I really do feel bad for Selena Gomez. As far as I can tell, she seems like a perfectly sweet girl, she has talent, and she doesn’t spend all her time clubbing for diving face first into piles of coke. And yet for some reason she gets death threats the way most people get poked on Facebook. This time, however, Selena was targeted by a crazy person who insisted that God (read: delusions of theological grandeur brought on by mental health issues) told her to kill her, instead of a bunch of teenage girls who are jealous she’s dating their boyfriend fantasy aka Justin Bieber. TMZ reports:
46-year-old Thomas Brodnicki — a man with a criminal history of stalking — allegedly told his shrink he was going to kill Selena. According to the declarations of Selena and her lawyer, Blair Berk … Brodnicki told the shrink he traveled from Chicago to L.A. to meet her, visited her workplace at least 3 times and has told people he had conversations with God about killing her. Selena says she is in “extreme fear,” believing he will carry out his death threat against her if he isn’t stopped. Selena and her lawyer claim Brodnicki was picked up for mental evaluation last month after he allegedly threatened to “scratch people’s eyes out on the street.” Brodnicki allegedly made the threats against Gomez during his mental evaluation.
I’m not going to harangue this guy too much, because despite my general approval of Selena, he’s clearly not mentally well and the demonization of mental health issues does tend to keep people from seeking psychiatric treatment. That being said, if you are hearing voices from what you believe to be God, in all likelihood, you should probably seek mental evaluation, because if he’s gonna talk to someone, it’s usually so that they can carve rules into stone tablets, rather than following around famous people. “Hey, would you mind taking a peek and seeing what the inside of Meryl Streep’s bedroom looks like? I mean, I’m omniscient, but not THAT omniscient.”