other sports because spectators have access to players before, during and after we play,' said Rick Pano, father and caddie of LPGA player Alexa Pano. 'The NFL, Major League Baseball, you have distance, but in golf you don't.'
About five years ago, a red button was added to the LPGA Player Portal, a digital hub for all tournament details. One press of the button, and security is immediately deployed to the player's location.
After Seles, the WTA posted security guards on courts at events. Security tightened even further in 2008 when the league announced players, parents, agents, coaches and other entourage members must agree to criminal background checks for full tournament access. And in 2024, the WTA set up a monitoring service for social media threats. Just this March, Świątek was given extra security protection during the Miami Open after being verbally attacked at practice by a man who had harassed her on social media.
The WNBA has also amplified and modernized its security protocols. Not long after the Clark and Bueckers incidents, the league assembled an offseason task force, which includes monitoring of social media to detect threats and added security measures at the league and team levels. Other leagues and organizations have taken similar steps.
Even though all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government have had anti-stalking laws in place since the mid-1990s, most statutes designed to address and prohibit stalking are toothless, and prosecution of the crime falls almost entirely on the victim.
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'Restraining and protective orders become sort of your first line of defense,' said Carlos Cuevas, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University. 'But one of the difficulties is that the burden of protection is so much on the victim. They have to report it, they have to get the restraining order, it's temporary. They have to go in there and go back and make it permanent. And then in most states or most places, that needs to get renewed every year, so there's a lot of, sort of, labor, if you will, that the victim has to engage in to protect themselves.'
Legal documents such as protective orders are often only a paper shield. Forty to 50 percent of protective orders are violated, according to the Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center. Some studies even found there was an increase in physical or psychological abuse after an order was granted.
'The criminal penalties for stalking are oftentimes not that severe,' said Dr. J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who consults on public figure stalking cases. 'Then they're back in action, and we know that … repetition, reoffense is very high.'
For Rice, the temporary restraining order granted by the court in January had little effect. The summer of 2024 was filled with messages from Thiaw, in direct violation of the order.
'THEY ARE TRYING TO TELL ME THAT I DO NOT HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO LOVE KIRA KIKI CARROLL RICE,' reads a portion of an email sent to Rice's email address in June.
'THE DAY I GOT ARRESTED I SAID THIS STORY WILL BE TOLD AT THE DINING TABLE AT OUR WEDDING, AND TO OUR CHILDREN,' reads one from July.
On Oct. 17, 2024, the court issued a more permanent, five-year restraining order against Thiaw. At the trial, Thiaw testified, 'I would like to be your husband one day. And I'm not some love bird. I have already thought of strategies on how to be your dedicated husband.'
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In the weeks since then, Thiaw, who is now 22, has filed a series of motion papers in an effort to terminate the restraining order, citing 'no credible evidence.'
In an email, Thiaw wrote to The Athletic: 'My entire ordeal began with a rightful ticket — one I obtained legally. That act was distorted by false statements and misrepresentations in a police report designed to criminalize me without cause.'
In June, he successfully completed a mental health diversion program, after which the criminal case against him was dismissed. (The civil restraining order case is independent from the criminal matter.)
This month, Rice had to submit an additional plea to the court for the continuance of the restraining order against Thiaw.
In opposition to Thiaw's request to remove the restraining order, Rice submitted the following declaration: 'Latyr's relentless stalking and harassment caused me significant emotional distress. … I have just started to be able to live my life again without the constant worry of Latyr disturbing my peace. … I am forced to relive the stress I experienced over the last two years which has triggered a fear that my peace will be greatly disturbed knowing that he could contact me at any time or appear wherever I may be.'
Just last week, the court denied Thiaw's request, and the restraining order will remain in place until October 2029.
Athletes who have been stalked talk about the lasting impact it has on their lives. (Many choose not to speak about it at all due to fear of copycats, or a refusal to give their stalkers more power or notoriety.)
After her stabbing, Seles was out of tennis for nearly 28 months. She fell into a deep depression and developed an eating disorder. 'And yes, the physical scars healed in a few months. But the emotional damage cut much deeper and I was plunged into a fog of darkness and depression that I couldn't see my way out of,' Seles wrote of the attack in her 2009 autobiography.
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Eleven years after a man tried to abduct her with duct tape, two loaded guns and a wooden club, Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson told ABC in 2019 that the experience still haunts her.
After her three-year ordeal with a stalker, Olympic runner Emily Infeld remains careful with what she posts on social media, no longer receives mail at her condo, and still keeps a metal bar by the front door.
The fear among women's sports activists is that any behavioral changes female athletes make could stymie the momentum women's sports has built in recent years.
'There's a long history of when women's sport becomes popular, visible, lucrative, that we see a plethora of ways in which women's value, popularity, and visibility is undermined, marginalized, silenced and erased,' said Nicole LaVoi, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. 'I think harassment and stalking is one exemplar of that.'
— The Athletic's Gabby Herzig contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Sarah Stier / Getty Images, iStock)
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