Robbie and His German Stalker

My bedroom was still dark when I switched on the computer. The first thing I noticed was an old email that I had missed somehow.  

It was from a German woman with whom I had barely spoken in a now-defunct chatroom devoted to the British superstar, Robbie Williams.  

The German woman’s face and name had been in  tabloids all over Europe lately.  Williams filed a restraining order against her claiming that she was stalking him to warn him against an imminent abduction by aliens from outerspace.  

The stories made her look like a complete whack job.  

But there’s a lot that the tabloids left out or never knew.

At age 16, an impressionable Williams joined a boy band.  In spite of the odds, Take That became hugely successful.  Unfortunately, by the time the band broke up, Williams was also an addict and alcoholic.  

With extraordinary courage and determination, Williams sobered up, wrote some songs, and started a solo career.  One of those songs, Angels, catapulted him into the stratosphere of superstardom wished by most, but known by only a few.  Still virtually unknown in the United States, he is arguably, the biggest entertainer in the world right now.

During one of his tours, he noticed a blond woman and had one of his minions ask if she’d like to visit his hotel room.  She obliged.  Their meeting is memorialized in a video documentary, Nobody Someday.  

She is the German woman from whom I received the email.

During this period, Williams had a website in which he sponsored a chatroom and let it be known that he chatted regularly.  The German woman was a regular there.  

At first it was all carefree and fun.  Williams even gave his private cellphone number to one or two chatters who said they too were recovering addicts or alcoholics.

Then it all got ugly.  

First there were the fakers who pretended to be Williams to take advantage of his younger female fans. Then it became common knowledge that if the German woman were in the chatroom, he would not show up. People began to pick fights, make accusations.  Finally, someone declared that Williams had died and the superstar, very much alive, killed off his chatroom.  

Funnily enough, as ugly as it got, it was a strangely closeknit community. Three years later, many of the original chatters are still in some sort of contact, in spite of having been spurned by Williams.  That’s why when the stories broke about the German stalker and the restraining order, most of us knew who she was.

I suppose the only two people who know the truth are Williams and the German woman.