AFP
NEW YORK0-US movie star Alec Baldwin was repeatedly interrupted and heckled by his alleged stalker as he testified against the French-Canadian actress in a New York courtroom Tuesday.
The 55-year-old actor denies having a relationship with Genevieve Sabourin, whom he first met in 2000 in a restaurant in Montreal as the then-mistress of his film-producer friend Martin Bregman.
He accuses her of bombarding him with hundreds of unwanted phone calls and emails and of sending ‘vile’ twitter messages to his wife, starting after he met Sabourin again in 2010 for dinner in New York. Sabourin was arrested in April 2012, just days after showing up at Baldwin’s Manhattan apartment, after the star of the hit comedy TV comedy series ‘30 Rock’ filed stalking charges.
The Canadian actress denies stalking Baldwin and has said she just wants ‘closure’ at the end of a romantic relationship. Baldwin said their dinner was to advise her on forging a mainstream acting career and was nothing more than a ‘favor’ to Bregman, who was allegedly desperate to be rid of his on-off girlfriend.
Baldwin denies sleeping with her but says he drove her back to the swanky Lowell Hotel, where he had helped her get a reservation. He claims he never saw her again until she turned up uninvited at his East Hampton, Long Island home on March 31, 2012, the afternoon that he got engaged to his second wife Hilaria. Wearing a navy blazer and a black polo shirt, Baldwin testified for just less than two hours. He insisted he knew Sabourin purely in a professional context and that their subsequent email contact had been nothing more than him trying to be ‘polite’ and shake her off.
But an angry and emotional Sabourin, dressed in a figure-hugging black and cream jumper, skin-tight black trousers and knee-high black suede boots, repeatedly interrupted Baldwin’s testimony. She called him a liar, shook her head, laughed and mocked him, provoking Judge Robert Mandelbaum to repeatedly demand, then to shout at her, to be quiet or be held in contempt. ‘Don’t testify from your seat at the defense table while the witness is on the stand,’ Mandelbaum told her.
‘Your honor, he’s lying,’ Sabourin replied. ‘Do you want to speak to your client before I have her removed from the courtroom?’ the judge asked Sabourin’s lawyer. At one point, Sabourin and her lawyer briefly left the courtroom, but after they returned she continued to disrupt proceedings. When Baldwin accused her of behaving like an alcoholic, a drug addict or someone having a breakdown, Sabourin again protested saying: ‘This is vilifying me in the press.’
Baldwin said Sabourin left ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of messages that would vary ‘wildly’ between her sobbing and begging to be called, to laughing with plans for what they could do together.